Using Shakespeare to Demonstrate Quantum Superposition

This is both simultaneously a cat and a ham.

Could a physicist please tell me when the wave function collapses here?  

Meanwhile in Turkey

Facing the most serious electoral challenge in years, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has initiated a crackdown on his political opponents.

Turkish police have detained Istanbul’s mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, the main political challenger to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, in an intensifying crackdown against the opposition to the country’s longtime ruler.

State media said İmamoğlu’s detention on Wednesday was part of an investigation into alleged terrorism links, but the opposition described the move as a “coup attempt” and the arrest sent the nation’s markets tumbling.

The opposition Republican People’s party (CHP) had been set to name İmamoğlu, one of the country’s most popular political figures, as its presidential candidate on Sunday ahead of elections due by 2028.

The detention comes a day after the state Istanbul University cancelled İmamoğlu’s higher education degree, which would disqualify him from entering the presidential race if not overturned on appeal.

The state-run Anadolu news agency said the probe into İmamoğlu was linked to possible support from a pro-Kurdish political group for his 2024 mayoral re-election campaign.

Yeah, sure.

………

In recent months, his government has embarked on a crackdown targeting politicians from left and right, journalists, academics — even an astrologer who strayed into election predictions — with hundreds of people arrested as the president’s rivals have been hobbled.

………

In local elections last year, the party suffered its worst defeat since its creation more than 20 years ago. İmamoğlu secured re-election in Erdoğan’s old stronghold of Istanbul by a margin of more than 11 per cent.

This is an incredibly transparent attempt by Erdoğan to kneecap his opposition before the upcoming elections.

And Then There is SERIOUSLY Old School

Such as refining the recipe for an 8,600 year old loaf of bread.

Turkish chef Ulaş Tekerkaya has done so, and it's pretty good according to reports:

In Konya, central Türkiye, inspired by the "8,600-year-old bread" found in the Neolithic settlement of Çatalhöyük, where the grains were identified through scientific analysis, chef Ulaş Tekerkaya baked bread made from peas, barley, wheat and faba beans.

In the excavation conducted two years ago at Çatalhöyük, located in the Çumra district, a charred spongy find was analyzed at Necmettin Erbakan University's Science and Technology Research and Application Center (BITAM). The analysis revealed that this find, dating back to approximately 6,600 years before Christ, was "leavened bread."

After this exciting discovery, both in Türkiye and internationally, chef Ulaş Tekerkaya, who was curious about the taste of the "8,600-year-old bread," wanted to bring it back to life today.

Previously, Tekerkaya, with the support of the excavation team and academics from Necmettin Erbakan University, published a work titled "Neolithic Age: 9,000-Year-Old Culinary Culture," where he collected the majority of the grains from the region to recreate the bread.

………

According to the analysis published by the excavation team in the "Çatalhöyük Area 66 Neolithic Period Bread Findings Analysis and Evaluation," Tekerkaya worked to produce the bread containing various grains. He conducted numerous trials to recreate the form of bread from 9,000 years ago.

Using a volcanic grinding stone called a hand mill to grind the grains, Tekerkaya baked the dough (dough balls) over a wood fire at the Meram City and Culture Museum.

In an interview with Anadolu Agency (AA), Tekerkaya stated that his work on Çatalhöyük's cuisine had earned a global award in gastronomy. Reflecting on the preparation of a menu aimed at bringing the region's 9,000-year-old culinary culture to life, Tekerkaya said, "After the discovery of the bread, I was excited to make it. After about a year of trials, the bread's final form is like this. Initially, it was too hard and had a bitter taste, but after many trials, I adjusted the recipe and baked a tasty product. It's very delicious and filling."

 I so want this recipe.

Good News Out of Turkey

Erdoğan lost big in local elections.

My guess is that the Turkish people are getting sick and tired of incompetence, corruption, and Erdoğan's increasingly autocratic rule:

Turkey's main opposition party retained its control over key cities and made huge gains elsewhere in local elections on Sunday, March 31, preliminary results showed, in a major upset to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who had set his sights on retaking control of these urban areas.

With more than 90% of ballot boxes counted, incumbent Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, of the Republican People's Party, or CHP, was leading by a wide margin in Turkey's largest city and economic hub, according to the state-run Anadolu Agency. The city topped the list of targets for Erdogan's ruling AKP after losing it to Imamoglu in 2019.

Mansur Yavas, the mayor of the capital, Ankara, retained his seat with a stunning 25-point difference over his challenger, the results indicated. "The elections are over, we will continue to serve Ankara," Yavas said.

In all, the CHP won the municipalities of 36 of Turkey's 81 provinces, according to Anadolu, making inroads into many strongholds of Erdogan's party. It gained 37% of the votes nationwide, compared to 36% for the president's party, marking the CHP's greatest electoral victory since Erdogan came to power two decades ago.

………

AKP supporters opted to stay away from the ballot stations or voted for other parties, [Turkish think tank chief Sinan] Ulgen said. "Turnout was relatively low compared to past elections," he said. "There were cross-party shifts in the vote, which did not happen in the national elections because of stronger ideological attachments. This time around the economy prevailed over identity."

To quote political analyst, and walking penis, James Carville, "It's the economy, stupid."

More significantly, the wins in local elections are significant because this means that the opposition will continue to control a large number of patronage jobs, and this translates into political power.  (It's how Erdoğan leveraged his post as mayor of Istanbul into national political prominence.)

I Attribute This to Diet, Not the Divine

While delivering a fire and brimstone condemnation of Israel on the floor of the Turkish parliament, and after declaring that, "Israel will suffer Allah’s wrath," right wing Turkish MP Hasan Bitmes suffered a heart attack and later died in hospital.

He was 53.

I have a few points to make:

• I don't believe that God smites people like this.
• I am in agreement with Abraham Lincoln, who said, "My concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God's side"
• If God were smiting people for stuff like this, a good quarter of the members of Congress would be pushing up daisies.

I will say that my initial reaction upon hearing this news was significantly more ……… Biblical ……… than what I stated above, but (for once) I decided not to let my initial appraisal of the situation inform what I wrote.

Well, This Sucks

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has defeated Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu in the presidential runoff in Turkey.

There are no indications of any sort of fraud in the collection of ballots, but obviously the paucity of independent domestic media sources in Turkey hamstrung the opposition.

So did the selection of Kılıçdaroğlu, who also went hardcore nationalist during the runoff campaign, and was perceived as a weak and uninspiring candidate in some quarters. 

Finally, and I've not seen coverage of this, I think that anti-American sentiment in Turkey may have provided some of the margin of victory, Erdoğan has been aggressively pursuing a resolutely neutral position with regard to Russia and the United States and Chins.  (You may recall the freakout among the US foreign policy establishment [really the military industrial complex] over the purchase of the Russian S-400 SAM system)

That being said, it was not particularly close, 52.14%  — 47.86%, a 4.18% margin. 

A lot of this comes down to issues between secular Kemalists and Islamists in Turkish society, as well as an urban rural divide, and unlike his predecessors, Erdoğan did actually apply state resources to traditionally backward parts of Turkey.

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has extended his two decades in power, securing victory over his rival Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu after an unprecedented presidential runoff election, in a vote that reflected Turkey’s stark and persistent political polarisation.

With 99.43% of the vote counted, Turkey’s supreme election authority announced late on Sunday that Erdoğan had won 52.14% of the votes, while Kılıçdaroğlu received 47.86%. With a gap of more than 2m votes between candidates, the votes yet to be counted would not change the result, said Ahmet Yener, the head of the election board.

………

While the opposition holds mayorships in Turkey’s six largest cities, Kılıçdaroğlu’s campaign appeared to run aground outside his party’s traditional enclaves on the Aegean coast and in metropolitan centres. In the Turkish provinces where Erdoğan’s rule previously catapulted many into the middle class, voters said they were unconvinced by the opposition’s campaign. 

It appears that the opposition is already blaming the Kurds for their loss.(At least on Twitter, for what it's worth.)

About the only policy suggestion that I have for the United States would be to get the nuclear bombs out of Incirlik, sooner rather than later.

Elections Tonight

It won't get much ink in the United States, because they are in Thailand and Turkey.

The results in Thailand are are pretty clear right now, with the opposition winning decisively, with a new party outpacing the traditional opposition.

This is notable because this party, Move Forward, was not expected to do so well, and it is the only of the Thai body politic that has expressed, even obliquely, a desire to reexamine the role of the Thai monarchy in the running of the country:

Voters in Thailand overwhelmingly sought to end nearly a decade of military rule on Sunday, casting ballots in favor of two opposition parties that have pledged to curtail the power of the country’s powerful conservative institutions: the military and the monarchy.

With 97 percent of the votes counted early Monday morning, the progressive Move Forward Party was neck and neck with the populist Pheu Thai Party. Move Forward had won 151 seats to Pheu Thai’s 141 in the 500-seat House of Representatives.

In most parliamentary systems, the two parties would form a new governing coalition and choose a prime minister. But under the rules of the current Thai system, written by the military after its 2014 coup, the junta will still play kingmaker.

The system is that there is the democratically elected House, and a Senate whose members are appointed by the military numbering 250, and to form a new government, a majority of both the House and Senate must approve, requiring 375 votes, so they will need at least 83 votes from some of the smaller opposition parties.

The current military backed party, the Palang Pracharat, appears to have lost at least half of its seats, though there was also a party that hived off of them, UTN since the last election.

The election had widely been seen as an easy victory for Pheu Thai, the country’s largest opposition party founded by former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. A billionaire tycoon, Mr. Thaksin, 73, was ousted in a coup in 2006 after accusations of corruption, but he is still fondly remembered as a populist champion for the rural poor. Polls had showed that Mr. Thaksin’s youngest daughter, Paetongtarn Shinawatra, 36, was the leading choice for prime minister.

But in a surprise, the Move Forward Party, a progressive political party that called for upending old power structures and amending a law that criminalizes public criticism of the monarchy, made stunning strides, capturing young urban voters, and the capital, Bangkok.

“We can frame this election as a referendum on traditional power centers in Thai politics,” said Napon Jatusripitak, a visiting fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute. “People want change, and not just a change of government, they want structural reform.”

While Move Forward has tempered its rhetoric, it still is calling for a significant curtailment of the powers of the King, which is a very good thing.

I hope that this results in real change, but I expect it to result in another coup.

Meanwhile, in Turkey, it appears that the Turkish Presidential elections are headed toward a runoff.

This is still uncertain, Erdogan is currently less than 1% away from an absolute majority, and there is a lot of mischief that he could create using the levers of power of the Turkish state, either now, or during a runoff election.

I'd like to see Erdogon go, but I'm not optimistic:

Turkey’s presidential election appeared on Sunday to be headed for a runoff after the incumbent, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, failed to win a majority of the vote, a result that left the longtime leader struggling to stave off the toughest political challenge of his career.

The outcome of the vote set the stage for a two-week battle between Mr. Erdogan and Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the opposition leader, to secure victory in a May 28 runoff that may reshape Turkey’s political landscape.

With the unofficial count nearly completed, Mr. Erdogan received 49.4 percent of the vote to Mr. Kilicdaroglu’s 44.8 percent, according to the state-run Anadolu news agency.

But both sides claimed to be ahead.

………

I cannot claim to have my finger on the pulse of Turkish politics, but it seems to me that his reputation as being scrupulously ethical, he is best known for his anti-corruption efforts, probably had a lot to do with the close contest.

If those numbers hold, then it is likely that Erdogon would win the runoff, votes typically come in at 2 or 3 to 1 for the challenger, but Erdogon is very close to the majority now.

I would expect to see attempt to suppress the Kurdish vote in the west of the country by Turkish security forces in the next few weeks, and perhaps some jailing of members of the political opposition.

Hoo Boy!

Secretary of State Anthony Blinken is arguably the most gonzo Secretary of State in a generation, has decided on another bit of hawkish crazy, the US will drop its weapons embargo on Cyprus, and will start selling arms to the the Greek Cypriot government.

While the situation in Cyprus is far from optimal, this is not a welcome development:

Cyprus on Saturday hailed the full lifting of a U.S. arms embargo on the ethnically divided island nation as a milestone reaffirming increasingly tighter bilateral bonds that serve to bolster stability in the turbulent east Mediterranean region.

President Nicos Anastasiades tweeted his gratitude to the chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, New Jersey Democrat Robert Menendez, for helping to lift the embargo.

Turkey, which maintains more than 35,000 troops in the northern third of Cyprus, condemned the decision. Turkey’s Foreign Ministry urged the U.S. to reconsider, warning that the move would harm efforts for a Cyprus peace deal, lead to an arms race on the island and undermine regional stability.

U.S. State Department spokesperson Ned Price said in in a statement that Secretary of State Antony Blinken determined Cyprus met the conditions to allow for “exports, re-exports and transfers of defense articles ... for the fiscal year 2023.”

The U.S. will assess annually whether Cyprus complies with conditions for the embargo lift, including implementing anti-money laundering regulations and denying Russian military vessels access to ports for refueling and servicing.

Cyprus barred Russian warships from using its ports in early March following the invasion of Ukraine.

This is clearly a payback for supporting US sanctions, and it is a black eye for Turkish President Erdoğan, but it greatly increases the possibility of hostilities on the island, which would likely result in the outbreak of hostilities between NATO members Turkey and Greece. 

To quote Tallyrand (actually, he did not originate the phrase), "It is worse than a crime, it is a mistake.

This May Not Be What It Seems

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has expressed opposition to Finland and Sweden joining NATO.

My reaction to this was that this was part of Erdoğan's pissing contest with the US over the Turkish purchase of the Russian S-400 surface to air missile system, which resulted in the cancellation of sales of F35s to Ankara.

It may be more than that.  Sweden has exchanged consular officials with the "Kurdistan Region" in northern Iraq, and as such, they are much closer to a formal recognition of Kurdish independence than any other nation in Europe.

A central tenet of Turkish foreign policy since the founding of modern Turkey, has been the vociferous opposition to Kurdish self-determination and autonomy all Kurds, whether in Turkey, or in neighboring regions.

This may not be an easily resolved issue. 

My guess is that the US response will be to pressure Swedish officials to distance themselves from the government of Iraqi Kurdistan, because screwing the Kurds has been US policy for more than 40 years.

Only 90 Years Late

President Biden has formally declared the Armenian Genocide by Turkey a genocide, the first US President to do so.

The fact that this has taken over 100 years is an mark of shame and cowardice:

President Biden on Saturday recognized the mass killings of Armenians more than a century ago as genocide, signaling a willingness to test an increasingly frayed relationship with Turkey, long a key regional ally and an important partner within NATO.

“Each year on this day, we remember the lives of all those who died in the Ottoman-era Armenian genocide and recommit ourselves to preventing such an atrocity from ever again occurring,” Mr. Biden said in a statement issued on the 106th anniversary of the beginning of a brutal campaign by the former Ottoman Empire that killed 1.5 million people. “And we remember so that we remain ever vigilant against the corrosive influence of hate in all its forms.”

The declaration by Mr. Biden reflected his administration’s commitment to human rights, a pillar of its foreign policy. It is also a break from Mr. Biden’s predecessors, who were reluctant to anger a country of strategic importance and were wary of driving its leadership toward American adversaries like Russia or Iran.

………

But in a call on Friday, Mr. Biden told Mr. Erdogan directly that he would be declaring the massacre an act of genocide, according to a person familiar with the discussion who spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose details of the conversation.

As to the feelings of the Turks in general, and of Erdogan in particular, those delicate snowflakes can go f%$# themselves.

Their ancestors committed genocide, and have denied it for a century, and there needs to be an accounting for that.

Today in Evil, Facebook Edition

This time, it's not Zuck, it's Sheryl Sandburg, who shut down people that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan did not like. 

What's more, it is clear from the internal communications, they did so despite Facebook's publicly stated affection for freedom of speech, because it was more profitable to side with despots.

No big surprise. 

Also not a surprise, Facebook structured it to make it look like a network error, so as few people as possible would know.

Turkey Launches Offensive to Protect al Qaeda

Turkey has initiated major military operations (an invasion) of Idlib province in Syria.

Turkey has a number of justifications, including concerns about an additional influx of refugees, but any any realistic assessment would strongly suggest that this is about installing client mini-states along the Turkish border as a part of Erdogan's desire for greater sway in the area, along with his desire to enforce Sunni hegemony in Syria.

It should be noted that the rebels are al Nusra/al Qaeda in the Levant/Jabhat Fatah al-Sham/ Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, and as such are al Qaeda.

Turkey is looking for Nato support, because ……… Everything is f%$#ed up and sh%$.

In related news, Turkey is aggressively moving refugees to the the Greek border in an attempt to coerce the EU into supporting his adventure.

This will not end well.

Burying the Lede

In a story about the rapidly unfolding debacle in northern Syria, they weight until the 9^th paragraph to note that the US is looking at evacuating the nuclear weapons stored at Incirlik Air Base in response to the instability and chaos in the region:

………

And over the weekend, State and Energy Department officials were quietly reviewing plans for evacuating roughly 50 tactical nuclear weapons that the United States had long stored, under American control, at Incirlik Air Base in Turkey, about 250 miles from the Syrian border, according to two American officials.

Those weapons, one senior official said, were now essentially Erdogan’s hostages. To fly them out of Incirlik would be to mark the de facto end of the Turkish-American alliance. To keep them there, though, is to perpetuate a nuclear vulnerability that should have been eliminated years ago.

“I think this is a first — a country with U.S. nuclear weapons stationed in it literally firing artillery at US forces,” Jeffrey Lewis of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies wrote last week.

For his part, Mr. Erdogan claims nuclear ambitions of his own: Only a month ago, speaking to supporters, he said he “cannot accept” rules that keep Turkey from possessing nuclear weapons of its own.

“There is no developed nation in the world that doesn’t have them,” he said. (In fact, most do not.)

This is unbelievably dangerous.

Also, given the nature of the potential nuclear exchanges these days, the forward deployment of nuclear weapons, particularly in a country run by a delusional megalomaniac, seems to be a profoundly unfortunate decision.

I Can't Even………

Trump is defending his abandonment of our Kurdish allies in northern Syria because they did not hit the beaches with us at Normandy.

This is amazingly stupid and ahistorical. (Turkey was neutral in the war, and Syria, Iran, and Iraq were under the control of the UK by the time that America entered the war)

I'm not surprised about the betrayal of the Kurds, this has been a bipartisan standard operating procedure for the United States since (at least) the early 1970s, but this justification is mind-bogglingly stupid.

S-400 Begins to Arrive in Turkey

There are a number of reasons for Turkey to prefer the S-400 to the US Patriot system: It's more capable, it's about half the price, and it gives Erdoğan yet another opportunity to play the Turkish nationalism card to his advangage.

The US defense establishment has completely lost their sh%$ over this, claiming that it is a security issue, though there is nothing about the F-35 that an S-400 in Istambul could get that an S-400 in Kaliningrad would not.

My conclusion has always been that the Pentagon and its web of contractors are upset because they cannot get their fingers into these pies.

It's not even the first NATO nation to use a Russian SAM system, Greece has been operating the S-300 for over a decade.

So the US has been threatening sanctions, including withdrawal of F-35 sales to Turkey, while Turkey has insisted that it would take shipment of the systems.

Well, Turkey has now begun to receive the shipments of the system, so, as the saying goes, "It is on."

I do not see either side backing down:

Turkey has begun taking delivery of Russia’s S-400 air defense system, the Turkish Defense Ministry said Friday, completing a deal that has threatened its standing in NATO and is likely to trigger sanctions from the United States.

The first components for the system arrived Friday at Murted Air Base in Ankara, the Turkish capital, the ministry said in a statement. Turkish television stations broadcast footage of the delivery throughout the morning as Russian cargo planes arrived at the base and equipment was off­loaded.

The purchase underscored President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s increasing willingness to coordinate with Russia and risked a new crisis in relations between Turkey and the United States. Although U.S. law mandates sanctions against countries making “significant” deals with the Russian defense industry, the Trump administration has given mixed signals about how exactly it might respond if Turkey went through with the purchase.

A basket of measures listed under legislation passed in 2017 — from which the administration is required to select at least five — includes economic sanctions, revocation of visas and prohibition of all Turkish procurement of U.S. defense equipment.

It will be interesting to see how all of this plays out.

Good News From Istanbul

In March, Turkey's Islamist AKP suffered major setbacks. 

Most significantly was that, for the first time in over a decade, they narrowly lost the election for Mayor, which did not just a political earthquake, but would eliminate the party's control over patronage in Turkey's largest city.

 Faced with this treat, Erdoğan petitioned electoral commission to invalidate and re-run the elections, and the commission, being largely a tool of Erdoğan did so.

Well, in the new elections, Ekrem İmamoğlu defeated the AKP candidate in a land slide:

Turkey’s opposition has won a high-stakes rerun of the Istanbul mayoral election, a serious blow to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and a landmark victory in a country where many feared democracy was failing.

Shortly after initial results pointing to a landslide win for the opposition coalition candidate, Ekrem İmamoğlu, emerged on Sunday evening, the candidate of the ruling Justice and Development party (AKP), Binali Yıldırım, conceded and congratulated his rival.

The repeat election, designed to undo İmamoğlu’s narrow surprise win in the 31 March contest, was an unprecedented test for both Turkey’s fragile democratic institutions and Erdoğan’s political future.

………

The president issued his congratulations to İmamoğlu on Twitter after initial results showed that with 99% of ballots counted the People’s Republican party (CHP) candidate had increased his lead in March, of 13,000 votes, to an astonishing 777,000, or 54%.

Crowded parties broke out on Istanbul’s main shopping streets and in liberal neighbourhoods.

I rather hope that this is the beginning the end for Erdoğan, btu I rather imagine that the this is the point where the opposition begins fighting with each other.

Well, This is a Big Old F%$# You

I have been writing for some time about how Turkey's purchase of the top of the line Russian S-400 surface to air missile (SAM) system has the US military industrial complex freaking out over the loss of sales.

The US claims that Turkey operating the system would allow the Russians unique insights into the characteristics of the F-35, but this is complete crap.

The Russians would be able to determing things like radar cross section from installations in Syria and Russia. (It is an extraordinarily long range system)

In response to threats to cancel F-35 sales to Turkey, Turkey is now in negotiations with Russia to set up a production line for the S-500, the even more capable system due to succeed the S-400:

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on Saturday that the purchase of S-400 defense systems from Russia was a done deal, adding that Ankara would also jointly produce S-500 defense systems with Moscow.

U.S. officials have called Turkey’s planned purchase of the S-400 missile defense system “deeply problematic,” saying it would risk Ankara’s partnership in the joint strike fighter F-35 program because it would compromise the jets, made by Lockheed Martin Corp.

I don't speak Turkish, but I'm pretty sure that this is an invitation for the Pentagon, and Lockheed Martin, to go Cheney themselves.

Nope. No Attempt to Overturn the Will of the Voters Here

The Turkish election board has called for new elections for Istanbul mayor after Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's preferred candidate lost:

Turkey’s election board announced Monday that it was invalidating the results of Istanbul’s mayoral race, which had dealt President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s party a stinging defeat. A new election will be held late next month, the board said.

Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, or AKP, had appealed for the cancellation of the March 31 vote over what it deemed irregularities. The election board ruled Monday that some polling officials overseeing that race were not civil servants, in violation of the law, according to Turkey’s state-run news ­agency.

Results last month showed that an opposition challenger, Ekrem Imamoglu, had narrowly defeated Binali Yildirim, the AKP mayoral candidate, in the Istanbul race. Erdogan’s party also suffered rare losses in local elections in several other cities, including Ankara, Turkey’s capital.

The AKP’s extraordinary appeal to redo the Istanbul election immediately drew criticism that Erdogan and his party were willing to undermine confidence in Turkey’s democracy to serve a narrow goal: retaining control of Turkey’s largest city, along with the financial and patronage networks that have benefited the AKP over decades.

Let's be clear here:  We are going to see all the powers of the state trying to tilt this election in favor of the AKP candidate.

They cannot afford to lose the patronage in Istanbul city government.

There Were Elections in (Sort of) Europe………

It looks like corruption of political elites on both sides of the aisle are a major issue in European elections.

In Slovakia, a neophyte environmental activist defeated a European Commission Vice President in an election that was largely about corruption among the existing elites.

The assassination of investigative journalist Ján Kuciak brought festering discontent out into the open, resulting in protests that forced the PM's resignation a year ago.

In related news, massive discontent in the Ukraine over elite corruption has had a comedian who plays an accidental President on TV won the first round of Presidential elections, and will face the incumbent President, Petro Poroshenko, in a runoff in 3 weeks.

Are you noticing a pattern yet?

In the last election, corruption was less of a factor, though, to be fair, 95% of the country is not in Europe, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's Islamist AKP suffered major defeats in local elections, with his party losing the Mayoral races in both Ankara and Istanbul, which is significant not only because it provides opportunities for political party building, and political patronage, for his opponents, but also because Istanbul has been his political base for his entire political career.

If the opposition can keep fratricidal idiocy to minimum, and that is a very big if, it looks like he may face a meaningful challenge at the next national elections.

What You've Just Said Was One of the Most Insanely Idiotic Things I Have Ever Heard

and May God Have Mercy on Your Soul

The above Billy Madison quote is directed at Katie Wheelbarger, acting assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs.

She is a part of the Pentagon freakout over Turkey buying S-400 SAMs from Russia.

As I have noted before, this butt-hurt is about US defense contractors not geting their vigorish, and then not distributing a cut to Pentagon Generals through post-retirement sinecures.

There are claims of security issues, but given that US allies in NATO are currently operating the nearly as capable S-300 system, Bulgaria, Greece, and Slovakia, I'm calling bullsh%$.

Katie, however, turned the knobs on stupidity and hypocrisy up to eleven with when she said this:

“The S-400 is a computer. The F-35 is a computer. You don’t hook your computer to your adversary’s computer and that’s basically what we would be doing,” Katie Wheelbarger, acting assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, told Reuters.

Undoubtedly the S-400 has ESM capabilities, and as such it could read emissions from the F-35 (as could more extensive installations in Russia) but the idea that somehow, because they both have chips in them, the S-400 could hack into the F-35 is beyond brain dead.

I have it on good authority that you can tell when Katie Wheelbarger has been using your computer, because there is Wite-Out^® on the screen.