Being Buzzed again: Yup Balikatan time

For the last week, every morning and evening, and sometimes during the day, we are being buzzed by low flying planes or helicopters.

Yup. It's "Balikatan" time: when joint US/Philippine military exercizes take place every year.

Usually it includes parachute drops and jungle training at nearby Fort Magsaysay: And our town center, with it's brand new ferris wheel, is a visual point for VFR navigation. Last year, a small plane (A10?) buzzed our town square, frightening our cook who comes with me when I walk the dog there. But this week, it has been very hot and humid ("asthma weather"). So I didn't go out to identify the plane.

here is a short film about the exercizes at Clark AFB: The US left Clark years ago, right after Mt Pinatubo destroyed the area with ash, but our lovely Ex presdent GMA put lots of money into the area to build it up, so aside from a Phil Airforce base, Clark now has an industrial park and international airport.



The news picked up that the USS Wasp was near "disputed" islands bothering China, but this is nonsense. China is illegally digging up the sea bottom to build artificial islands to take over the West Philippine sea with it's mineral and fishing resources, not to mention the ability to block the sea lanes to Japan and Korea.

They are destroying the ecology and pushing out local fishermen. China claims they own the area, probably since the last time they "owned" the area they let Chinese pirates terrorize the are during the Ming dynasty. How bad were the pirates? Well, when they tried to take over Luzon, the locals helped the Spanish throw them out...

Of course, Obama pressured the Philippines not to fight back and take it to court. So now the Philippines has a paper saying China's islands are illegal. which china ignores.

but lately, China has been blocking supplies to an island that the Philippines has long inhabited, and so the presence of the USS Wasp hopefully sends a message that if they invade, the US will help out this invasion of a sovereign country with whom the US has a mutual defense treaty. And Duterte? He essentially has told the soldiers there that it will be a suicide mission to protect our sovereignty.

This is a turn around for Duterte, who has been trying to make nice with China, but even though he is popular with locals, a lot of locals oppose his policy here: The locals hate the Chinese (whose immigrants for years have had a monopoly on the economy), and now many are worried about China's "help", which could result in China grabbing our economic assets if the Philippines could not pay them back.

Duterte's speech warning China was at the big celebration of the day of Valor: To commemorate the soldiers who died at Bataan and the Bataan death march. Filipinos may lose wars, but they will still fight.

Austin Bay at StrategyPage has a short essay summarizing the problem.

Of course, in the USA, the Democrats will claim Trumpieboy is causing the war. Yet China has gone to war with VietNam in the past after similar aggression, and their bullying against a lot of local countries (VietNam, India, Korea, Taiwan, Japan) with similar tactics mean it's not just a US problem. StrategyPage has a nice summary and analysis about all of this HERE.

The key to this is not fishing, or even the natural gas resources there: It is all about the sea lanes to Japan and Korea... true, the ships could go around the east side of the Philippines, but China is also threatening to take over areas there, which would enable them to isolate the Philippines.

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the SP essay I linked to above includes this about the drug war here:

The National Police reported that since the war on drugs began three years ago nearly 1.5 million drug addicts have turned themselves in and the crime rate has declined 30 percent. Nearly 70 percent of Filipinos approve of the anti-drug effort mainly because their villages or neighborhoods are either free of drug activity or that such activity is much reduced.

sounds about right, but hey, the MSM and the SJW on the social media hate Duterte as much as the MSM and SJW in the US hate Trumpie boy. So take what you read about him (usually a joke/irony taken out of context) with a grain of salt...