hiobsbotschaft

Though Germany’s message in support of social justice and democratic reform in Turkey might have withered (as we’ve seen in other milieu) if the country’s economic prosperity were under threat by maintaining its criticism, Germany nonetheless deserves our plaudit for not compromising its values in order to eke out just a little more profit.
Most regimes have no moral qualms when it comes to enabling dictatorships when there’s money and influence to be gained. Even businesses and the robust German tourist industry are showing some character, however, insofar as they’re not—overtly at least, cowing the government to acquiesce to their ambitions and agenda with palaver and ignorance—putting something much bigger at stake than vacation plans or market saturation or even the politics of the present. Though Germany’s foreign minister also enjoys the high-ground in this challenge—the tantrums that Erdoğan is throwing are just as laughable and hollow but far more fraught for the people of Turkey—and authorities have stopped short of saying don’t travel to or invest in (although so much is implied by saying that Germany cannot vouch for one’s safety after multiple arrests and detention of activists, accusations supporting terror and of diplomatic embargoes and restricted access) the setbacks to Turkish relations to the West (Dear Leader’s affinity not counting towards the positive) and for the population are potentially immense and generational. I think Germany can take the name-calling, realising the gravity of the situation.

around the horn

We’ve known for some time that the fall of the Byzantine Empire—precipitated by the Ottomans’ taking of Constantinople—in May of the year 1453 was an event chronically adjacent to the dawn of the age of exploration with Christopher Columbus’ voyages in 1492 and Vasco da Gama’s five years later (preceding both and inspiring the success of his fellow countryman subsequently was Bartlolomew Diaz). We, however, failed to recognise the collapse of the Eastern Roman Empire and the blockade of overland routes to Asia directly, like the series of Crusades to recapture the Holy Land of Middle Ages and safeguard caravans of pilgrims, was aimed to re-establish trade-routes severed by Muslim occupation.

Unlike what Marco Polo had done a century prior, one could no longer walk to India and China and so a sea-route was sought in order to satiate those willing to spend exorbitant amounts of wealth on exotic spices and silks. Exchanges of goods and culture still continued by the Venetians, with whom the Ottomans had developed a business-relationship, but no one else thought that that maritime empire should enjoy a monopoly on supply. Betting that the globe was in fact smaller than Greek geomancers calculated, Columbus first embarked on a route to the East by going west and never realised that his progress had been arrested by two intervening continents, it was da Gama that actually reached the Orient first by sailing around the southern horn of Africa and on to Asia—prompting the Pope to negotiate a treaty decreeing all lands outside of Europe belong to one of the two Iberian kingdoms. The line of demarcation was the Cape Verde Islands (Repùblica de Cabo Verde) and everything to the West belonged to Spain, whilst (inclusive their colony on the archipelago) belonged to Portugal—stopping at Cuba and Hispaniola, and while repudiated many times over the centuries basically held until colonial ambitions for all of the European powers erupted. Though the Byzantine capital was subject to many sieges in over a milleuium until its fall—it took the Ottoman forces’ knowledge of gunpowder from the Chinese to breach the city’s defences, it had resisted capture until the fifteenth century and kept open the lines of communication between the West and East. One wonders if that if the old logistical network hadn’t become a less than ideal option, then would there have been an impetus for exploration.

inherit the wind

Chillingly, we learn via Super Punch that Turkish president Erdoğan has directed high schools to excise the topic of evolution from its science syllabus in public schools.
Demonstrating that wanton ignorance and lack of curiosity is not exclusive to one demagogue, the controversial topic will be removed from standardised textbooks issued to the country’s matriculating ninth graders beginning next fall, arguing that young Turks are not yet equipped with the critical-thinking and scientific background to adequately assess a theory fraught with problems confronting students at such an impressionable age. I suppose we needn’t worry about them acquiring that vital skill-set now. This development combined with the narrowly won referendum to cede the office of the president greater powers represents a national lurching away from its commitment to secularism and separation of church and state and towards a policy of neo-Ottomanism, for which Turkey hopes to be the anchor and guide.

luftwaffenstützpunkt

Having been repeatedly denied access to visit service members stationed at the NATO airbase in İncirlik, German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel said that his country has been left with no choice other than withdraw troops and materiel and re-station them elsewhere.
Turkish authorities have blocked visits by government officials since last summer’s questionable coup d’etat and Germany’s refusal to extradite political asylum-seekers caught up in the swift and subsequent purge. Relations further degraded thereafter. Defence Minister von der Leyen offered that the some two-hundred fifty personnel and Tornado fighter jets now at the base in southern Turkey (where the US also has a presence of around five-thousand soldiers and airmen with their families and fifty or so nuclear warheads) could be re-deployed to an installation in Jordan but the transition would be costly and hamper joint efforts in the fight against the Cosplay Caliphate.

the great game or rules of engagement

Just for those who might have harboured a kernel of doubt about Russia’s meddling in Western elections, Jason Kottke directs our attention to a 1997 publication by Duma-advisor and noted fascist and eschatologist Aleksandr Gelyevich Dugin, which is essentially an Orwellian play-by-play script for the destabilisation and subterfuge that we are experiencing presently.
The geopolitical book sets forth that the struggle for world dominance for Russia did not end with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and that the country remains the venue for the new anti-American revolution, with a Eurasian Empire united against a common enemy. Across different theatres of influence, sophisticated instructions are given to ensure absolute and enduring Russian victory—including the suggestion that Germany should be the dominant power over western and central Europe, the United Kingdom ought to be cut off from the continent, Ukraine should be annexed. For the Middle East, Dugin advocates supports that the Iranians, Kurds and the Armenians ought to be supported—especially insofar as they could create chaos in Turkey. China poses a serious threat to Russia and should be dismantled and encouraged to focus it’s only expansion towards Indonesia, the Philippines and Australia. Moreover, Russia should cede the disputed Kuril Islands to Japan to as a way to weaken their allegiance with the Americans. For the USA, Dugin prescribes that special forces be used to provoke instability with racial and social strife, blackmail and undermine internal political processes. With Brexit, Dear Leader, proxy wars, Crimea and fake news, it’s chilling how many chapters have already become headlines and scary to speculate how much further this manual might be carried out.

minyatür

Public Domain Review curates an exquisite collection of sixteenth-century miniaturist Matrakçı Nasuh’s images of Persian landscapes and urban centres. The gifted polymath, historian and strategist’s particular, modern style became its own genre among Ottoman art circles, “the Matrakçı school,” but that moniker was not his name but rather one that the Janissary had earned when he devised a lawn game to demonstrate his skill with a cudgel, matrak.

arbitration, vendetta

Last week the Turkish diaspora residing in Germany rather incredulously appeared to vote against their self-interests by helping to garner a bald majority in favour of the referendum to imbue the office of the presidency with executive powers.
Ahead of the plebiscite, relations between the two countries strained to the breaking point when German municipalities refused to grant permission for campaign rallies due to concern for public safety. Now that the first resolution has passed an addendum is to follow but this time Germany as a federal republic (not just a venue for a political junket) and as a proponent for human rights would be legally able and morally obligated to block Turkish expatriates from participation in ballots that would involve the reinstatement of capital punishment on German soil—prohibiting set up of voting booths or embassy outreach programmes that would decide this issue that represents a very slippery slope once the recourse is brought back and antithetical to Germany and European Union membership.

sınırı

Whilst arguably an improvement to the mine-field that formerly separated Turkey from Syria (an arrangement drawn up by our old ombudsmen friends Sykes and Picot from the vanquished Ottoman Empire), the world seemed to take far less exception with the wall now half completed that effectively cordons off the war-torn region than with Dear Leader’s imaginary one. Once the nine hundred kilometre long border is secure, the wall will be the world’s second longest structure, second only to the Great Wall of China. The circumstances are very different on each frontier but it’s strange how both dictators couch the threats from the barbarians at the gate with the same language and from the characterisations, one would think neighbours could be easily transposed.

exit through the gift-shop

Apparently chuffed from his recent claimed mandate after a referendum passed by a slim margin investing the office of president with executive powers, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has directed the Turkish Ministry of Culture to erect a museum dedicated to the victims of the failed coup d'état of last summer.
Some three hundred people died but it is unclear if those deaths were at the hands of insurrectionists or whether the other victims, the hundreds of thousands of civil servants, educators, artists and journalists that were purged, aren’t also deserving of memorial—and not just damnatio memoriæ. The Museum of 15 July: Martyrs and Democracy as it is to be known will have besides its permanent exhibits a library, café and gift-shop.

(s)alt çoğunluk

Whilst the sentiments of Turkish citizens voting abroad from embassies in Germany and Austria were solidly in favour of constitutional reforms that would give the country’s executive broader, consolidated powers more in line with those of the president of the United States, there was no clear majority among domestic polling stations.
Though the election commissioner is expected to release in ten days, the party of Erdoğan is already claiming victory with a bare fifty-one to forty-eight percent majority in the contested referendum. The opposition party is to launch an investigation over voting irregularities. With campaign pledges certain to derail any hope of Turkey’s pending membership in the European Union, it would seem that the expatriate community would not vote against their own self-interests but with relatives and in some cases whole families left back in Turkey, I suppose these voters are also among those that could be easily intimidated, just enough to nudge the outcome.

5x5

ærodrome: Kottke wonders if the circular aircraft runway might ever take off

no mister bond, i expect you to die: movie villain dermatological trends

my beautiful launderette: the Pope opens a free laundromat for the poor and homeless of Rome with plans for expansion

nakkaşhane: scenes from cult films depicted in Ottoman miniature style by Murat Palta, whom we’ve admired previously

bring a whistle to a knife fight and pretend you’re the referee: Texas is tendering legislation to name an official state gun—with the Bowie knife being a top-contender, via Weird Universe 

trial balloon, probefahrt

Although allowing a foreign government to play in Peoria to its diaspora (many of whom left their homeland for fear of political reprisal) would be without precedent, the refusal of Germany and Austria to permit the regime of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to campaign at venues in those respective countries with sizable Turkish populations has garnered much angry and caused further tensions between the outlier and EU member states.
In mid-April Turkey plans to hold a referendum not on EU membership but rather on changing the country’s constitution to invest the office of the president with greater executive powers, more akin to those of the president of France or the US rather than the largely ceremonial, soft-power that Erdoğan enjoys now. With rallies in Turkish communities, the administration is hoping to persuade (or perhaps intimidate) the expatriate population to vote to strengthen the presidency—while many outside Turkish jurisdiction probably harbour the exact opposite sentiments. While in Austria the denying of a platform is coming from the government directly, the federal government of Germany, who has seen continual strained relations for some time now, insists it’s played no part and local venues are wholly cancelling engagements at their own volition without the government’s influence. As stated, it would be highly irregular to allow a foreign politician a pulpit from which to bully exiles in a power-grab—Obama passing the mantle of leadership of the free world to Merkel is something quite different, though these are quite irregular times—but perhaps this refusal is a sign that other institutions will stand up to America’s Minitrue and Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda when he and his minions try to through European elections.

7x7

bowie.net: prescient 1999 BBC News Night interview with David Bowie regarding the emergent world wide web

urban league: a primer on why cities grew where they did

track 61: an intrepid team of urban spelunkers explore FDR’s custom train car underneath Grand Central Station, via the always marvellous Nag on the Lake

hic sunt leones: the Phantom Atlas chronicles how we filled in the gaps of our geographic knowledge with centuries of fictitious locations

time and tide: beach installation of mirrored poles captures the reflected sunrise and sunset

shyriiwook: woman goes into labour wearing a Chewbacca mask

curds and whey: a dairy factory in the western Turkish province of Afyonkarahisar boasts a circular viewing gallery around its central courtyard that offers visitors a demonstration of cheese-making

now it's turkish delight on a moonlit night

A new collaboration by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s civil engineering faculty creates a privileged platform for witnessing the development of Istanbul and several junctures of its modern and urbane history as one of the world’s mega-cities. Through the lens of history and with geopolitical superposition, one can trace the evolution of the metropolis from 1850 onwards. Surely all communities are just as much representative as the heirs and drivers or change and deserve a show-case of their sprawl and re-zoning for their own re-inventing, only hopefully without too much directed or ordained.

bir varmış, bir yokmuş

Following in the tradition of the Brothers Grimm of the previous generation (but whose legacy was still being unfolded), Hungarian linguist and ethnographer Ignácz Kúnos travelled around Ottoman Turkey collecting folklore, and in 1913 published a brilliantly illustrated by Willy Pogany edition of forty-four Turkish fairy tales.
Though in presentation, the collection may strike Western readers as something more in the tradition of 1001 Arabian Nights, the stories are cognates of the archetypal ones that the occident monomyth is heir to. The title above is the beginning of the Turkish preamble to all fairy stories, the equivalent to Once Upon a Time (Es war einmal…) and like Kúnos’ own Hungarian Egyszer volt, hol nem volt, volt egyszer egy... means once there was where there wasn’t, there was a, a form of introduction that was playfully duplicitous. Visit Public Domain Review to read the book in its entirety and to discover more forgotten literary gems.

rapprochement

Over pledges to endorse the return of capital punishment within its borders and fully drain the swamp after staged coup attempt of the summer, Turkey is vocally protesting EU misgivings about the prospect of every joining the economic bloc over its poor human rights record and the way things are tending that run counter to the principles that Brussels tries to uphold—threatening to throw open its frontiers and no longer impede transit of refugees on to EU territories.
The Turkish government, furthermore, is not pleased with the slow manner in which the EU is disbursing the three billion euro aid package agreed upon in exchange for Turkey’s care-taking and triaging of the refugees. Detecting the potential for corruption, the EU has been judicious in remitting these alimony payments, issuing them in small instalments and directly funding projects rather than paying Turkey to manage it. As uncivil and incredulous as this is and people are being used as pawns in the purge and in the surge, it was as precocious to believe that Turkey would live up to its end of the bargain as it was for Turkey to believe that it could ever really ingratiate itself and be given membership. “Throwing open the floodgates” sounds ominous but I don’t think that Turkey was doing a very good job controlling its borders in the first place—and probably more walls will follow in response. Perhaps with everything else going on in the world, those B-List whingers and their demands, fulminations will be dismissed as merely obnoxious and not to be engaged with diplomacy or plied with politics.

inherit the wind or john henry was a steel-driving man

Though polls placing the United States between Latvia and Turkey when it came to tolerance for the concept of evolution and natural selection—simple scientific curiosity with or without decrying that it’s only a theory, were sampled well before the farce of democracy that was the US election, I am sure that the vice-president elect inserting his sanctimonious nose into the halls of academia and reaffirming his beliefs (unbidden by the scientific community) only goes to reinforce the incuriousness of his constituency, secure in having their foundations unrattled.
This does not bode well for the state of American education, nor for those institutions that drive progress, no matter how support might be spun to curry favour with certain parts of the industry. One’s rose-tinted convictions have little to do with mastery of the extant, rentier economy—that of branding, trademarks and profits gleaned off the friction of moving assets around, and these models are easily given over to machines that would indubitably conspire to out-perform humans. I wonder how it feels to encourage and reach out to those with the world view that is in danger of becoming redundant. I’m wagering that when manufacturing returns to America, it won’t be with the attendant jobs as expected but rather with more automation. Artificial intelligence will surely be innovative as well in ways we cannot imagine or possibly understand (and robots are not surrogates for gods and angels) but I do not think we could factor in at all unless scientifically literate.  Not only might business-driven science be more reckless with trying the untested, public health and environmental degradation globally will pass the tipping point and become unsalvageable as we’ve known it. It’s going to be a long, painful regime, with the swapping of titles, à la russe to skirt or trounce term limits. Even though entering his fifth term Trump will be in his nineties, he be as spry as ever, having regenerated and taken a donor body.

rendition

When the German government failed to respond to the extradition demands of Turkey to turn over some four thousand suspected dissenters and dissidents who were party to the failed coup attempt thought to reside in Germany, the Turkish government accused Germany of harbouring terrorist elements, which will boomerang back and destroy Germany. The tense exchange comes right after a series of purges and censorship of the press. It is unclear which persons of interest Turkey is hoping to be offered up or whether radicals are of the established variety (Berlin said to antagonise Ankara over its tolerance for the Kurdish minority) or if they recently fled the country. There was not a rush of political asylum-seekers but many lawyers who suddenly found themselves on the wrong side of the coup did seek sanctuary in Germany.

autobots, roll!

An Ankara-based research and development firm has created a range of prototype and fully operational Transformer vehicles. These BMW cars can be driven just like any car but also can take a robotic form and is fully articulated. Maybe these warriors are not quite ready for a pitched-battle but the team behind these custom Decepticons are working fervently to add more features.

curveball

Although it was known for years that agents and informants were keeping their country’s diaspora under surveillance to uncover any expatriates who might be harbouring critical views of the ruling regime, it seems no one really appreciated the scope and the reach of this network in Germany (which rivalled the Stasi of East Germany) and other European countries with significant Turkish populations until the failed coup.  In fact Ankara’s MİT (Millî İstihbarat Teşkilatı) had formerly worked closely with counterpart intelligence services in host nations to thwart potential terrorism and smuggling operations (of all sorts), but in the aftermath of the failed coup, spies have been drawn closer to the regime and deployed to menace and intimidate (reminding the exiled that they still have family in the homeland can force anyone to be silent or even rally in the regime’s support) those that probably left the country in the first place over political reasons.
Now, instead of having faith in the intelligence of their partners, the BND and others fear that any information they act on might have been presented to them in order to incriminate individuals (sort of the reserve false testimony of the informant known as Curveball, a dissident who feed the war hawks the salacious details it wanted to hear) who don’t share the Turkish government’s vision of how national and religious identities are to be portrayed and exercised.