August 18, 2010

Sihlquai (upper image), the place to go if you look for sex (and are willing to pay for it) or for a new passport (middle image). If you note the little sign in the lower left corner you see that there was indeed an entry for trolleys, you just had to walk around the entire block to get there. Due to the new biometric passports you are then kindly requested to make your 4 weeks old baby to hold his head still and straight and his eyes opened and fixed at the same spot for 5 seconds in order for the new, specialized camera to focus. It is always so nice to see how totally in touch authorities are with reality when they invent new regulations. Thanks to the lovely and patient people working at the passbüro we managed after only 14 attempts.

After that my baby and I had a well deserved coffee at Josefstrasse (lower image).

Yesterday the people in Switzerland collected 13 millions swiss francs to the floobding victims in Pakistan. It is a good thing but I always get a funny feeling of trying to buy away my bad conscience of not doing anything that really matters.

A couple of weeks ago Wikileaks published about 90'000 confidential reports concerning the Afghan war. The U.S. has condemned them as irresponsible whereas other thinks it is important things to reveal. What is a bit scary in the world at the moment is that nobody has any trust in any kind of authorities anymore. Today, we almost take for granted that we are being fooled and kept in the dark. I can really miss the trust I used to have when I was a child seeing the US as the heroes saving the world from all evil as when they helped Europe beat Hitler. I think that we have almost become too critical against them, especially in Afghanistan. It is not as if they went into a peaceful paradise with their tanks. Afghanistan has known nothing but war as long as people can remember and one additional reason to go to war against the Taliban, a part from the terrorist one, is for the women. Under the Taliban rule the conditions for the women are absolutely horrendous, they have absolutely no human value, no right to work, no right to health-care, not even to make sound with their shoes against the pavement when they walk on the street. In addition to that they can be stoned to death for the mere suspicion of having been seen with a man that is not a relative or their husband. It is awful what is happening to the afghan people in the war but I honestly don't believe it used to be much better.