After lots of government claims they were winning against the coup, we now have some hard evidence of pro-coup forces surrendering on the Bosphorus bridge in Istanbul, as shown in this video:
While the situation in Ankara may very well be different, this is pretty direct evidence that government forces are winning and that the coup has failed in Istanbul.
Strange that we still haven’t heard anything about who the plotters were, except Erdogan’s assertion that Fethullah Gulen is involved, something Gulen himself (who denounced the coup) has strongly denied…
Lots of conspiracy theories that Erdogan launched his own false flag operation to further consolidate power. Like just about all conspiracy theories, it’s unlikely and way too pat. Though bombing the Parliament building did seem a rather heavy-handed “Reichstag fire” moment…
The military regime is at least making noises about protecting human rights and the constitutional state, which is a good sign.
The army already controls the TV stations and bridges, shut down the airport, successfully disarmed police in Istanbul, and are doing low “fuck you, we’re in charge” plane and helicopter passes over Ankara. I’d say it’s probably all over but the shouting and moping up token resistance from Erdogan’s Islamist AKP party, despite Erdogan’s spokesmen claiming that the coup attempt has been “repelled.”
This is not the first coup in Turkey’s history; indeed, historically they’ve played the roll as a check and balance to Islamic fundamentalism and maintaining Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s vision of a secular Turkish state. Unlike the rest of the Middle East, after a few months or years, the Turkish military relinquishes control back to a (secular) government.
Erdogan tried to prevent this through repeated purges of the military. It appears that he failed.
Meanwhile, Obama continues his amazing streak of backing losers.
The scene there seems a bit chaotic, with intermittent small arms fire:
If this video is any indication, people out on the streets seem more festive than resistant:
Video of Turkish tanks (I’m guessing Leopard 2s, the most modern tanks in Turkey’s armed forces) rolling in the streets:
Here, on the other hand, we see (I think) an M-60 Patton tank just tell protestors “Fuck you and fuck your car” while they beat at it ineffectually with (I kid you not) long sticks (and later an APC does the same thing):
This “death from above” video is getting a lot of play on YouTube. The title says this is an AH-1 Helicopter attacking a police station, which makes more sense than it being an F-16 (as labeled in other copies of the video):
Another day, another Democratic congresscritter indicted. “Corrine Brown, the House rep from the 5th District of Florida, was indicted (along with Ronnie Simmons, her chief of staff) on federal charges of mail and wire fraud.”
Mir Islam, 22, of New York, N.Y., was sentenced today to 24 months in prison on three federal charges stemming from a conspiracy to commit various crimes related to the “swatting” and “doxing” of dozens of victims, and from a false bomb threat made against a university in Arizona and a pattern of online harassment constituting cyber-stalking against a university student, all occurring between February and September 2013.
Mr. Islam and his (thus far unindicted) co-conspirators seemed to target people who wrote about convicted felon Brett Kimberlin.
Robert Stacy McCain also links to computer security expert Brian Krebs, who goes into more detail on the trial and how Islam et. al. obtained information about their victims.
There’s so much Clinton Corruption news dropping I haven’t had time to sift through it all.
Take, for example, this 90 page document, evidently compiled by the 4Chan folks from publicly available sources. I’ve only started go through this. (A lot of it looks like unsourced speculation from the Chan Clan, so caveat lector.)
What would happen to Clinton if she had broken information secrecy rules while in the military. “To say that Hillary Clinton is unfit to be commander-in-chief is to give her too much credit. It implies that she might be fit for other positions of responsibility. She’s not fit to be POTUS, and she’s not fit to be a private. It’s time for her to slink back to her foundation, make her speeches, and retire to private life.”
Slashdot is hardly a hotbed of conservative thought, but look at this thread on Clinton’s statement on H1B visas. All the highest rated comments are how people are fed up with Hillary’s obvious lies and how they won’t be voting for her.
There’s are persistent rumors that Donald Trump might (emphasis on the might) tap Newt Gingrich as his running mate, an idea that gained more currency with Gingrich scheduled to appear with Trump on the campaign trail. Trump’s manifest shortcomings and weird appeal has been covered at length by now, so lets talk about Gingrich.
Though a running mate’s primary constitutional duty is to step in and act as President in the event of the death or impeachment of the sitting President (plus break the occasional tie in the senate), a VP pick is supposed to accomplish three political tasks: Make it easier to win the general election (either by securing their home state or making inroads into a key electoral demographic), be the “bad cop” of the campaign (which ain’t happening, since Trump’s rhetorical style makes him his own bad cop), and to “balance the ticket,” either geographically (Kennedy/Johnson), ideologically (Dukakis/Bentsen), age and experience (Obama/Biden) or some other way. Gingrich would balance the ticket geographically (though if Trump actually needed Gingrich to win Georgia or any of the rest of the “deep” South, his campaign would be in serious trouble), but more importantly would provide a great deal of balance in terms of experience and insider knowledge.
Though stale as to the identities and proclivities of the current crop of insiders, as a former Speaker of the House, Gingrich is a master of the process and minutia of how Capitol Hill actually works. In his heyday, Gingrich was the most effective Republican speaker in my lifetime by a good measure, and possibly the most effective ever (depending on your opinion of Joseph Gurney Cannon, whose career I am not intimately familiar with). A Vice President Gingrich would greatly help cover up Trump’s many blindspots and areas of ignorance, as well as someone who could interface with the House and Senate.
In his heyday, Gingrich was one of the staunchest conservatives in the land. The problem is that Gingrich’s heyday was 1994 (when he unveiled the contract with America and helped Republicans retake the House for the first time since 1952) to 1999 (when he stepped down as Speaker). Since then he’s reinvented himself as an idea-a-minute futurist, offering a blur of interesting ideas, many of which were frequently innovative (but not always good). There’s no question that Gingrich still has the smarts to be an effective VP, but does he still have the focus?
A Trump/Gingrich ticket would probably be the most variable Presidential ticket ever. You could see a dozen innovative initiatives or an explosion of meaningless rhetoric. Trump might offload many policy tasks onto Gingrich (who then might do an excellent job of furthering the Republican agenda), or he might ignore him entirely. Gingrich is one of the very few plausible Trump running mates who would make the ticket more unpredictable.
About the only thing it wouldn’t be is boring.
One final bit of irony would be that liberals would have to refer to Gingrich as the kinder, gentler half of the ticket, something that might have made their heads explode in 1998…
“Until blacks start changing these pathologies, the whole ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement, with its insistence that everyone has to change except for blacks themselves is nothing more than Progressive kabuki theater aimed at diverting attention from the fact that Democrats are facilitating self-destructive behaviors in the black community and that blacks are using the Democrat propaganda machine as an excuse to avoid the terrible (but not insurmountable) challenges that really claim black lives.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Who, exactly, is in charge of these cities and city agencies about which African Americans do have many legitimate complaints? Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, Baltimore, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago: Not exactly famous enclaves of conservative Republican political dominance. Because Dallas is in Texas, people sometimes forget that it is a city like any other American city, and Democrat-dominated. In Dallas, as in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Detroit, that Democrat domination is due in great part to a black Democratic voting bloc.
Eventually, someone is going to figure out that the black progressives protesting municipal arrangements in places such as Baltimore are protesting the municipal arrangements created by black progressives working for the interests of the Democratic party. Dallas’s racial politics aren’t as one-sided as Detroit’s, and neither are its party politics; it is Democratic, but not as lopsidedly Democratic as, say, Philadelphia. It even has had a Republican mayor (the office is technically nonpartisan) within living memory. No doubt somebody in Dallas already is trying to figure out a way to blame that mayor for the murder of those five police officers.
“Friends and family tell us that Alton Sterling was a great guy. That may well be the case, but he is also a convicted sex offender felon with a violent temper, who had six arrests for battery, two domestic violence charges, multiple illegal weapons charges, and who had fought with police over weapons before.”
SuperGenius tries to rob gas station, ends up shooting himself in the groin. I also wonder if he’s the towering intellect that managed to clip his own driver’s side mirror at the pump in the video…
If you’re not already suffering from Brexit fatigue by now, this John Gray piece in the New Statesmen has more than enough pith and insight to make it worth your time.
A lesson of the past few days is the danger of groupthink. Along with the major international institutions, the assembled might of establishment opinion – in the CBI and TUC, massed legions of economists and a partisan Bank of England – was confident that the existing order here and in Europe would be preserved by promises of unspecified reforms. Until around 2am on the morning of Friday 24 May, the bookies and currency traders followed the playbook that had been given them by the authorities and the pollsters. Then, in a succession of events of a kind that is becoming increasingly common, the script was abruptly torn up. A clear majority of voters had reached to the heart of the situation. Realising that the promises of European reform that had been made were empty, they opted for a sharp shift in direction. The consequences can already be observed: rapid political change in Britain and an accelerating process of unravelling in the European Union. The worldwide impact on markets and geopolitics will be long-lasting and profound.
There are sure to be concerted efforts to resist the referendum’s message. The rise of the hydra-headed monster of populism; the diabolical machinations of tabloid newspapers; conflicts of interest between baby boomers and millennials; divisions between the English provinces and Wales on the one hand and Scotland, London and Northern Ireland on the other; Jeremy Corbyn’s lukewarm support for the Remain cause; the buyer’s remorse that has supposedly set in after Remain’s defeat – these already commonplace tales will be recycled incessantly during the coming weeks and months. None of them captures the magnitude of the upheaval that has occurred. When voters inflicted the biggest shock on the establishment since Churchill was ousted in 1945 they signalled the end of an era.
Predictably, there is speculation that Brexit will not happen. If Britain can vote for Brexit, it is being argued, surely anything is possible. But those who think the vote can be overturned or ignored are telling us more about their own state of mind than developments in the real world. Like bedraggled courtiers fleeing Versailles after the French Revolution, they are unable to process the reversal that has occurred. Locked in a psychology of despair, anger and denial, they cannot help believing there will be a restoration of an order they believed was unshakeable.
Snip.
As it is being used today, “populism” is a term of abuse applied by establishment thinkers to people whose lives they have not troubled to understand. A revolt of the masses is under way, but it is one in which those who have shaped policies over the past twenty years are more remote from reality than the ordinary men and women at whom they like to sneer. The interaction of a dysfunctional single currency and destructive austerity policies with the financial crisis has left most of Europe economically stagnant and parts of it blighted with unemployment on a scale unknown since the Thirties. At the same time European institutions have been paralysed by the migrant crisis. Floundering under the weight of problems it cannot solve or that it has even created, the EU has demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that it lacks the capacity for effective action and is incapable of reform. As I suggested in this magazine in last year (“The neo-Georgian prime minister”, 23 October 2015), Europe’s image as a safe option has given way to the realisation that it is a failed experiment. A majority of British voters grasped this fact, which none of our establishments has yet understood.
Skip if you must Gray’s description of leadership fights among the Tories and Labourites, but his summation of the problem facing Labour is admirably succinct:
Leading Labour figures have denied adamantly that the party’s stance on immigration is central to the collapse of its working-class base. It was a complex of issues to do with de-industrialisation, they repeat, that led to mass desertion by Labour voters. There is some force in this, but it is essentially a way of evading an inconvenient truth.
Free movement of labour between countries with vastly different wage levels, working conditions and welfare benefits is a systemic threat to the job opportunities and living standards of Labour’s core supporters. Labour cannot admit this, because that would mean the EU is structured to make social democracy impossible.
Also this:
Corbyn is not alone in passing over this conflict. So do his opponents, and this is one reason why it will be extremely difficult to reverse Labour’s slide. If Yvette Cooper, Andy Burnham or David Miliband had been leader, the referendum would still have ended badly for Labour. No doubt the campaign would have been handled better. But the message would have been the same – promises of European reform that European institutions have shown to be worthless. Labour’s heartlands were already melting away. A rerun in the north and Midlands of Labour’s collapse in Scotland is now a distinct possibility. Fear of this disaster is one reason Labour is unlikely to split. With over 40 per cent of the party’s voters opting for Leave, anyone who joined a new “modernising” party would be on a fast lane to oblivion. Only a radical shift from progressive orthodoxies on immigration and the EU can save Labour from swift and terminal decline. It is doubtful whether any future leader could enforce such a shift, as it would be opposed by most Labour MPs and by activists. Yet it is plainly what millions of Labour voters want.
And this:
The contradictions of the world-view shared by progressive thinkers and established elites are becoming acutely evident. There is constant talk about being in a time of unprecedented change. Globalisation is connecting the world as never before; our lives are being continuously transformed by disruptive technologies; old ways of life and hierarchies in society are fast dissolving . . . these are the ruling clichés of the age. What is striking is that they are deployed to prop up a failing ancien régime. Not only in Britain and continental Europe but also in the Unite States, the human costs of a broken form of capitalism have fuelled popular revulsion – a revolt that has produced a mood of hysteria and something like blind panic among bien-pensants who pride themselves on their judicious rationality. Brexit will be followed by the end of Western civilisation, they foam, while a Trump presidency would be a planetary catastrophe. A paranoid style of liberalism has emerged that sees disaster and demonic evil at every turn.
And this:
“The new tolerance of anti-Semitism by sections of the left in Britain is an elite pathology: a disorder of the gibbering classes not the masses.”
