Land of Bad - Netflix Movie

LAND OF BAD Official Trailer (2024) Russell Crowe
Movie Trailers Source

Three 'operators' and one newbie (Liam Hemsworth) parachute into a Philippines jungle to rescue a CIA 'asset'. Instead of the small group of troublemakers they were expecting to find, they find a whole army of Muslim terrorists. On the other side of world we have Russell Crowe as drone operator 'Reaper' working at Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas, Nevada.

We get to see high-tech communications at work with our newbie calling in strike coordinates and the drone operators delivering. They also get some help from a couple F-18 fighters and a B1-B bomber. Seems kind of overfill for extracting five guys from the jungle, but it makes for a good show.

The film switches back and forth between intense jungle combat in the Philippines and peaceful suburban life in Las Vegas. I don't always agree (okay, almost never) with America's scattershot approach to foreign policy, but I gotta admire the guys who are out there working on the front lines.

There was an episode of a TV series we watched a while back, The Good Wife maybe, where a female drone operator was convicted in a military court of pressing the fire button in violation of an order. She was likewise operating a drone on the other side of the word from where she sat at the controls safe at home. Some people were killed as a result, but it was never clear, to me at any rate, whether they were bad guys or not. Of course with our flaky leadership, it is unlikely whether anyone else knew either.

The Sulu Sea gets mentioned during the opening of the movie and I think - wait a minute - that sounds familiar. Yes indeed - the minesweeper USS Guardian grounded on a reef in the middle of the Sulu Sea back in 2013. I put up a couple of posts about the incident, here and here. Wikipedia has a page, as does the US Navy.

Fork the System

Volunteers at the Khalsa Diwan Sikh Temple in Manila prepare chapatis for the evening crowd [Sonny Thakur/Al Jazeera]

Yes, Aljazeera is run by Nazis, but outside of their coverage of the Palestinians and Israel they seem to be fairly well balanced, so you get stories like this one about Sikhs emigrating from Bombay to the Philippines and going into the microfinance business. They are doing well enough there that they are offering free meals to all at their community kitchen.

Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP)

Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP)

A bunch of countries in east Asia are working on a free trade agreement. The people in these countries make up 30% of the world's population. 

I'm reading Tyler Durden's post about this and there is a chart of numbers and I don't like the format. The numbers are all left justified, makes it hard to see what's going on, so I muck around 

(save the image, run it through a free online OCR (Optical Character Recognition) service, edit with a text editor to clean it up a bit) 

and then import it into a spreadsheet. Now I can play with it. Lists of numbers like this call for a graph, but none of graphs I call into existence really show me anything useful. Then I realize what we need is GDP per person, so I add that column. Now we have some numbers that mean something.

The top five are no surprise. Number six, Brunei, is kind of a freak, a tiny country on the island of Borneo that just happens to be "the fourth-largest producer of oil in Southeast Asia". Then we have China, Malaysia and Thailand that seem to be doing okay. And then we have the bottom six, who maybe aren't doing so well. That the Philippines are below Vietnam was kind of surprise, but maybe not. Filipinos make up a third of the crews of most of the cruise ships in the world. Working on a cruise ship is not far from slave labor. If that many people are looking for slave labor gigs overseas, things can't be too good at home. Plus we've got a jihadist revolution percolating there.* 

Seems Capitalism worked in some of these countries (the top five again). A couple suffered Communist revolutions (China and Vietnam) and are making progress. You'd think that the Philippines would be doing better what with it being a mostly an English speaking, Christian country with strong US backing, but maybe that's the problem. South Vietnam's corrupt government had US backing as well.

* It took me a while to find this post. Searching for philippines missed it. Searching for philippine would have found it, but Blogger's search function is rudimentary at best and I didn't think of it. Searching for winning finally turned it up because I remembered that from the blurb I quoted.

P.S. The chart in Tyler Durden's post was an image of the chart in Visual Capitalist's post. The chart format in Visual Capitalist's post is still piss poor, but at least it was text, so I could have copied it directly instead of going through the OCR business.

Making it in Manila

Refined CNC Machine Design

Some dude in the Philippines is running a shop making things (flower pots maybe?) It's a constant battle against gremlins, technical and bureaucratic. It's always nice to hear about far away places that aren't a complete disaster.

Via BustedKnuckles

The Long Way Round Part 2

First of six Embraer A-29B Super Tucanos landing in Gran Canaria on a delivery flight for the Philippines Air Force - thortelde

Flying East from Brazil on the way to the Philippines? That's doing it the hard way. I would have expected them to take the wings off of the airplane, but it in a big box and load it on a ship. I mean that's how we did it with fighter aircraft in WW2. But times have changed and there could be any number of reasons to undertake a long flight like this, the primary one being that we don't have a world war going on right now.

Super Tucano Delivery Flight

I picked up a few clues as to the route they are taking and then made some guesses as to where else they might stop after they leave the UAE and plotted the results on the above map. The range of the aircraft (1700 miles) is the first constraint, and then there are political alliances. Some countries can be real persnickety about letting warbirds fly over them, much less touch down. 

The first stop after leaving mainland Brazil is Fernando de Noronha, a place I did not even know existed. You can't even see it on Google Maps unless you are zoomed in on it, and why would you zoom in on a featureless bit of ocean?

Back at the start of WW2, a Boeing 314 flying boat made a similar trip flying the long way around the world to get home from Australia. They crossed the Atlantic around the same place landing at Natal on the coast of Brazil. Fernando de Noronha probably wasn't high on their list of places to stop. It had a prison, but didn't get an airport until 1942, courtesy of the US government.

A Philippine Murder Exposes Corrupt Police

Choi Kyung Jin, the widow of Korean National Jee Ick Joo, and their househelp Marissa Morquicho at the Senate Hearing on Tokhang for Ransom. INQUIRER PHOTO/ALEXIS CORPUZ

A Philippine Murder Exposes Corrupt Police is the title of a story on the front page of The Wall Street Journal this morning. It's just another chapter in the abysmal story of the War On Drugs. But dang it, if you are getting to get me riled, I'm going to rant, so I sent this to the editors:

    The War On Drugs is the most evil criminal conspiracy operating in the world today. It is promoted by organizations operating on both sides of the law. It employs ignorant do-gooders as shills to sell their line of bullshit. And it is all done in order to maximize the profits that can be made from selling drugs.
    Can anything be done to eliminate this evil conspiracy? Probably not, not as long the majority of the elite continue to support it, and why wouldn't they? It keeps a large percentage of them afloat, financially speaking.
    Some people believe that letting people have unfettered access to drugs would result in all kinds of horrors and even the complete collapse of society and Western Civilization. I'm sorry, how is that any different from what we have now? Oh, right. Now we have enormous profits making a few people very wealthy,
    There are some benefits to the War On Drugs. The promise of conflict and physical violence attracts a certain kind of person. Employing these people in this war keeps them occupied, and if they are occupied, we know where they are, more or less, but more importantly, they are not out looking to cause some other kind of trouble which may be even worse. Hard to imagine what that might be, illegal dumping of toxic waste maybe? Smuggling nuclear weapons to countries run by psychotic heads-of-state?
    What would our society look like if drugs were deregulated? Well, some of the people running the illegal drug business would adapt to running a legal business, but the enormous profits would vanish. You would be able to buy heroin at Walmart, which could make make your daily fix akin to buying a cup of coffee and would not require knocking over a dozen 7-11's.
    Would more people take drugs? Undoubtedly. Would more people die from overdoses? That's debatable. If you are buying legal drugs that are clearly marked with the dosage, you would no longer have the excuse of not knowing how much you are taking.
    The is a big campaign going on right now to reduce the number of deaths due to an overdose from opiates. I am not sure accidental overdoses are all that accidental. Many people are taking opiates to cope with chronic, severe pain. Sometimes the recommended dose is not enough, and sometimes people get tired of having chronic, severe pain and decide to disregard the 'safe, recommended dose' guidelines. Not to mention the hopeless economic situation some people on the fringes of society are in.
    The big problem I see is that the vast number of people employed in controlling the distribution of illegal drugs would be out of work, which would likely raise the unemployment rate, which would have a negative impact on the economy, and we can't have that.
    What we need is some kind of project that could put a large number of people to work doing something constructive. If we can't find anything better, we could bring back the Egyptian Sun God and start building pyramids again. I suspect that is unlikely to happen. But if we don't find something better for these people to do, some demagogue might come along and incite them to fight a war.
    Oh, wait, that's where we are now.

I looked for a version of the story that wasn't hidden behind a paywall and the only site that had one that I recognized was Wikipedia. I also found this cogent observation about corruption in the Philippines. It's pretty good.

Day of the Dead, Part 2

    The Monument to the Heroes of Cavite and Santiago de Cuba is a sculptural group commemorating the Spaniards who died in the Spanish-American War. It is situated in the port city of Cartagena, Spain. It was created in 1923 by the sculptor Julio González-Pola. Seem the statues were originally done in stone and later redone in bronze.
    Cavite and Santiago de Cuba are cities where Spain fought battles during the Spanish-American War. Santiago de Cuba is where the battle of San Juan Hill happened on July 1, 1898. Cavite is on Manila Bay in the Philippines and is where the Filipino revolt against Spanish rule started.  The American Asiatic Squadron engaged and destroyed the Spanish Pacific Squadron there.

Based on stuff I extracted from Wikipedia.  I would have thought stone would be the more enduring material, or maybe this sculpture is something completely different than the original.

THIS IS THE WAR ON TERROR. WISH YOU WERE HERE!

Filipino marines roll through Jolo City on a mission to deliver textbooks, summer 2006.

Photo: Antonin Kratochvil

TUESDAY, JANUARY 16, 2007

Welcome to the tropical Philippine island of Jolo, where life is like a Corona ad—coconut trees, white-sand beaches, bathtub-warm seas. Except those guys in the water are U.S. Green Berets, and those kids on dirt bikes are jihadists known for kidnapping Western tourists. Even stranger? On this front, at least, America seems to be winning.

By: JOHN FALK

This is a excellent story from Outside in 2007.

USS Guardian on Tubbataha Reef in the Sulu Sea

USS Guardian
Click to see the photo album

The American minesweeper USS Guardian ran aground on the Tubbataha Reef January 17, 2013.

No longer applies: [Photos are arranged in chronological order. The first few photos are from its career prior to this ignominious event. Most of the pictures were taken since then. The last third depict the salvage operators dismantling the ship in order to remove it from the reef.]

The reef is in the middle of the Sulu sea in the Philippines  a hundred miles from land in any direction. The reef is a National Marine Park and World Heritage Site and the Philippines are understandably ticked off that we managed to get our ship stuck there, so the U.S. Navy is trying to minimize the damage to the reef as they try to remove the ship. Photos from Military Photos dot net.

Update June 2019 replaced dead Picasa slideshow with image and link to Google Drive album.

Picture of the Day

TUBBATAHA REEF (Jan. 22, 2013) The mine countermeasures ship USS Guardian (MCM 5) sits aground on the Tubbataha Reef. Operations to safely recover the ship while minimizing environmental effects are being conducted in close cooperation with allied Philippines Coast Guard and Navy.  (U.S. Navy photo by Geoffrey Trudell)

Tubbataha Reef is in the Philippines in the middle of the Sulu Sea, a hundred miles from land in any direction. I'm wondering how they managed to managed to get themselves in this fix.

Clean Air=Global warming???

ALL-CLEAR IN THE STRATOSPHERE:Earth's stratosphere is as clear as it's been in more than 50 years. University of Colorado climate scientist Richard Keen knows this because he's been watching lunar eclipses. "Since 1996, lunar eclipses have been bright, which means the stratosphere is relatively clear of volcanic aerosols. This is the longest period with a clear stratosphere since before 1960." Consider the following comparison of a lunar eclipse observed in 1992 after the Philippine volcano Pinatubo spewed millions of tons of gas and ash into the atmosphere vs. an "all-clear" eclipse in 2003:

Keen explains why lunar eclipses can be used to probe the stratosphere: "At the distance of the Moon, most of the light refracted into the umbra (Earth's shadow) passes through the stratosphere, which lies 10 to 30 miles above the ground. When the stratosphere is clear, the umbra (and therefore, the eclipsed Moon) is relatively bright. On the other hand, if the atmospheric lens that illuminates the Moon becomes dirty enough, light will be blocked and the eclipse will appear dark."

This is timely and important because the state of the stratosphere affects climate; a clear stratosphere "lets the sunshine in" to warm the Earth below. At a 2008 SORCE conference Keen reported that "The lunar eclipse record indicates a clear stratosphere over the past decade, and that this has contributed about 0.2 degrees to recent warming."

This story reproduced from spaceweather.com (emphasis added)

Stolen entire from Confessions of a Street Pharmacist