Turkeys

Veronica Kalas:

I have been asked to write a report for the International Center of Medieval Art newsletter concerning recent events in Turkey whereby Byzantine churches that long have held the status of state museums and cultural heritage sites are being converted into mosques. It is crucial to raise awareness about this very critical issue. The examples include the church of the Hagia Sophia in Iznik (Nicea), the church of the Hagia Sophia in Trabzon (Trebizond), and the plans for the church and associated monastic complex of St. John Stoudios in Istanbul (Constantinople). Although these events have been ongoing for quite some time, the world started watching more closely in recent months when certain representatives of the Turkish government publicly called for the conversion of THE Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. For every example, the original Byzantine church building testifies to the vast contribution of Byzantine culture and civilization to the history of medieval art and architecture and world architecture more broadly. These churches were converted into mosques under Ottoman rule and subsequently into museums under the Turkish Republic.

Slavoj Žižek:

In his early writings, Marx described the German situation as one in which the only answer to particular problems was the universal solution: global revolution. This is a succinct expression of the difference between a reformist and a revolutionary period: in a reformist period, global revolution remains a dream which, if it does anything, merely lends weight to attempts to change things locally; in a revolutionary period, it becomes clear that nothing will improve without radical global change. In this purely formal sense, 1990 was a revolutionary year: it was plain that partial reforms of the Communist states would not do the job and that a total break was needed to resolve even such everyday problems as making sure there was enough for people to eat.

Where do we stand today with respect to this difference? Are the problems and protests of the last few years signs of an approaching global crisis, or are they just minor obstacles that can be dealt with by means of local interventions? The most remarkable thing about the eruptions is that they are taking place not only, or even primarily, at the weak points in the system, but in places which were until now perceived as success stories. We know why people are protesting in Greece or Spain; but why is there trouble in such prosperous or fast-developing countries as Turkey, Sweden or Brazil? With hindsight, we might see the Khomeini revolution of 1979 as the original ‘trouble in paradise’, given that it happened in a country that was on the fast-track of pro-Western modernisation, and the West’s staunchest ally in the region. Maybe there is something wrong with our notion of paradise.

Tap or click on the image to view the panoramic scene. Then pan in any direction.

Wikipedia:

Kayaköy (Greek: ???????, Levissi or Greek: ???????????, Karmylissos, although modern English usage seems to be Karmylassos) is a village 8 km south of Fethiye in southwestern Turkey where Anatolian Greek speaking Christians lived until approximately 1923. The ghost town, now preserved as a museum village, consists of hundreds of rundown but still mostly intact Greek-style houses and churches which cover a small mountainside and serve as a stopping place for tourists visiting Fethiye and nearby Ölüdeniz.

It was built on the site of the ancient city of Carmylessus in the 18th century. It experienced a renewal after nearby Fethiye (known as Makri) was devastated by an earthquake in 1856 and a major fire in 1885. After the Greco-Turkish War, Kayaköy was largely abandoned after a population exchange agreement was signed by the Turkish and Greek governments in 1923. Many of the buildings were damaged in the 1957 Fethiye earthquake.

Climategate emails show that erasure of the prior warmth was coordinated by #ClimateScam professionals in several countries.

Except in practice, judging from the report of founder after founder, what this often turns out to mean is: hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground.

Under Kamala’s plan, if you have an asset that the government says has appreciated by $1 million in value, you’ll owe $250,000 in taxes – even if you don’t want to sell it, and even if you can’t sell it.

In the world of cloud computing, the costs can quickly add up, especially when using serverless architectures. However, with a little effort, you can set up a virtual machine (VM) on Hetzner for just $4 a month, allowing you to bypass the “serverless tax.” and have full control over your server. In this tutorial, we’ll walk through setting up a VM on Hetzner, installing Caddy for SSL, configuring Cloudflare for DNS, and deploying a web app using Github.

But E Ink displays also have slow screen refresh rates, limited support for color (on models that support any color at all), and generally aren’t very useful for high-motion graphics like videos or games. So while there are a handful of companies producing E Ink smartphones and tablets, they tend to be niche devices. And now we’re seeing a growing number of companies offering products with reflective LCD displays or similar technology that offer some of the paper-like qualities of E Ink, but which are more suitable for animation and video.

Ever since Milwaukee spent $60 million to build a high-tech pitching lab at their Arizona spring training facility, the Brewers have struck out more batters than any team but Houston and rank fifth in the majors in ERA (3.85).

You can feel how uncomfortable Reid Hoffman is here as he fidgets in his chair, punctuating his word salad response with “uh, um, uh.” He’s struggling hard to answer whether Democratic voters are okay with not having a say in their nominee. But let’s be fair—that question is unanswerable without a free, fair, and open primary where millions of voters actually get to make their voices heard. One guy’s opinion on how voters feel? Irrelevant.

The Justice Department alleges the giant health insurer cheated Medicare out of more than $2 billion by reviewing patients’ records to find additional diagnoses, adding revenue while ignoring overcharges that might reduce bills. The company “buried its head in the sand and did nothing but keep the money,” DOJ said in a court filing.

Richard Qian didn’t know what to expect when he heard that WM Motor, a Shanghai-based EV maker popular for its low prices, filed for bankruptcy in October 2023. He tried to drive his compact EX5 SUV as he normally would, but discovered that he could no longer log into WM Motor’s smartphone app, which remotely controlled the car lock and air conditioner. He also couldn’t see his car’s mileage and charging status on the dashboard. 

Epic is known for their fun/quirky software names (Radiant/Beaker/Cupid/Beans/ etc). Looking through things, I noticed a few names on the Epic trademarks page (epic.com/epic/page/trad…) that I didn’t recognize. Anyone know what they are?

I think it’s clearer to call it “early scaling” rather than rate of scaling (fast scaling). Fast scaling isn’t the issue, when you scale is.

The growth engine needs to be in that efficiency range where we’re. actually not losing money to acquire customers,” Ellis says.

This subtle difference in the ordering of legal enforcement is the major cause of the stagnation of aircraft design and manufacturing.

Mr Ceviker is helping revive Turkey’s viticulture. Though wine has been produced in Anatolia for millennia, the country’s modern vineyards and wineries produce mostly French varieties imported in the past century. But Mr Ceviker works with old vines that have survived for far longer, many abandoned when the Greeks and Armenians, vintners of the Ottoman empire, were forced out. Many of the Muslim farmers who took over now sell their produce for dried fruit or pekmez, an unfermented grape syrup, rather than alcohol. Mr Ceviker has persuaded some to sell their grapes to him at higher prices and has bought several vineyards outright. He takes his crop to different micro-wineries using traditional methods. “With each vintage, we experiment,” he says.

The Supreme Court’s ruling made clear that not only are Presidents immune from prosecution for many official acts, but such acts cannot be used as evidence at trial. This requires extensive pretrial proceedings to ensure official acts are not admitted into evidence.

How the heck did Dane County let this guy walk? And at any other time in US history, he’s deported.

Citizen DJ is officially open to the public and all sounds on this website are completely free-to-use for your remixing needs. Read a behind-the-scenes retrospective post on this experimental project and residency.

Before modern air travel and first-class suites, the grandest thing in luxury air travel was the German Zeppelin airship. The Hindenburg was designed to ferry passengers across the Atlantic in serenity, with the dirigible floating smoothly through the clouds. The airship was considered the longest class of flying machine and the largest airship by envelope volume.

Open Terms Archive publicly records every version of the terms of digital services to enable democratic oversight.

Over the past five decades, the venture capital industry has become a notable force in fueling the start-up, growth, and impact of many innovative tech companies that have changed the world. Though the majority of startups do not receive funding from venture capitalists, in Silicon Valley they have invested in and helped launch and grow companies like Intel, Apple, Google and Uber, profoundly changing how billions of people live, work, and play.

Electricity maps.

Fourteen major American cities are part of a globalist climate organization known as the “C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group,” which has an “ambitious target” by the year 2030 of “0 kg [of] meat consumption,” “0 kg [of] dairy consumption,” “3 new clothing items per person per year,” “0 private vehicles” owned, and “1 short-haul return flight (less than 1500 km) every 3 years per person.” C40’s dystopian goals can be found in its “The Future of Urban Consumption in a 1.5°C World” report, which was published in 2019 and reportedly reemphasized in 2023. The organization is headed and largely funded by Democrat billionaire Michael Bloomberg. Nearly 100 cities across the world make up the organization, and its American members include Austin, Boston, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New Orleans, New York City, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Seattle.

George Bush was mauled for merely flying over New Orleans as citizens drowned during Katrina.

Ted Cruz was mocked in a week-long news cycle for leaving Texas during its electricity crisis.

Not only hasn't Biden visited Maui, but twice vacationed and has barely spoken on it. https://t.co/t3BJ0DhKUe

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) August 21, 2023

By my count, there are currently 8,291 different vehicle license plates offered by the 50 states and the District of Columbia. States now offer a vast menu of personalized plate options for a dizzying array of organizations, professions, sports teams, causes and other groups.

The problem—whether or not you accept the premise that climate change threatens civilization—is that carbon-removal technologies are ineffective, and solar and wind power are nowhere near able to replace fossil fuel-based energy. The only way to achieve net-zero is by dramatically reducing carbon emissions, which would punish the American economy and destroy the capacity to develop technologies that might reduce the need for fossil fuels. “Think about the year 1970,” Mr. Huntsman says. “That’s the year we hit a trillion-dollar GDP, and the year Jimmy Page and Robert Plant wrote that great song ‘Stairway to Heaven.’ A great year, right? Well today we’re emitting roughly 6,500 million metric tons of CO2. Same thing we were emitting in 1970. And look how much more electricity we’re using, and look how many more transportation and miles we’re driving. We’ve expanded the economy 30 times over, nearly, and core CO2 has stayed flat. We should be celebrating this achievement, shouldn’t we?”

Four weeks ago, I was feeling guilty for spending so much time inside playing Tears of the Kingdom, so I took it on myself to plan something for the National Day long weekend. That something turned out to be a hike from the westernmost point to the easternmost point in Luxembourg.

Archaeologists affiliated with the University of Chicago discovered the tablets in the 1930s while excavating in Persepolis, the ceremonial capital of the Persian Empire. However, the institute has resumed work in collaboration with colleagues in Iran, and the return of the tablets is part of a broadening of contacts between scholars in the two countries, said Gil Stein, director of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago.

Garg has personally guaranteed any losses the Japanese conglomerate may suffer if it chooses to sell the debt. Meeting the terms of the guarantee could force Garg to sell his Better shares and drive down the stock price, a filing warned.

I have been on the boat – submarines are always called boats, never ships – for less than 24 hours and am writing this log at a depth of 60m. Sorry, I spoke too soon. We are just rising to periscope depth – 18m below the surface – and the tall desk on which I am typing has started to list. At least I’m not in the toilet. I joined HMS Triumph in Crete for the final week of its 10-month deployment. I had never been on a submarine before and don’t especially like confined spaces. I plan to get off at Gibraltar six days from now, though the captain warns me this may not be possible if there is fog as the launch can’t come alongside.

The origins of baklava date back to ancient times. Around the eighth century B.C.E., people in the Assyrian Empire, which spread across parts of modern-day Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Syria and Turkey, arranged unleavened flatbreads in layers, with chopped nuts in between, to be enjoyed during special events. Centuries later, the Ancient Greek and Roman “placenta cake” (the Latin placenta coming from the Greek word plakous, or “cheese cake,” not the unsavory afterbirth) was a dish consisting of many layers of dough, filled with cheese and honey and flavored with bay leaves. However, the earliest versions of baklava as we know it today came around 500 years ago, during the Ottoman Empire.

It turns out that one simple message to the large and diverse Sun community is actually quite hard to craft. Even for a big mouth who is always ready with a clever quip. The community includes our resellers and customers, our current and former employees, their friends and families who supported our employees on their mission to change the industry, our investors, our supply and service partners, students and educators, and even our competitors with whom we often collaborated.

I made a 800 square feet garden in San Francisco’s Mission District. Planning started in 2015 and we finally planted in January 2017. The process involved tearing up concrete, pouring a new sidewalk, hauling in clean soil, and patiently waiting for the wet season to plant.

Tiago thinks notes should be organized by actionability, and that each note should go in one and only one place in the following categories: Projects, Areas, Resources, Archives. Conor thinks that notes should go everywhere, and that there’s no single top-down structure that can encapsulate all note-taking.

In the first interview since his appointment to Aria, Gur told the Financial Times that much of the agency’s success or failure would depend on its eight newly appointed programme directors who will select and fund projects. They will each have a budget of about £50mn. Aria expects to unveil the identities of the directors next month and Gur said: “They are empowered to take bold, not safe bets. We have an opportunity here to create something that could have a world-changing impact for future generations.”

What is this book about? Why is it not very good? Acemoglu and Robinson (AR) argue that countries are rich or poor because of their political institutions, not culture, geography or policy ignorance. I’ll do this as much as possible in AR’s own words. Why Nations Fail was written during the Arab Spring, so the preface begins with Egypt.

All of these people, who spent decades sending the youth of America off to foreign lands to die for ‘democracy,’ when faced with the choice to defend it with their persons, tucked tail and ran. Bear in mind, these were the stakes they themselves outlined in subsequent accounts; Trump was trying to destroy the American government; he was trying to overturn the Constitution. Fair enough, but what did they do when faced with that threat? By their own admission they didn’t know if the country would survive Orange Hitler’s assault and they couldn’t know police would shortly restore order. According to them, they faced the greatest threat a country could face . . . and they ran away. They hid under their desks and the world watched them do it. The hero of the republic was an incompetent diversity hire cop who shot an unarmed woman in the neck. That’s it. There was no insurrection. No one was armed and no one tried to take over. That accusation is idiotic. No less pathetic than the MAGAgeddon, however, was the response, to simultaneously call it the worst attack on America since Pearl Harbor and to flee in terror from their posts. Our nation faces a mortal threat and the people charged with meeting it are moral and physical cowards. Trump’s normiecon followers, people who send money to Hannity but wonder if that Matt Walsh is a little extreme, shuffled diabetically into the seat of power and walked off with trophies like Alaric in the Forum. They pushed, and the shell cracked.

The inspector of Abu Ghraib. I first learned of the tortures and other abuses that took place at Abu Ghraib late in 2003 while interviewing an ousted senior officer of the Iraqi air force. He took a dangerous seven-hour taxi ride from Baghdad to Damascus, where we met in an out-of-the-way hotel for three days. He wanted a way out of Iraq for his wife and two children, and I passed his name and contact information to various officials in Washington. One evening he brought up Abu Ghraib, about which I knew nothing, and told me that the US military, desperate to learn about the opposition in Iraq, had taken to seizing mothers and their children and jailing them there. The women were sending messages asking family members in Baghdad to come and kill them because they had been sexually abused by their American guards and interrogators.