Turkish Intransigence

The world is heating up (temperature AND human violence), and speeding up.

We are living in a world of acceleration, and people still do not understand the impacts of this relentless change.

Future Shock author, Alvin Toffler died just a few weeks ago.

We need that analysis now more than ever.

Silicon Valley is changing the actual neurological responses of humans with rapid feedback mechanisms. The economy is being disrupted with massive job displacement and income inequality.

We don't even understand the kinds of fires that we are dealing with now.

Our nukes are held in place by human / computer interfaces that are NOT fool-proof.

Turkey is melting down in the midst of ISIL and the Kurd crisis and the US / Russia brinksmanship of the Middle East.

We need to all sit down and have a LONG LONG chat about what we're going to do about all this shit.

I'm a highly trained graphic and computer science technician and I'm working the fields of a winery and now a lumber products company as a grunt.

I am an intellectual, but I'm not afraid to work. I am not afraid to join the proles in the trenches.

Clench to your precious bubble while you can, folks. You can't stop physics nor psychology.

We are underway. We need to right the ship before we all sink.

Go ahead and play with your cell phone all day and shoot pictures of your kids.

In 2011, Erdoğan ordered the tearing-down of the Statue of Humanity, a Turkish-Armenian friendship monument inKars, which was commissioned in 2006 and represented a metaphor of the rapprochement of the two countries after many years of dispute over the events of 1915. Erdoğan justified the removal by stating that the monument was offensively close to the tomb of an 11th-century Islamic scholar, and that its shadow ruined the view of that site, while Kars municipality officials said it was illegally erected in a protected area. However, the former mayor of Kars who approved the original construction of the monument said the municipality was destroying not just a "monument to humanity" but "humanity itself". The demolition was not unopposed; among its detractors were several Turkish artists. Two of them, the painter Bedri Baykam and his associate, Pyramid Art Gallery general coordinator Tugba Kurtulmus, were stabbed after a meeting with other artists at the Istanbul Akatlar cultural center.^[60]