Junkyard Man, the French Version

This Man Turned a Car Into a Motorbike to Escape the Desert
The Great Big Story

I remember coming across this story several years ago. Today I think it's worth posting.

Morocco

How Morocco Secretly Controls China, India, The United States, And the World
Jack Chapple
Jack's presentation is a little breathless, a little OMG what are we going to do? But he lays out the facts pretty well. I kind of thought that the population explosion was due to our conquering many of the nasty diseases that killed so many people. I never consider the impact of food production.

This kind of explains why Morocco is fighting rebels over Western Sahara and why Morocco has the longest conveyor in the world and a very long wall.

Previous posts that mention fertilizer.

Post about Fritz Haber.

Tangerine

Tangerine by Christine Mangan

Not a great story, but not bad either. I finished it, which is a rare occurrence lately. We have two women who were close friends in college, but after college they go their separate ways for a bit, but then one tracks down the other in Tangier (Morocco), where residents are known as Tangerines.

Most of the action takes place inside their heads. One woman is kind of timid and weak. Her moods and perceptions vary from one moment to the next. The other is stronger, confident and more assertive. Her moods vary as well, but she stays on track.

There are entire aspects of the situation, sections that I might consider important, that are left out, left out because they are of no concern to the participants. They have a very different view of the world, but that might be because they are wrapped up with what's going on it their heads.

The New Yorker has a review.

Picked this book up at Costco where it had a Buyer's Pick sticker on the front cover.

Neckan

TRAILER "NECKAN" Angela wears a 'deux piece' from Paris. Daring, for 1956. 
We saw this on Netflix about a week ago.

Tetuan, Morocco, 1956. Santiago, a young Spanish lawyer, goes to Tetuan to take care of some legal business.  Just so you know where we are, the movie opens with a conversation that includes this comment from a fellow Spaniard, presumably a lawyer and Catholic:

I do not wish to deal with quarrels between the Moors.
They're twisted people, believe me.

During the course of his investigations, Santiago uncovers some secrets about his past dating back to the time of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). In case you don't remember, Franco and the Nationalists had the backing of the Nazis and the Catholic Church. The Republicans had the backing of the Soviet Union and Ernest Hemingway, who wrote a best seller about his experience there. Another comment about this time:

They were masons. Rats

I've encountered anti-mason rhetoric before, but it seems pretty thin, kind of along the lines of how there is a great conspiracy among the Jews or the Illuminati or the Bilderberg group to run the world for their own nefarious purposes.

Another quote about the Civil War:

- Do you know who won the war?
- Sure.
- Priests won the war, and teachers lost it.

This war has been going on for at least a thousand years, as long as some people have been trying to apply logic and reason to figure out how the world works. On the other side we have those who want things to continue as they have been,  because those methods are tried and proven and, above all, safe. Safe is a relative term however. Society runs, and survives, on traditional rules. Traditional rules may result in an individual's death, but the group will survive. Deviation from the known and accepted may bring calamity down on our heads, and you certainly don't want that, do you, peasant, who cannot think for yourself? 

On the other hand sometimes those new ideas do bring calamity down on our heads. Be careful what you wish for, you might get it.

After Morocco became independent, Spain held onto a couple of enclaves, one of which has the last remaining public statue of Franco in Spain, even though it's in Africa.

I am not sure, but I think the title comes from a Jewish prayer, which kind of ties into the whole Jewish / Masonic Lodge conspiracy thing.

P.S. Looking for a trailer for this movie yesterday, I could not find one on YouTube with English subtitles. I found the one above when I first started this post shortly after we watched the movie.

Atlas Film Studios,Ouarzazate, Morocco

Ouarzazate, Morocco

Watching an episode of Grand Tour, the automotive comedy show featuring our goof-ball trio from Top Gear, and they pay a visit to the Atlas Film Studios in Ouarzazate, Morocco, where Richard Hammond destroys a priceless historical relic.

Atlas Film Studios, Ouarzazate, Morocco

Spectre

Léa Seydoux as Madeleine Swann

Not a great movie. I think I may be done with James Bond. There wasn't really anything wrong with the movie, it had all the requisite pieces of a typical James Bond adventure:

• multiple exotic locations
• destruction of expensive cars and aircraft
• explosions
• smarmy bad guys
• fight scenes
• car chases
• gunfights
• Bond girls
• improbable escapes from impossible situations

But the story, such as it was, didn't really grab me. Shoot, didn't grab me at all.

Bond made a number of mistakes:

• when he walks into the house in Austria, he doesn't disable the TV camera. That comes back to bite him not once, but twice.
• he fails to stop the kidnapping at the mountain top clinic. Come on, the bad guys had three big, black cars parked out front. Think that might have been a clue?
• he chases the kidnappers down with his airplane and manages to stop them, but he fails to ensure that they are all dead.
• he walks into the center of the bad guy's lair. He does get a bit of information, but he only escapes because it was in the script. Any half competent bad guy would have had him ground up for dog food. An airstrike would have been more appropriate.

The guy in charge of a competing British intelligence agency is no good. You can tell because he is not clean shaven, unlike Bond.

Daniel Craig's suit may be fashionable, but it looks snug, and completely wrong for all the action he gets involved in.

In Mexico City he manages to throw the bad guy out of the helicopter, but then he attacks the pilot. WTF? They are flying over a big crowd of people, let the chopper pilot fly out of the area, shoot, let him land someplace before you pick a fight with him. He's not going to be able to hurt you while he's flying the chopper.

Then there's the business of shooting down aircraft with handguns. If the aircraft is small and close and you manage to get a bullet into the turbine's intake, you could cause some trouble. Or if you are very lucky you might hit a critical system, but at any distance or it's going away, forget it. Unless you're in a movie.
During the kidnapping, the big bad guy was shooting at Bond with a double barreled 45, a very foolish gun. I'm not going to provide a link because I've been down that rathole before and while it is entertaining from a mechanical point of view, it's more of a fantasy than a useful weapon

Orient Desert Express

The best part was the Orient Desert Express, a real train across the Sahara desert.

There is one scene where a character says the word 'careless', but it's a Brit accent, so it could have been 'callous'. Either one would work, they both have similar meanings.

The whole point of the story is corruption in high places. Corruption is endemic. The higher you go, the worse it gets. I'm thinking nations are no longer there to provide for the common defense. They are now just fiefdoms that the rich have carved out for thie themselves. If we want to fight them, none of our old standbys, like law, order, and tough minded prosecutor are going to cut it anymore. The Weapon Shops of Isher is one of my favorite stories, but I've never been able to figure out how it might work. Now I'm thinking Anonymous might be the first step in being able to counteract the oligarchy.

Finding pictures is becoming painful. More and more websites are talking longer to load. I blame all the adware. I would gladly pay real money to avoid having my time wasted by all this advertising crap.

Tannerie Chouara

Tannerie Chouara, Fes El Bali, Fes, Morocco

Fes is equidistant from Tangier and Casablanca. It is about 100 miles from the Atlantic coast and 100 miles from the Mediterranean coast.

Melilla, Spain

Model of original Melilla Fortress

Storming Spain's Razor-Wire Fence: In episode one of our series, VICE News correspondent Milène Larsson travels to the border between Morocco and Spain, where West Africans in their thousands storm the razor-wire-clad fences.  - from a blurb for a VICE video.

Cool, continental drift has accelerated into overdrive! Europe and Africa are colliding, tsunamis and earthquakes run rampant! Real-life disaster movies in the making, film at eleven.
    Uh, no, not really. Morocco and Spain are still separated by the Mediterranean Sea. The closest they ever get is the strait of Gibraltar. Gibraltar, now that's fortuitous. Seems Spain has a city on the Mediterranean coast of Morocco, much like England has the rock of Gibraltar on the coast of Spain. Actually Spain has a couple of cities in Morocco. Naturally, Morocco thinks these cities should belong to them. Spain disagrees, hence the fence.
    Melilla has been there a long time, and it's been Spanish for quite a while. Thought this was curious:

General Francisco Franco used the city as one of his staging grounds for his Nationalist rebellion in 1936, starting the Spanish Civil War. A statue of him – the last statue of Franco in Spain – is still prominently featured. - Wikipedia

I've been wondering about refugees in general. Seems like if someone is tearing up your homeland you might want to try and do something about it. Standing up by yourself against thugs is a good way to get yourself killed, so I can see how exit stage left might be reasonable choice. With a little organizing and some money for weapons, you'd think the people could form a militia that could eliminate these thugs. But that doesn't happen. Why is that? Capable organizers do not exist, or they are too busy combating other organized militias to worry about a few bands of thugs. And if people leave, well that's great, gets rid of a bunch of people and saves us the trouble of killing them.
    I am beginning to see how a state religion could be a good thing.

Update August 2015. Added pictures. Added the picture of the fortress because I like models. Added the picture of Franco because there is movement afoot to get rid of all traces of Franco and I thought we should remember what evil looks like.