Much obvious work on helping the poor may actually be beside the point. As good as supplying clean water and building schools is, giving people honest work tends to be the true way out of poverty. Give a man a fish, fishing rod etc. Thus, while the West makes a show of providing development assistance, the real steps it could take to help are actually much more simple. Cut agricultural subsidies for wealthy farmers and allow easier immigration from the developing world. Both of these options, however, are politically toxic whereas everyone generally likes giving out medicine and assorted largess. It may, however, be besides the point.

It seems something of a tautology. Suicide bombers are suicidal. This is, however, not the dominant view. According to Mia Bloom at Penn State, “You don’t want to conflate the Western ideas of suicide with something that is, in the Middle East, a religious ceremony.” I still find that most western analysts of suicide bombing falter, however, when they make it a Middle Eastern or Muslim thing. The Sri Lankan example is proof that it isn’t and a scientific study of the thing has to go beyond the 9/11 bias of focusing on a strange Muslim threat. I once read a profile of a Sri Lankan suicide bomber in Marie Claire which talked about how she was repeatedly raped at 7 and how other LTTE bombers were from similar background. In that vein, these scholars Williams and Lankford may be on to something when they say that many suicide bombers have suicidal tendencies themselves. The bombing organizers they interviewed, for example, have none.

There’s a three-legged dog at the top of the road, lying there with his balls out in the band-killing drizzle. I respect the three-legged functioning and I pet the filthy beast. Later, I’m telling the promoter that his band is dogshit and he’s flipping out and threatening to beat me up. I’m more worried that my girl is going to hit him. What’s sad is that the Duke Spirit is here, a band that opened for REM, and this promoter Ifham wants to replace them with a school choir and a cover band. And that band is clearing the crowd. They break into a version of Barbie Girl and people literally flee the hall clutching their ears. It is, in aesthetic terms, dogshit, but Ifham is, in between threatening to rape me, lecturing about local talent. What local talent? Aqua?

I say, the Electric Peacock Festival is today. They’re organizing a very cool live music event in Mount Lavinia with actual international DJ Roger Sanchez and bands like the Duke Spirit and Trophy Wife. Plus Sri Lanka/British BBC DJ Nihal. It should be extra cool, though it is also rather expensive at Rs. 6,500. These are actual international acts though, and not saccharine like Sean Paul or pickled like Englebert Humperdink (the usual acts we get). I’ve written about the show at The Sunday Leader, all that’s changed is that it’s no longer in Negombo it’s in Mount Lavinia, so essentially in Colombo. It should be pretty cool and it starts tonight at 6:30 PM, going on till the morning. There’s more info on their website.

I recently paid my income taxes. For me, this involves two trips to Maharagama, one trip to the bank (or into the nether reaches of my closet where my checkbook dwells) and a sizable amount of money. This year it was mostly foreign exchange so my tax bill was paltry, but last year it was painfully huge. Evading taxes in Sri Lanka is not necessarily easy, but it’s not hard. Only about 600,000 entities (including corporates) pay tax, and a lot lot more are evading. So why do I pay taxes. Honestly, so I can bitch about the government.

Yesterday I linked to Google’s 2010 Zeitgeist, what people searched for this year. This is a five minute run through of all the photos I took this year. Which is pretty intense. It makes sense to me, but it may be bit of a blur. Loosely, it starts with Steve Buscemi, Albert Einstein, Barbie, New Year’s in Tangalle, Mulikirigala, Pettah, Jaffna, the A9, Sarath Fonseka, Dolphins, India, butterflies, Colombo, Mannar, Jaffna, airplane, Trinco, Unawatuna, Sarath Foneska’s dog, Batti, Kandy, Avurudu, Ella, Arugam Bay, Colombo, Horton Plains, Jaffna, Delft, Namal in Vavuniya, Galle Face, parades, protests, processions, plays, puppets, ports and more. It closes on Kik cola like an ad, but that’s just the last photo I took. It’s quite a trip, seeing your life flash before your eyes. Powered by Pummelvision.

2010 is almost over, which is a bit crazy. I was looking through some science fiction books and I realized that I can’t read them anymore. They sound too much like the present. Everything strangely makes me think of Justin Bieber. It’s like we’re living in that future time. Above is a video covering the Google Zeitgeist, the most searched for terms over the past year. It’s interesting, there were a lot of natural disasters, a few cases of people overcoming disaster, and a whole lot of famous people I don’t know. I remember when I used to pay attention to pop culture, but a part of my brain is permanently pickled in the 90s. But here’s to the noughties. It was a bit confusing, but in all a good show.

When I write this blog I write for you, and I also write as indi.ca, that is, a somewhat moralistic, curated version of myself. I write the voice in my head, but I edit, less here than for the newspaper, but still, in retrospect, a lot. My God, the stories I could tell, at the expense of not being able to live in this town. Or get a company or government job. When I write it down some of the things are actually shocking, but still in a rather well meaning way. As privacy breaks down something will have to give. We are truly entering a period of Naked Lunch, the moment when you can see what’s on the end of every fork. But I have been writing, freely, somewhere else.

I went to a thing by Transparency International. The chair obfuscely said that conversation was off the record, which was odd for a session on right to information. JC Weliamuna’s presentation was very interesting, however. He talked about the agency model of government and a court case which said that right to information was part of right of thought. Both very interesting ideas. While doodling I thought of something of my own, which was that you can either control or flood information, either having the net effect of people not caring (and leaving you alone).

The Dev World actually has pretty environmental packaging. Short eats will be wrapped in recycled paper and rice served on a banana leaf. Sadly, as we ‘develop’, everything gets boxed in paper, then wrapped in plastic. McDonald’s is probably the end of that continuum, almost more packaging than food. Design website Inhabitat, however, is going the other way and saying that banana leaf could be the packaging of the future. I don’t know if it scales up to industrial levels, however. Banana leaves are non-standard sizes, degrade fast, can’t be kept in a storeroom for months, etc. Interesting idea though.