Found this revealing image painted on a house-wall in the street of Udaipur. Their cameras are not only observing 24/7 but even 24/24. The good news is that most likely they are currently out of order or nobody is watching the screens;-)
A friend (Raghu) has just put a very interesting website online: I Paid a Bribe.com.
"Most of us have a personal story to tell, and it often makes you angry and frustrated. However, the edges of bribery are quite fuzzy! Giving a tip is not considered bribery; in fact it is considered quite civilized! But if a government official demanded a ‘bakseesh’, you would certainly consider it to be a corrupt action, won’t you?"
The whole point of it is to allow people sharing stories around how corruption works and how bribes find their murky path into the pockets of officials or just 'normal' citizens like doctors or lawyers. This should create a kind of a map of Indian corruption and its various local differences. In a second step people could then start taking direct action for more transparency - through knowing how the system works exactly.
In the worst case it could still provide you with an idea of current tariffs;-) Or it is simply a good read when your facebook is down…
Lights shut down, schools closed for three days a week, streets turned from asphalt to gravel (because of lower maintenance costs), shut down public bus services - all compensated by tax cuts … for the rich. Enjoy the new highways in India!
An attack on the Iran later this year could of course save the US economy again. A new war a new boom - only that the chances of WW III are now higher than ever. As Gerald Celente puts it: "Let the politician go to war themselves this time!"
The latter is more likely than ever and every week we can see more escalation patterns appear on the horizon. Especially noteworthy is this article on zerohedge, which states that Iran is not going to sell its oil anymore in U$ nor in Euro and on top of that is now also removing those two currencies from their currency basket. Other states (including Iran and Iraq) have tried this before - to trade oil against something else than US$. For the US this has always been an inofficial declaration of war and those foreign governments were either toppled through staged "revolutions" or their countries invaded.
This time though it looks more like an act of high confidence - not only regarding Iranian self-reliability but also regarding the 'new' Caucasian block of China, Russia, Iran and several other Asian countries - maybe even including Turkey at one point. The stage seems to be set and new fissures appear everywhere that are set up to soon turn into front lines of yet another mega-war … not so much between the US and Iran, but between the US led NATO and Iran, Russia and China. They all are well aware that the US government stands back against the wall and urgently needs a war to survive (the rulers, not the people). Despite knowing that the new 'Eastern Block' might still yield to provocations of those western governments. Let's hope for an 'internal' collapse though and not one which takes everybody else down with them!
Some strange sea-shells seem to currently invade Karachi. I could not make out if they were probably a new type of chinese drones; at least they missed the official harbor, which had been built with chinese help. They might as well have been a new version of the tamed and trained CIA-dolphins. In any case another failed project. The question remains: What will be the effects on the international oyster-markets? Should Pakistani diet change?
I like the video author's comment:
"Authorities - you know, it's the Pakistani government - they are trying to clean … so, usualy they don't work at all. So you must give them thumbs up!"
Especially see the heavy machinery they use for cleaning the beach at the end of the video!
In late 19th century the russian pre-revolutionary author Nikolay Chernyshevsky wrote an extremely influential book titled What to Do? (Что делать) [1]. This novel is written in a horrible style and I definitely do not recommend reading it, but the title is still very good and to the point - naive as it may sound.
A nice side-note to this explosive novel was that Chernyshevsky wrote it in prison (as Hitler wrote Mein Kampf), that it passed two censors, was then lost by the publisher to be found again only with the help of the police - only to then turn out to be one of the most explosive and revolutionary writings published at this time. What a promising self-defeat of bureaucrazy! If today we can look up to the UN and its affiliates as the masterpiece of highest bureaucratic achievements or we envisage the various 3-letter agencies in the US and other NATO-states as new peaks in bureaucratic culture and exchange - then their equivalent in the 19th century would have been the russian administrative machinery.
Chernyshevsky became also known for coining the (cynical) phrase "the worse, the better", meaning that worse living conditions of the masses lead to higher revolutionary potential that then can be exploited by the Bolsheviki - the small group of professional revolutionary leaders who shape the ideas and the final outcome, and on top of that call themselves "majority" [2].
The 'R'-Word
We are again living in times just before a major revolution. Maybe we already live in one; future historians will tell. For all those who see this coming the major question remains: What shall we do?
