Dhaka

Boeing 747-200 (4K-BCI)

747 air freighter landing in Dhaka. I've heard of Dhaka, but I forgot where it was. Bangladesh, that's where. Just a reminder that even though stories from the third world are almost uniformly bad, like the movie Extraction, there are bits of civilization.

Extraction

Extraction | Official Trailer | Screenplay by JOE RUSSO Directed by SAM HARGRAVE | Netflix
Big, tough white man (Chris Helmsworth) goes to war against an army of drug war minions and goes all John Wick on them. Great stuff.

It starts with an Indian drug lord's son being kidnapped by the minions of a rival drug lord from Bangladesh. Drug Lord #1 is in jail, so he directs his lieutenant to get his son back. The lieutenant hires our hero, a mercenary from Australia for the job. There's just one problem, the lieutenant doesn't have any money on account of the drug lord's bank accounts have been frozen.

Drug lord #2 is holding the kid in Dhaka, which is evidently an island, because the only way out of the city is on one of the bridges, and his minions have set up roadblocks on the all the bridges looking for our hero.

P. S. I wrote this back in 2020, but I didn't finish it or post it. But now I need it for another post, so here we are.

Refugees

Cox’s Bazar refugee camp in Bangladesh - Showkat Shafi/Al Jazeera

Wherever there is strife, we are almost sure to find refugee camps. I hear about them intermittently, but usually from government agencies via commercial media. Today I came across a story on Aljazeera from a refugee from Burma (now called Myanmar by the military junta that seized power several years ago) who is now living in a refugee camp in Bangladesh. It gives you a different, i.e. an inside view of the situation.

Facebook should pay for what it did to my people, Rohingya 

by Maung Sawyeddollah, a Rohingya refugee in Bangladesh

For six years, I have been stuck in an overcrowded refugee camp in Bangladesh with little hope for the future. Facebook helped create the conditions that got me here.

I suspect Zuckerberg is a bit of an idiot savant. Very good at creating his social media empire and keeping it running, but not fully aware of what kind of monster he has created, and he certainly isn't in control of it. I mean, who can control the monster of public opinion? You can try to influence it here and there, but there are liable to be unintended consequences. They just haven't come back to bit him on the ass yet.