Space opera never looked so delicious

I've just started re-watching the 110 episode Legend of the Galactic Heroes and all its prequels.

Legend of the Galactic Heroes Café

The Plight of the Poor in the Midst of Plenty

A well-ordered society advances the good of each and all of its members, so that there is no one from whose gaze or plight we have to avert our eyes, no one whose complaints can be met only with lies or pious nonsense about following one’s dream.

The Plight of the Poor in the Midst of Plenty

‘Well-ordered’ does not mean docile or regimented. Quite the contrary, it means a society whose members – all of them, individual men and women of every creed, class and background – are prepared to raise awkward questions about how things are organised and to justify their laws and institutions to one another in good faith, without any myths or illusions.

Overlooking the city

U.S. wealth gap in the 1960s and 70s

It’s a complicated empirical issue.

The Great Compression 

Then came the economist

Thomas Sargent, speaking for himself and the other Economics winner, Christopher Sims, decided, in effect, to tell the Swedes (and everyone else) to lower their taxes and cut their social spending, in obedience to what are coming to appear more and more discredited free market theories. They must remember, he said, that ‘there is a trade-off between equality and efficiency’. But this is just what the Swedes over the years have shown to be untrue. Sweden is both more equal and more efficient than (say) the USA. Most Swedes would say the two qualities are connected. The mean, narrow dogmatism of Sargent’s contribution contrasted vividly with the breadth and humility of the natural scientists’.

Then came the economist

Mobile Armor

All paths...

... lead to K162

 

Downton Abbey

I think that thing of being polite, of making people easy in your company, of not burdening them with your troubles; that's quite nice...

Julian Fellowes Q&A

All successes grow to be alike; only the failures remain interesting

From Cosmic Neutrality, by Fredric Jameson. London Review of Books. Vol. 33 No. 20 · 20 October 2011 pages 17-18:

One of the most decisive things that happened to narrative in the 19th century had to do with the problematisation of its formal conclusions, which closed their narrative circuit in earlier and simpler societies either by way of a happy ending (in fairytales, for example, or romances) or a catastrophic defeat. Those older endings had content, as we might put it in philosophical language; in the new world of money and business, the whole social variety of existential outcomes was slowly reduced to a new set of abstract categories: the opposition between success and failure. Winning the girl is success, losing the war is failure: these abstractions do not on the face of it involve earning or losing money, but it is in reality the abstraction of money as such that governs the new system and which begins to impose the new simplified classification in terms of the stark alternatives of winning or losing, success or failure.

The formal result, for the novel, is strange and paradoxical, yet momentous: all successes grow to be alike, they lose their specificity and indeed their interest. Success sinks to the level of emergent mass culture – which is to say, fantasy and wish-fulfilment. Only the failures remain interesting, only the failures offer genuine literary raw material, both in their variety and in the quality of their experience.

Apophis

Drink from the cup of ice, drink from the cup of fire

"Fantasy gives us the colors. Fantasy is strong emotion and red wine and dreams and visions. It's life imagined more intensely, and lived more intensely, vicariously as we read about it in our own lives, that we can experience great loves and great tragedies, and do things we would never do in real life. It's the whole reason I think people read, and particularly when they read fiction. The non-reader just lives one life, while the reader lives a thousand lives, does amazing things: climbs mountains, goes to other planets, explores the bottom of the sea, loves a hundred women/loves a hundred men, lives and dies, and gives birth to children and conquers kingdoms, and all of that you experience only in fiction (most of us anyway)."

Text

Texas Prisons End Special Last Meals In Executions

via NPR 

A former inmate cook who made the last meals for prisoners at the Huntsville Unit, where Texas executions are carried out, wrote a cookbook several years ago after he was released. Among his recipes were Gallows Gravy, Rice Rigor Mortis and Old Sparky's Genuine Convict Chili, a nod to the electric chair that once served as the execution method. The book was called "Meals to Die For."

Taipei Exchanges

第36個故事
作詞：雷光夏
作曲：雷光夏

夏天的雨水飄落　寧靜公園
深夜的微風拂過　吹乾了樹
在街角的咖啡店　相遇的一刻
故事從頭　我對你依然心動

溫暖的太陽照著　冬天的花
你微笑著讓我　抹去眼淚
看這座城市　漫漫　被時光移動
若伸出手　還是渴望被你把握

給我　我想要的生活

面對　最坦白的眼眸
前方　是一片晴朗星空
答案　靜靜擁抱我

V: I am watching `Taipei Exchanges'. I am having a hard time watching this. They're just too rich. The city is too clean. I don't know about the vox pop sections, either.

me: Oh?

V: I understand how those HK movies can make the city seem so beautiful and romantic. This movie makes Taipei look like Austin. It very much is not.

me: What city does it closely resemble?

V: Detroit, haha

Sleepwalking towards the 1930s

"The problem is in large part to do with the application of an incorrect metaphor, the easy-to-understand idea that a household has to live within its income. But governments are not households, and the idea of cutting your way to prosperity cannot be read across from an individual’s finances to those of the state."

The Belgian Solution

Texas Smoke Barbecue

"...although the meat itself has been slaved over for hours by the pit master and refined to the nth degree, no one sees any contradiction in serving it with cheap saltines, industrial white bread or the world’s worst beans or corn bread. "

Texas Cult of Smoke Barbecue

"...obsession with limited government produces impressive failures of wisdom and compassion in otherwise intelligent people"

Sam Harris

HoMM3 - Stronghold theme

Honour

"With the primitive barbarian, before the simple content of the notion has been obscured by its own ramifications and by a secondary growth of cognate ideas, "honourable" seems to connote nothing else than assertion of superior force."

Theory of the Leisure Class, by Thorstein Veblen, Kindle Loc. 205

Yes! Another Avatar series!

Can't wait. Looks like the Avatar world set in the Republican Shanghai period. With a bit of steampunk clockwork contraptions thrown in.