Néro the Assassin - Netflix Series

Néro the Assassin | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

1504 in France and there is a drought. There was a big drought in Europe in 1540. You don't suppose they got the four and the zero transposed, do you? I do. Anyway, the situation is grim, but doesn't keep people from lusting after power and killing people to get their way. Matter of fact, it gives some people an opportunity to wreak havoc. We have a nutcase leading the pentitents who claims people have not been been penitent enough and that's why god is withholding the rain. The pentitents work to rectify this situation by cutting off people's noses, ears, fingers and even heads. Lovely bunch of folks.

That's the background. In the foreground we have a fat cat, his daughter, his number one assassin, the assassin's daughter, a one eyed witch, and a couple of dark skinned soldiers, one male and one female. All of these people change loyalties with every episode. It basically makes the story incoherent.

There is a bit of a love story and there is plenty of fighting, but the story is weak, weak, weak.

Cast

Actor	Surname	Character / Role
Lili-Rose Carlier	Taboury	Perla
Sandra	Parfait	Zineb
Pio	Marmaï	Néro
Alice	Isaaz	Hortense
Olivier	Gourmet	Horace
Louis-Do	de Lencquesaing	Rochemort
Yann	Gael	Lothar
Camille	Razat	La Borgne
Quentin	D'Hainaut	L'Inquisiteur
Raphael	Roger Levy	Rimbaud
Elric	Montorier	Petit Louis
Efrain	Anglès	Tête de Mort
Pauline	Clément	Josephine
Alexandre	Massonnet
Daniel	Aguilera	Penitent soldier
Quentin	Ogier	Cardinal Vatican
Marc	Velasco	Brigand 2
Josselin	Amoravain	Jeune Paysan Village Pénitent Bijoux

8 episodes, 1 hour each

Kachhi Canal Project

Kachhi Canal Project
The Red Line is the Canal

I started watching a video about this project, but while it was entertaining it wasn't showing any maps, so I traced the canal out on Google Maps and here we are.

The canal was started in 2002 and is 500 kilometers long. It provides water to irrigate 100,000 acres of crop land.

Nine Meals

Smithfield Foods, Tar Heel, South Carolina

From Variety we have a movie review by Peter Debruge. It reads more like an investigators report.

The Grab

Exposing a Nearly Invisible Conspiracy to Control the World’s Food and Water

Gabriela Cowperthwaite uncovers a massive global scheme to gobble up resources, pairing with the Center for Investigative Reporting to bring these shadowy operations to light.

You’ve heard the expression, “There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy.” Well, The Grab makes the case that society had best brace itself for disorder, since certain parties are gobbling up the world’s food and water resources while the rest of us are distracted by other things. Produced in association with the Center for Investigative Reporting, Blackfish director Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s astonishing, eye-opening doc hits us with the idea that the next world war won’t be fought over ideology, oil or border disputes, but basic resources like meat, wheat and water, none of which should be taken for granted.

Experts call this field “food security,” and the entire system is more fragile than it looks. World populations are climbing while water resources are dwindling, which has led countries such as Saudi Arabia and China to seek farmland on other continents. Among its myriad examples, The Grab focuses on a 15-square-mile expanse in La Paz, Ariz., an arid desert locale where there’s no limit to the amount of water landowners can pump from the aquifers. Arizona’s policy of unrestricted access means Saudi investors can legally tap into the water table to grow fields of hay, which will be shipped home to feed their cattle, even if it means draining the wells of local farmers in the process.

It’s the same principle described at the end of There Will Be Blood, when a triumphant Daniel Day-Lewis crows, “I drink your milkshake!” Only now, it’s H2O, not oil, that’s at stake. Versions of the same thing are already happening all over the world (not that Americans should pretend for a second that they’re not among the culprits of the global resource snatch). A good part of what makes The Grab so alarming is the reminder of what’s being done to satisfy your own consumer comfort.

For years, the West had a virtual monopoly on this phenomenon: Colonialism has historically been less about taking care of foreign peoples than about taking control of their resources. And now, other countries — like fast-growing China — are looking for a piece of the proverbial pie. The Grab points to the Great Chinese Famine and the Arab Spring as examples of shortfalls that reshaped nations, and suggests that world leaders must anticipate their people’s food and water needs if they hope to stay in power.

Want to understand the reason Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine? Look no further than the besieged country’s status as supplier of 29% of the global wheat trade. Russia already took a big bite of the country in 2014, to which Ukraine responded by cutting off water to Crimea. It’s no coincidence that Russian forces occupied the canal on day one of their latest offensive, destroying the dam blocking water from the Dnieper River. (Not upset enough about Putin? Just wait’ll you hear why global warming is a good thing to a country that sees usable ranch land under areas of ice.)

Simply repeating the film’s points makes one sound like some kind of conspiracy nut, and yet, the truth is outrageous — like the way Blackwater founder Erik Prince turned his attention to a new venture, Frontier Resources Group. Operating like mercenaries, FRG reps have been gobbling up fields and forests in Zambia, driving poor villagers out of their homes, so their land can be used to feed distant regions.

The big picture here is so elusive and vast that it helps Cowperthwaite to have a few intrepid investigators to follow, letting their research drive the shape of the film (which, when you unpack it, must have been one hell of a task to structure). Her main character is CIR sleuth Nate Halverson, a tenacious journalist who broke enough of these stories that he now understands how they connect.

Halverson explains how looking into the acquisition of Smithfield Foods (a livestock company responsible for one in four American pigs) by a state-funded Chinese company led straight back to President Xi Jinping’s national strategy. All these revelations sound sinister, playing on audiences’ fears of the other without seriously challenging the degree to which their own governments do the same. It’s not fair, but those with money have always been in a position to buy mines, fields and whatever means they need to transport those resources away from where they’re harvested. So what’s new here?

On one hand, all this harvesting is being done in plain sight; on the other, there’s enormous secrecy about how companies (many of them private-looking fronts for government interests, deceptively hidden behind layers of offshore accounts) are going about the actual pillaging — and the public deserves to know. Untangling those arrangements is what Halverson and fellow investigators Mallory Newman and Emma C. Schwartz have been focused on, playing cloak and dagger as the paranoia mounts (as when they disable the camera and internet functions on a computer terminal before accessing “the trove,” a massive leak of damning insider data).

There’s so much at stake in this arena that one half expects these journalist heroes to be silenced along the way. For that reason, The Grab unspools like a thriller in one sense and a dystopian science fiction movie in another. The entire situation might be incredibly depressing were it not for a few heroes Halverson identifies along the way, like Brigadier Siachitema, or “Brig,” a Zambian human rights lawyer who takes the case of those displaced by FRG. Accountability is the first step, and to that end, The Grab doesn’t entirely let its audience off the hook. We are what we eat, after all, and the more responsibly sourced our food, the better we can all feel about ourselves.

 Couldn't find a good picture of FRG, but I did find this video:

Erik Prince, Frontier Resource Group: Investing in battery metals
3,350 views Apr 28, 2019
121 Mining Investment TV
This video has been up for 3 years and has only gotten 3,000 views. Most media stories like to present Erik Prince as a villain. I'm beginning to think he might be one guy who can cut through the bullshit. Frontier Resources Group is an investment firm. They probably have a nondescript office somewhere. Frontier Services Group seems to be the force that gets things done.

Lake Oroville Drought

Lake Oroville Drought
1st photo - 2018
2nd - april 27, 2021
3rd -last week

Lake Oroville is the one that had problems with the spillway not too long ago. Looks like the California drought is pretty serious.

Via Posthip Scott

Frozen in Time

HMS Modeste frozen in the icy Columbia River, January 1847

Car driving on the Columbia River, Portland, Oregon, January 1930

The icy Columbia River freezing over in the early 1900’s. Photo courtesy: Washington State Archives

Columbia River provides landing field on frozen water. Clarence S. Murray on the right and Glenn Murray on the left. 1930. (Columbian files)

Breakup, Feb. 11th, 1916

Before the dams were built on the Columbia River, the flow rate was much lower in the winter time which made it easier for the river to freeze.

Posthip Scott sent me the last picture which got me started.

Living the Dream

Dig To Build The Best Secret Swimming Pool Underground House
This is strangest thing I've seen today. I'll leave off talking about stagnant water and no drain, but maybe the water seeps out through the dirt, and maybe they only use it for a few days before they go build another one. It looks like they know what they are doing, which means they might have done this before, like a couple of dozen times, or maybe even hundreds. Or maybe they were just working up to this so they could make a video and no one is even going to use it because it's out in the jungle. I wonder how long it took them to build this. They are very fast, and the dirt is soft, but that's still a chunk of dirt to move.

Water from Nothin'

Fog collection in the Atacama Desert, Chile - Nicole Saffie

The Atacama Desert is one of the driest places on Earth, which is why the ALMA radio telescope project is there. Fog collection is a one way to collect drinking water out of the atmosphere that doesn't require any energy. Getting a usable amount of water out of the air in the desert is a pretty good trick. But if this is a desert, then what are all those clouds doing there? I think they must be right on the western edge of the desert, that horizon looks like the Pacific Ocean.

Via Posthip Scott

Let's Go Surfin'

Sebastian Steudtner at Nazaré - 2018 Ride of the Year Award Entry - WSL Big Wave Awards
YouTube has a zillion similar videos.

Nazare Canyon

The underwater Nazare Canyon is the reason the waves get so big here.

Via Posthip Scott.

Flic of the Day

Round Blue - created by Armand Dijcks in collaboration with Ray Collins

This image is a cinemagraph, though I am not sure how it is different from a GIF image. Iaman sent me a link, but the images on that page seem to suffer from tiny little hesitations that spoil the viewing.

Okay, so I published this post and when I looked at the result, the image was huge and it was suffering from the same sort of hesitation. I edited the html to put limits on it and now I'm not sure if there are hesitations or not.

Water

Smart Water Bottle

Which is more ridiculous, buying water in disposable bottles, or buying a reusable bottle that you have to keep track of and care for? And when did it become necessary to carry a bottle of water around with you? Back in the good old days we used to drink beer. Nobody drank water. What has happened to us? This country is going to hell in a handbasket, I tell you. And get off of my lawn.
    There are drinking fountains in airports, but they are at the end of the mile long concourse, next to the restrooms. And you can get a drink on the airplane, if you are awake when they are passing out drinks. And you can usually get a cup of water at a fast food joint when you buy your hamburger, but it's one of those really flimsy cups that you have to hold oh-so-delicately so that it doesn't collapse and spill your precious life-giving fluid all over the table where is soaks your french fries and ruins your life. So you can get by without a water bottle, but sometimes it's just easier to buy one.


How Many DJ's Does It Take to Open A Bottle of Smart Water?
    I first got a bottle of smartwater at the international concourse in Atlanta. I couldn't figure out how to open it, I had to ask. This particular bottle has a pop top that covers the nozzle. The pop top is hinged on one side and there is partial ring that covers the rest of the space between the base cap and the pop top. At one end of the partial ring there is a little tiny tab that you can pop out with your fingernail. Then you can grab the end and pull the rest of the ring off, which releases the pop top, which you can now pop open and get your drink.
    So the pop top is nice, you can open it with one hand, and it stays attached to the bottle so you aren't in danger of losing it. And it's disposable, no cleaning involved, and if you misplace it, no big loss.
    I've been buying them ever since whenever I am traveling by air or on the road. On the road it gives you something to buy when you stop at a truck stop to use the restroom. It's only fair.

   At home we've taken to drinking lemon flavored sparkling water. It's cold, it's wet, it's fizzy, and there's no calories or weird artificial sweeteners. We buy it by the case for $3.60 which includes the nickel bottle deposit. That works out to 30 cents a can, which in this day, when a dollar is like the smallest denomination worth bothering with, is like free.

Nice! Sparkling Water

I picked up a bottle of Nice! sparkling water the other day. No calories, which is good for someone trying to avoid sugar, and no warnings, but it's sweet! What the heck? I examine the bottle when I get home and I find sucralose in the ingredients list. Sucralose is an artificial sweetner, but there's no label warning about artificial sweetners. Bah, double bah and humbug. All kinds of warning labels out there but not the one I wanted.

Water, Water Everywhere

A new desalination plant in Carlsbad, California, is bordered by Interstate 5 on one side and the Pacific Ocean on the other.

After 14 years of construction the Poseidon water desalination plant in Carlsbad, California, is starting operation. It is the largest reverse osmosis plant in the USA. It makes drinking water from sea water. I seem to recall hearing about a zillion years ago how 'we' (Americans? Scientists?) were working on reverse osmosis techniques. Seems it has finally reached the point where it is practical, or maybe we have finally gotten desperate enough to pay for it. The price Poseidon is getting for their water is about twice what San Diego pays the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California for water. I ran some numbers to see how it pencils out.


Poseidon should make money on this project, but it's a pretty thin deal. The 9.6% return they should be getting on their investment doesn't include operating costs. Those cost should be minimal, but they are not going to be zero. They have to produce the water to get paid, so breakdowns could impact their revenue stream. Their capacity is about 15% greater than what they are contracted to produce, so they have a little margin for error. Reverse osmosis depends on special filters to work. I don't know how long those filters / membranes last, but it's not forever, and replacing them is going to cost money. I wish them luck.

From a story by  Bradley J. Fikes in The San Diego Union-Tribune.

Lotsa Mules

June 18, 1911 Building  the Los Angeles Aqueduct

Via Posthip Scott

Water, Water

Island Malé and capital city of Maldives

There's a bit of a water crisis in the Maldives (or is it just Maldives? My conditioning prevents me from leaving out the the.) The population outstripped the islands' ability to provide fresh water some time ago, so they are dependent on desalination plants. A fire in an electrical control panel in a relatively large desalination plant in the capital city/island of Malé has shut it down.

Malé is about halfway up the eastern chain of islands. At this scale it occupies one pixel on your screen. The 'British Indian Ocean Territory' down at the bottom center is just a fancy name for Diego Garcia, a hot spot on every sailor's tour of duty. And look! There's Arthur C. Clarke's house, 15 pixels South of Sri.

My paraphrase of the Wikipedia article on the place gives us the basics:

Maldives is an island nation in the Indian Ocean, consisting of a double chain of twenty-six atolls, oriented north-south. The chain starts about 250 miles southwest of the Southern tip of India and extends 500 miles south. Most of the atolls are composed of a ring of small islands. There are roughly 1200 islands, only 200 of which are populated. The total population is something greater than 300,000.  With an average ground level elevation of 5 feet above sea level, it is the planet's lowest country. It is also the country with the lowest natural highest point in the world at 8 feet.

Highest point is 8 feet?!?! How is it that this place still exists? I would have thought that everything would have been swept away the last time a typhoon blew through. Obviously I'm missing something, but it's going to have to wait for another day. I've got enough on my plate right now.

The Maldives cover about 35,000 square miles of ocean. If it was land it would be about the same size as Indiana, South Carolina or Maine. Put all the islands together and the actual land area would only be 115 square miles, which is slightly smaller than Larry Ellison's Pineapple Island.

My first hearing of this crisis left me wondering WTF? An electrical fire shut down the water? What kind of desalination plant do they have? I mean any boy scout knows you can get enough fresh water to survive with a sheet of plastic by rigging up a solar still. Works even in the Sahara (maybe. I'm not going to bet on that.) Wikipedia disabuses me of that notion:

Solar Stills

In the direct method, a solar collector is coupled with a distilling mechanism and the process is carried out in one simple cycle. . . . Water production by direct method solar distillation is proportional to the area of the solar surface and incidence angle and has an average estimated value of 3-4L/m²/d. Because of this proportionality and the relatively high cost of property and material for construction direct method distillation tends to favor plants with production capacities less than 200m³/d. - Wikipedia

200m³ (200 cubic meters) is about 50,000 gallons. Okay, land is kind of at a premium in Malé (see picture at top), and while 50,000 gallons a day might enable the population (roughly 100,000 people) to survive in a temperate climate, Malé is on the equator. I think you might want a bit more.

Still, with water being necessary and scarce, you'd think they'd want some kind of backup plan that didn't require electricity. Like maybe a water tower and a battery of hand operated pumps. I dunno though, maybe anything that sticks up would get blown away in the next typhoon. Or maybe pumps are too sophisticated. Maybe what they need is a water tower with a set of stairs so people can curry buckets up of water to the top. After all, the electricity isn't doing any magic, all it's doing is running the pumps. Electric pumps might be more economical from a business perspective, but if you are running out of drinking water and it's a hundred degrees outside I think you might be persuaded to man the pump for a bit, especially if that is the only way to get a drink.


India and China have been shipping water there by the ton, but Malé needs at least a thousand tons a day (a cubic meter weighs a ton). Saudi Arabia and India have pledged a chunk of money to get the water supply fixed. It's a chunk, but it's only a fraction of what they need. Being the geeky kind of guy I am, I'm wondering why the electrician didn't just go in and replace the burnt up wires, but then I realized that even if that got it going, what they really want is a reliable machine that doesn't require any fiddling. Their big business is tourism, not engineering. Besides, it's kind of like a military campaign, or a movie production - everything has to be shipped in from somewhere else, including all the support staff and supplies for the people who are doing actual work. Kind of like a pyramid scheme. You only need one guy to turn on the switch on the new plant, but getting the new plant there and installed, well, that's going to take a small army, and as we all know, armies are expensive.

Sun.MV has a live blog on the Malé water crisis. It's kind of a cool format. What we haven't heard is anything from Hitachi, who built and run the Malé's desalination plan, though I might be the only person on the planet who knows this (puffy mcpuffery speaking).

On the plus side, I found a very cool back room tour of the Hyatt in Malé, and an English company that is building Seawater Greenhouses in Arabia.

Hot Date in Yuma, Arizona

Yuma Medjool Date Festival 2014

Iaman, who isn't in Iowa anymore, told me about the Yuma Date Festival. I like dates well enough, but no, I'm not going to Yuma.
    I've driven through Yuma at least twice. All I remember seeing there was acres and acres of motorhomes driven there by snowbirds from up North. Other than that, well, there was the movie 3:10 to Yuma and the Yuma Proving Grounds. But dates? It all looked like desert to me.
    Yuma is right at the border with California and Mexico and at the intersection of the Colorado River and Interstate Highway 8.
     A hundred years ago some enterprising souls figured out that all they needed was to divert some of the water from the Colorado River and they could grow big crops. Most irrigation projects involved dams and canals but this one, this one is a real oddball. They dug a tunnel under the river. This video does a pretty good job of explaining the project.

Yuma Siphon Irrigation Project

Yuma Siphon

The population in Arizona has been growing which is putting more strain on their water supply. Now they are experimenting with paying farmers not to grow crops in order to free up water for other uses, like drinking.

P.S. I was thinking dates were tied up with wasps in some bizarre sexual escapades, but it's not dates, it's that other middle eastern fruit: figs.

Hangzhou, China

Surfing China: Silver Dragon Hangzhou 2010 from Charles Lanceplaine on Vimeo.

Twice every year the Qiantang Tidal bore thunders down the river from the Hangzhou Bay almost 30 miles past the city of Hangzhou. Since 2007 Surfing China and Wabsono, with the permission of the Chinese government, has invited Pro surfers to surf the bore known as the "Silver Dragon". This year the team included Jamie Sterling, Mikala Jones, Robert Wingnut Weaver and Mary Osborne. Mary had the honor of being the first woman ever to have surfed the "Silver Dragon" and Wingnut, the honor of first "headstand".

Text from Vimeo. Found on 3.5 OUT OF 5 (dead link) while I was looking for blimp hangers.

Update: I thought the 'twice a year' bit was incorrect, I mean this wave is due to the incoming tide, and high tides happen twice a day. I had a hard time finding anyone to say otherwise. I think the deal is that due to some mysterious (celestial?) circumstances, you get an exceptional large wave twice a year. I finally found someone to confirm my suspicions on a site about the Bay of Fundy: "Tidal bores takes place twice a day during the flood tide and never during the ebb tide."

Update July 2018 replaced video embed code.

Clean Water Haiti

The family from our church that went to Haiti to work on the Clean Water project has a blog called Our Ordinary Journey. I suppose if I paid more attention I would have found out about it a while ago. That's one of their munchkins amongst the newly cast water filter boxes.

Update February 2017 replaced missing picture and removed dead link.

Australian Flood

Floods covering an area the size of France and Germany . . . That's a lot of water. I'd like to see a satellite photo of that.

Via Roberta X

Clean Water for Haiti

A couple from our church are going to Haiti in January to work with Clean Water for Haiti. Their primary goal is the distribution of biosand filters. The picture is a cutaway version on display in the lobby. It seems like a reasonable thing to do. We had a sand filter on our pool in Phoenix. Of course we also used chlorine, so it's not exactly the same.

A quick Google turned up a couple other outfits working on the same problem, some have bigger goals, like city water supplies, some are more specialized, like water for a hospital. It's funny much of the world is having trouble getting clean water. With Haiti I can kind of understand it, the place has been a rathole forever. Why is that? What is it with these third world countries that they cannot take care of themselves?

Update March 2016 replaced missing picture.

Balmorhea State Park, Texas

Scuba diving in West Texas? Amazing what you run across on the internet.

Update January 2017 replaced missing picture.