Let's Go To Suriname! (One Way Or Another)

I'm going to be handing out candy today for Halloween, so not much time to put something together. So, as is our custom, we turn to YouTube.

If you've got 26 minutes and change on your hands, Journeyman Pictures in 2005 put together this piece on the descendants of African slaves who were taken to Suriname, the middle of those three teeny countries that sit on top of Brazil, and escaped into the Amazon. The descendants were, and continue to be, under threat of their land being taken for development (boy, does that sound familiar to American ears, particularly with Thanksgiving on the way). I'd embed it, but they don't want to be embedded. You'll just have to give them the click.

Consuming, Imbibing, and Engaging In Amusement

First off, it's Rally to Restore Sanity Day. It's going on right now, in fact. Go, be fruitful and propagate the mindset.

But I would advise you to be careful before you eat, drink and be merry. Surely, you have heard of the phrase. I'm not so sure you know its origin or, more importantly, its context. So, today, let's take care of that.

The phrase 'eat, drink and be merry' comes from the Bible, first off. Bible-wise, that doesn't say much all by itself. There are a lot of different anecdotes that eating, drinking and being merry could be plugged into. The Last Supper. The Garden of Eden. Samson living it up.

In actuality, "Eat, drink and be merry" pops up twice. The first comes in Ecclesiastes 8:15. As the King James version puts it, "Then I commended mirth, because a man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry: for that shall abide with him of his labor the days of his life, which God giveth him under the sun." Sounds pretty close to what everyone imagines it to be, right?

Let's fill in the surrounding verses, 11-17. This we'll use New International for, even though it changes the key phrase, because it's much, much easier to make out; King James is a tad on the archaic side.

When the sentence for a crime is not quickly carried out, the hearts of the people are filled with schemes to do wrong. Although a wicked man commits a hundred crimes and still lives a long time, I know that it will go better with God-fearing men, who are reverent before God. Yet because the wicked do not fear God, it will not go well with them, and their days will not lengthen like a shadow.

There is something else meaningless that occurs on earth: righteous men who get what the wicked deserve, and wicked men who get what the righteous deserve. This too, I say, is meaningless. So I commend the enjoyment of life, because nothing is better for a man under the sun than to eat and drink and be glad. Then joy will accompany him in his work all the days of the life God has given him under the sun.

When I applied my mind to know wisdom and to observe man's labor on earth—his eyes not seeing sleep day or night- then I saw all that God has done. No one can comprehend what goes on under the sun. Despite all his efforts to search it out, man cannot discover its meaning. Even if a wise man claims he knows, he cannot really comprehend it.

What you see here, in the entire chapter, is King Solomon recognizing the limits of wisdom. Sometimes life just doesn't make any sense, sometimes the bad guys win and you don't know why, and sometimes you're just not going to understand it. And if you spend too much time trying, you're going to drive yourself nuts, so you might as well lighten up once in a while.

Again, pretty much by the book.

I said there was a second place it popped up, though. Luke 12:19. The King James original: "And I will say to my soul, Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry."

Still about how one would imagine it. This time, though, context hits like a ton of bricks. It's part of Jesus' Parable of the Rich Fool. Switching back to New International, which this time keeps the key phrase, for verses 13-21.

Someone in the crowd said to him, "Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me." Jesus replied, "Man, who appointed me a judge or an arbiter between you?" Then he said to them, "Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; a man's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions."

And he told them this parable: "The ground of a certain rich man produced a good crop. He thought to himself, 'What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.'

"Then he said, 'This is what I'll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I'll say to myself, "You have plenty of good things laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry."'

"But God said to him, 'You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?'

"This is how it will be with anyone who stores up things for himself but is not rich toward God."

Jesus is railing against fuigmism. The message: Eat, drink, be merry... but make sure you let those around you join in. You can really only get a certain amount of merry from having a lot of stuff, and you can really only eat and drink so much. Be nice. Spread it around. Others would like to be merry too.

Random News Generator- Kenya

Recently, Transparency International released their Corruption Perceptions Index, something they've done annually since 1995. It is pretty much exactly what it says on the tin: every country they can get enough information on- 178 of them in this case- is given a score between 0 and 10, 10 being best.

The least corrupt nations on Earth, according to their methodology, are Denmark, New Zealand and Singapore, which all garnered a 9.3. Somalia is most corrupt, at 1.1, followed by Afghanistan and Myanmar, each scoring 1.4.

Tied for 154th, at 2.1, along with Cambodia, the Central African Republic, Comoros, Congo-Brazzaville, Guinea-Bissau, Laos, Papua New Guinea, Russia and Tajikistan, is today's stop on the Random News Generator, Kenya.

It doesn't say why exactly, for them or anyone else, but one would think a country where anti-corruption official Suru Tanna was just shot by "three men who stole a mobile phone and a jacket" is not likely to score very highly.

There have been efforts to stem the tide of corruption, but it's a hard slog. Some officials have gone to trial, only for technicalities to gum up the works. One of those set to stand trial, Minister for Higher Education William Ruto, faces charges of an illegal land deal to the Kenya Pipeline Corporation. Another, Foreign Minister Moses Wetang'ula, has been forced out over the buying and selling of foreign embassies. In addition, the mayor of Nairobi, Geophrey Majiwa, faces charges over the purchase of land for a cemetary; that news is just breaking.

That's not all. Not even close. Bribes have been handed out to military recruits. Bribes have been handed to police by the public as a prerequisite for doing their jobs. Fraud is being investigated at the Kenya Planters Cooperative Union, which accuses the investigating committee of attempting to "kill" it. The Immigration Ministry is under scrutiny for how it handles routine matters such as birth and death registration. The healthcare system makes America's look well-run and ethical. The national soccer federation caused FIFA to briefly suspend Kenya in 2004 from international competition. And it should go without saying that a 2008 election had its share of corruption, as well as violence.

At some point, all one can do is laugh at it all.

Election 2010: The Aftermath: The Preview

By now, you are in all likelihood sick of the election. It happens to pretty much everybody, me included, in just about every election cycle. The ads get too negative and too outrageous, they come too thick, too fast, they all just blur together after a while and you just want Tuesday to hurry up and get here already. I remember one time, when I was working the phones in 2004 for John Kerry, that some woman that got called (not by me, but someone in the same campaign outpost while I was present) said that she was adding up all the times she was called by Kerry, and all the times she was called by Bush, and then voting for whoever called her the least. True story.

Bad news on that: after the election, you don't get to cool down. In fact, the transition period can be the most critical of all in an incoming Congressperson's career. They can torpedo every principle they have before they're even sworn in.

Before we get to that, though, a note on what happens to the losers during this period; the incumbents that have been voted out. They get packed off and sent to the basement.

No, really. When you lose your seat in Congress, your big office that you've gotten used to goes away. You and your staff are transferred to the "transitional suite", which is a nice way of saying that you're shoved into a 5x5 cubicle in the basement of the Rayburn House Office Building with "little more than a tiny desk, a laptop, a phone, and a box of Kleenex." It is every bit as humiliating as it sounds. Re-elected members of Congress need to decide whether to move operations into a more convenient space, and incoming members of Congress need an office, period, having originally been given the "transitional suite" themselves. And someone needs your office. Which means YOU can't have it anymore. Your last two months are primarily spent trying to find jobs for your staff, who will also be out of office.

That out of the way, on to the winners. The incoming freshmen. Why do you need to pay attention to them immediately?

Because somebody has to help save the morally weak from themselves. You see, prior to being sworn in, they are not members of Congress (the official terminology). Not technically. They are members-elect. There's a big difference. Members are subject to gift-giving ethics laws. Members-elect, not being members, are not.

And the lobbyists- oh so many lobbyists- know this. They can sniff out a member-elect, give them a mansion, a yacht and a diamond-studded alligator and it's perfectly legal. Unethical as hell, but legal. Needless to say, this is done with as many members-elect as they can get their hands on.

During the transition period, Congressional officials administer "Freshmen Orientation. Here, they supply the freshmen with instruction on everything under the sun they might want or need to know about staffing, office design, perks, responsibilities, ethics, rules, legislation, constituent correspondence, where the bathroom is, everything. It's at about this point that a lot of the freshmen first start to wonder what the hell they've just signed up for. "Deer-in-the-headlights" expressions are common. Utter bewilderment. And remember, they haven't even done anything yet. Some of them are still attempting to find housing. Some end up sleeping in cots in their office; those that do are generally embarrassed to admit it. Jason Chaffetz of Utah will freely say it, but he's the exception.

This is something that a lobbyist with the proper connections can quite easily remedy. Of course, the lobbyist will then have easy access to the member-elect any time they're inside-- which is, of course, behind closed doors. That, obviously, is the point. The lobbyist isn't offering housing out of the goodness of their heart.

And remember, the member-elect only has two months before they're bound by gift-giving laws and have to turn it down. And they're in a giant hurry to get all their other affairs settled besides. The weaker-willed can wilt under the pressure.

And, of course, nothing says the lobbyists have to wait for someone to actually be elected to start trying to get to somebody. (They simply choose not to much of the time; they don't want to anger the incumbent, who they already have a relationship with, should he win re-election.) Nothing says the lobbyists can't make their own runs for office, either.

This is where you come in. The tendency to fund incumbents makes your task of finding the weaker-willed challengers difficult, but it can be done. Weak wills can be sniffed out. You're not necessarily looking for someone unsure of themselves. Minds can be changed given new experiences and new information. That's fine. That's human. In fact, when you get down to it, that's the way lobbying is supposed to work.

It's a little more complicated than that. There are no shortage of people out there that will tell you how to build up your willpower. But, of course, there has to be a weakness first. If you see someone changing their mind five times a week, that's a red flag. Changing one's mind is natural, but at some point there has to be a limit. If they're coming into Congress with barely any convictions at all, there are people that will be glad to give them some.

But that's the direct approach. That's looking for the weak will itself. Subtler red flags- the ones that tend to get addressed by all the willpower-building programs- often include:

*A generally negative attitude towards life, inferred by tips instructing one to improve said outlook.
*Bad habits, inferred by tips to exercise self-control. Smoking, excessive drinking, obesity, etc.
*Lack of perserverance.
*Procrastination, inferred directly here.
*The inability to say no.

That last one is the most important. After all, if they can't say no to anyone else, how are they going to say no to a lobbyist? How are they going to say no under pressure?

It's on you to make sure they can.

Things That Aren't Cool

Head-stomping opposition political supporters.

This should not even need elaborating on. For God's sake, people, American History X is not a campaign strategy guide. And if you think it is, you need to take a step back and seriously think about what the fuck can of worms you're opening. Get a damn grip. You may have your differences, you may think the other guy's out to screw you over, but is it really worth stomping on his goddamn head?!

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Back in June, as you will surely recall, as part of an article on taxes, I mentioned that Timor-Leste has the world's highest taxes as a percentage of GDP, and by a wide margin at that. You will also recall that the high tax revenue came from oil projects in the Timor Sea.

Or at least, I hope you recalled that, because Transocean, the contractor behind the Deepwater Horizon oil rig that caused the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, sure did. Timor-Leste has contracted them for drilling projects off their coast, despite their own spill last year.

There's another reason Transocean likely picked Timor-Leste. According to the last paragraph of the linked article, "The capacity of East Timor to supervise these activities appears to be negligible." So that'll be fun.

The Real Dollar Menu

Found this off the Facebook page of Nari Kye, producer of Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations.

Jonathan Blaustein of Taos, New Mexico went to McDonald's and saw a cheeseburger on the Dollar Menu. He also saw a double cheeseburger on the Dollar Menu, which to him didn't make a whole lot of sense, because you would think another patty and another piece of cheese would make the burger more expensive.

It led him to wonder what, exactly, a dollar gets you in terms of food (at least as far as northern New Mexico is concerned), and photograph it for posterity. And he does mean exactly: he set out to photograph food in its "most realistic" form. No packaging, no preparation beyond how the food was received by him. When he took a picture of shrimp-flavored ramen noodles, you see a pile of flavoring powder and, just to the right, seven boxy wads of uncooked noodles stacked on top of each other.

This is what he came up with.