What I've been up to.. but more importantly, what EVERYONE ELSE has been up to!

Hmm... What have I been doing? Well - living in India for one. That's the same ol'... I've also been making the same project over and over, mainly because I'm in the phase where I have to make 8 of the same thing over and over. And I have been seriously just flying through these things! I'm almost done with the entire pump device, with only 1 little element missing.. (plus I have to cut all the pieces of metal to length so that they custom fit the households that they'll be placed into, but I'll do that later, it's not a hard task)

Inner valves and bottom caps (which are also valves, mind you!)





Caps!




Faucets!

But that's enough about me. Do ya'll know what everyone else has been up to? Apparently the world has been falling apart since I've been in this part of the world. Maoist rebels/Communist Party Members (What's going on here? are the legitimate or what?) are gaining steam in India, becoming more and more violent. It wasn't too long ago that they ambushed a bunch of security officials, but now they are playing a game of spy vs spy, killing informants for the police and trying to collect intel on the locations of high-ranking security officials so they can assassinate them. That's India...

Pakistan is failing to uproot the Taliban from their mountainous regions, and the Taliban knows all too well how to simply avoid their would-be hunters. Their newest trick is to hide in densely populated areas where CIA drones wouldn't dare to drop bombs aimlessly (yet it doesn't seem to stop them from blowing up civilians houses in other regions)

And finally Afghanistan, where all the shit is blowing up. Not too long ago, an issue of Rolling Stone Magazine came out with a long article detailing the character of General Stanley McChrystal, our ex-commander in Afghanistan. He was one of the drafters of counter-insurgency strategy: "use the green berets as a kind of armed peace corp" or something like that, where troops live with the occupied populace and try to build up their government and infrastructure. But it isn't working; the military has a strict hierarchal order but civilians do not, and our diplomats in Afghanistan are all competing and vying for conflicting interests. I'm sure there's more than a few of those diplomats are career bullshitters too, just trying to stay in their job much like our domestic politicians. But apparently in the article in Rolling Stone, McChrystal was caught bad mouthing those diplomats for being annoying, and Obama sacked him. Now he's been replaced by his mentor Gen. Petraeus, and the notion of changing leadership mid-game is a little bit frightening.

And now let's go over to the Lebanon, a region that Israel had invaded in the not so distant past (maybe 40 years ago?) Hezbollah, the militant group that is fighting Israel right now, built an awesome theme park to indoctrinate young people into the struggle against the Israeli Oppressors. I don't think we can expect peace to come very soon if people already put their money down on a THEME PARK! haha

Well that's the news in brief. Dinner time now! Latahs