*America’s Forever Wars | The Last Man | Emperor Erdogan

“When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes.” – Erasmus

“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” – Ibid.

“The main hope of a nation lies in the proper education of its youth” – Ibid.

Erdogan Unable to Bring the Turkey Home: Turkey is sliding inexorably into financial crisis. It’s currency, the lira, has lost 20% of its value this year, inflating prices for households and businesses alike. But President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, dominating national life for 15 years is forging ahead with his sparkling new $12 billion airport project. It will take ten years to complete and will be as big as Manhattan, dwarfing all airport rivals on the planet, allegedly. Erdogan has bestowed heaps of public money, amassed mostly from unrestrained borrowing, on friends’ construction companies. He’s also guaranteed them against any financial losses.

Emperor Erdogan: Turkey is definitely not a democracy, or even a parliamentary representative democratic republic now — it’s an autocracy. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was already in power for 15 years. Now he’s gotten himself elected for life, and he’s instituted new changes that cement his place next to Vladimir Putin of Russia and Viktor Orban of Hungary. He’s issued voluminous decrees that consolidate his power. The changes will cause months of administrative upheaval as agencies are abolished and government employees reassigned.

Erdogan has eliminated the prime minister’s office and appointed his son-in-law minister of the newly combined Treasury and Finance Ministry. He can now dismiss Parliament and call new elections at will; he can appoint the head of the National Intelligence Agency, the Religious Affairs Directorate, as well as ambassadors, governors and university rectors. All presidential appointments will now be made with no confirmation process.

As a columnist for the secular opposition newspaper Cumhurive said: “The state is being reorganized around Tayyip Erdogan…. U.S. President Trump can appoint a replacement to a vacant seat in the Supreme Court, but he does not appoint a police chief in Massachusetts or a public theater director in Boston.”

– Apparently Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte can kill thousands of his people and still the populace will support him. And apparently he can criticize the pope and the Catholic Church in this highly religious country and still be popular. He just can’t call God “stupid”, and condemn him for making Adam and Eve sin, without re-energizing the Church and causing his approval ratings to hit their lowest level since he was elected in 2016. (WaPo)

– The Trump administration has undergone a recent strategy shift in how it intends to deal with America’s longest-running war — the one in Afghanistan. Top US diplomats are to seek direct talks with the Taliban, rather than insisting the Afghan government be involved. The new plan hopes to jump-start negotiations in an effort to bring an end to the 17-year war. The previous “Afghan-led, Afghan-owned” process has not proved to be successful. (NYT)

– Ten years ago it looked like the US had discovered how to defeat insurgencies overseas –with a “surge” of more military personnel to provide services and security that win cooperation from civilians and defecting militants. Unfortunately, the model that worked in Iraq–tried again in 2009-2011 in Afghanistan—didn’t work there. US policy has now shifted from this “population-centric” counterinsurgency to a new kind of small war strategy called “violence management”. This strategy “relies on light ground forces, airpower and loose partnerships with local armed actors. Its aim is to degrade and disrupt militant organizations within a chaotic, fractured political landscape, not to commit large numbers of forces and resources to building robust new governments.” (WaPo)

– Footage of an uncontacted indigenous man who has lived in the Amazons for at least twenty years has recently been released. Reportedly the sole survivor of an isolated tribe, the man seems to be in good health, and officials believe he survives by hunting small forest animals and maintaining plantations of papaya and corn. A symbol of hope for the survival instincts of man, there are supposedly many tribes throughout the Brazilian Amazon, some confirmed, others still completely isolated. (Guardian)

– Israel’s parliament has passed a new law characterizing the country as a Jewish state, which has incited anger from the Arab minority. The law puts Hebrew as the nation’s official language, which many see as an alienation of the large Arab minority. (BBC)

– The American people have no idea what President Trump and Russian President Putin talked about at their secret two hour meeting Monday, and already Trump is looking forward to a second get-together. (WaPo)

– When Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, the people were happy to show their support by giving President Putin an 80% approval rating. And they continued to show support by recently voting him into another six year term as President. But when the government began to move forward with a plan to increase the age at which seniors can start collecting their state pensions, unhappiness immediately broke out in the form of country-wide protests and a significant drop in Putin’s approval rating. It seems the Russian people don’t punish their leaders for failing to make their lives better, but they draw the line at making their lives worse. (WaPo)

– “America’s love for SUVs is killing pedestrians, and federal safety regulators have known for years.” (Detroit Free Press)

– “The endless reign of Rupert Murdoch: After decades of influence, the media mogul isn’t so much a person as an epoch.” (The Monthly)

– “The staggering rise of India’s super-rich” where India’s super-rich “collective worth amounted to $440bn – more than in any other country, bar the US and China. By contrast, the average person in India earns barely $1,700 a year. Given its early stage of economic development, India’s new hyper-wealthy elite have accumulated more money, more quickly, than their plutocratic peers in almost any country in history.” (Guardian)

– Burberry, one of Britain’s upmarket fashion labels, has admitted to burning and destroying unsold products worth upwards of ninety million sterling pounds (around $117 million USD) worth of goods over the past five years. Many upscale, brand name companies have reported doing the same to avoid having goods stolen or sold at lower prices. (BBC)

– Imagine this paradise: getting paid five days’ worth of work but only a four-day workweek. That’s it…plain and simple, yet very effective according to a trial run by a New Zealand company. After testing the four-day week, seventy-eight percent of workers reported feeling a better work-life balance, an increase of twenty-four percent. Work less, work better. But a four-day week is still a lot more than the purported “4-Hour Workweek.” (Guardian)

– Stockholm’s annual International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence saw some of the greatest scientific minds in the world signing a treaty outlawing lethal autonomous weapons. If you were looking forward to a Terminator-eque dystopian/apocalyptic future, sorry for the bad news. Some of the big names who signed the treaty include eccentric billionaire Elon Musk and Google’s DeepMind co-founders. (NPR)

– A new NPR-Ipsos poll has shown that views on political issues such as immigration are not only decided depending on your political party, but more so on where you get yours news. Some questions found that viewers of Fox or CNN have vastly conflicting views – a rift greater than that between Democrats and Republicans. (NPR)

– Britain has been in a state of pseudo-chaos following the 2016 referendum which began “Brexit,” and many are quick to blame the politicians and frontrunners of the campaign… however, what of the journalists? The British Broadcasting Corporation is the biggest name in almost all of news and reporting – “news isn’t news here until it is covered by the BBC.” However their coverage (or lack thereof) of the Brexit plan may have been one of the largest reasons that Britain is struggling to maintain a stable economy while President Trump and President Putin seek to destabilize the rest of Europe. An analysis on “How the BBC Lost the Plot on Brexit.” (New York Review of Books)

– New reports on the Russian information attacks have revealed that they used America’s trust in local news as a powerful tool. Infiltrating local news outlets and social media accounts alike, their attempts to influence and change the results of the 2016 presidential election are greater than we once thought. News stations were set up and it seems that the Russians had been plotting for years in advance rather than it being a spur-of-the-moment assault. (NPR)

– As the years roll by, it seems that words off the printed press are dropping in number. With less and less local news available, people have found themselves less politically involved, and some cities have even exploited the lack of citizen outreach and education by raising taxes for city projects, unbeknownst to its citizens. With less information for the public, governments could pass laws without the input or opinion of their local constituents for years to come. (BBC)

LAST MORSELS

“The summit of happiness is reached when a person is ready to be what he is.” – Erasmus

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