It was a momentous first half of the year in the United States, 1993. Waco, World Trade Center bombing, the “Storm of the Century”. And I missed it all. It’s a weird experience, not being in your home country during times of historical significance. I watched these events unfold via the narrow lens of the International Herald-Tribune and occasional postcards and letters from home. Mainly, I was on a beach, or in a bar, or scurrying around ancient buildings. Who could have predicted the Eastern Mediterranean would be an oasis of youthful fun and rose-colored glasses while the U.S. was in turmoil?
I spent 7 months in Turkey, and a couple weeks in Syria, in 1993. I had many fun times, and saw some exotic places. Rather than present a full travelogue, I thought I would share a few stories from the bubble.
Alanya east
Arrival
Thanks to Mount Pinatubo, most of the earth was experiencing some weirdass weather (Bill Gates, take note!).
Cyborg, impervious to weather
Istanbul was frigidly cold for our two-week orientation. Snow squalls would roll in off the Black Sea at regular intervals. Everything I experienced in those weeks was punctuated by cold. Our program director would have us scrambling around stone walls in a blizzard, while he blithely lectured us about Ottomans in nothing more than jeans and a leather jacket.
That’s all well and good until you need to dress up for a Greek Orthodox liturgy in a historic church. No bulky boots & layers of clothing allowed.
The HQ and leadership of the Greek Orthodox Church are in Istanbul. Apparently, if the Church’s lands and buildings are not in active use, they could be ceded to the Turkish government. In order not to lose its property despite an ever-shrinking Orthodox population, the Patriarch himself would perform services at a rotating list of churches. His presence would attract a greater crowd than a normal worship, hence keeping those individual churches under Greek Orthodox ownership.
I remember the the sweet, ethereal smell of incense and the 700-year-old stone floor seeping through my “dressy shoes”, slowly freezing me from the bottom-up. After we were thoroughly iced, we were privileged to have a meeting (in a heated room!) with the Patriarch. We listened to him speak to his Greek-Turkish flock and sipped on rose liqueur. We met a young priest from Texas who invited us to the Patriarchate (Church HQ), where he tried his level best to get us to hang out with him all day: “No more questions? OK, well let me tell you about this one time in divinity school…”. Guy was undoubtedly homesick and in need of American-style conversation.
Musical Interlude
Our program director set up an intimate performance for us in Istanbul with the Sephardic-Turkish music group Los Paşaros Sefaradis.
During the Spanish Inquisition, the Ottoman government allowed fleeing Jews to live & work (with many restrictions) in the Empire, mainly Istanbul where they could be monitored, taxed, and controlled. The families that remained there for generations developed a mix of Spanish, Turkish, and Jewish culture, ritual, and language.
The members of Los Paşaros all grew up speaking Judeo-Spanish at home, while learning Turkish in school.
For our interlude, here is major Turkish pop star Sezen Aksu performing the haunting and beautiful “La Romansa de Rika Kuriel” with Los Paşaros a few years ago.
Becoming a Bathist
Not far from our little hotel in Sultanahmet, there was a 500-year-old hamam, or Turkish bath. If you’re a man, you enter the changing room, where you leisurely disrobe and enjoy sodas and teas brought to you by attendants. Then, I think, you enter the bathing room where you wash and prepare for a steam and a massage.
Chicks? We entered a standard locker room, and from there into a large domed marble room. Around the columned edges were niches with faucets, soap, and buckets for bathing and rinsing.
In the center of the room, directly below an incredible perforated dome, was a gigantic heated marble platform. You could simply lie on the slab, soaking in the beautiful heat, or you could get a wash and a massage. Care for a facial? Lean back and rest your weary head in the naked, pendulous bosom of an attendant that has had many years to cultivate an aura of grandmotherly warmth combined with a sadistic desire to tear your skin off layer-by-layer with a loofah. After a day traipsing around our freezing environs, this was utter paradise, even the dermatological abuse while suffocating between a pair of Quintuple Ds.
Istanbul Miscellany
Blanchernae
If I had to choose a vacation in a big city, it 100% would have been Istanbul. Pre-Erdoğan, I mean. You could spend weeks or months here exploring all the nooks and crannies. The mosaics and frescos at Kariye; the ruined old Blanchernae Palace, whose walls have been incorporated into the surrounding neighborhood; a midwinter boat trip up the Bosporus, sipping Salep and watching the modern Ottoman palaces roll by; quince dessert at the World Famous Pudding Shop; pretending to be 007 in the Yerebatan Saray; eating illegal stuffed mussels from questionable street vendors; singing Kurdish folk songs and drinking glass after glass of Aslan Sütü in the kind of bar where you have to knock on the door; exploring the hidden corners of Ayasofya, such as the Empress Theodora‘s graffiti in the stone railing, and Enrico Dandolo‘s timeworn gravestone.
The Big Thaw
After an unmemorable stop in Ankara (every stop in Ankara is unmemorable), we finally set up home base in Alanya. The town enjoyed its glory days in the 13th century during the Seljuk Sultanate. In 1993 it was a modern mess of bars, tacky shops, and sunburned Germans.
Alanya west
Our little skoolhouse
Pissing the night away Alanya style
Ulaş beach
In other words, Alanya is not much of anything other than a place to party and engage in hijinks. We spent a lot of time between the heavy metal bar and the mafia-owned Pub 13, conveniently located within drunken stumbling distance, through a bat-filled gecekondu, of our housing.
What’s an Aleppo?
An Aleppo
Weirdest. Road. Trip. Ever.
It would have been a tense time for a bunch of Americans to visit a Ba’athist stronghold in 1993, but there we were, on our little bus, heading into the belly of the beast. The border area on the road between Antakya and Aleppo is a dry canyon of no-man’s land, where one imagines snipers of various allegiances staring down through their scopes. Picture the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where Indy threatens to blow up the Ark with a shoulder-launched missile. But with a paved road.
Also an Aleppo
As soon as we arrived in Syria at Bab al Hawa, we were in an alien world. Our bus driver had a “cousin” that traveled with us everywhere. Interestingly, the bus driver and this “cousin” never spoke or even really acknowledged each other.
Stencils of Assad The First were spray painted on every available surface in this part of the country. One got the sense of a slightly tenuous hold on power here.
We arrived at the historic Baron Hotel. You see, it was Ramadan, and the hotel was owned by an Armenian (i.e. Christian) family. Our program director liked his tipple, and the bar was open for business. It was everything you’d expect from a run-down piece of history – old wood,
Baron Hotel
marble, crumbling ceiling plaster. I loved it. It was easy to sit at the bar and imagine Winston Churchill drunkenly pontificating at a corner table.
Outside the time-stopped oasis of the Baron, the streets of Aleppo were…crazy. I had never seen anything like the chaos of life in that city. Imagine yourself downstream from the main bazaar when the evening canon blasts, signifying sundown and the end of the fast for the day. Suddenly, thousands of rabidly hungry Muslims are making a beeline for the restaurants and snack stands in the market. It’s like every “chase scene in a crowd” in every action movie ever made. Do not stand between tens of thousands of Muslims and their iftars.
I’ve been Muslimized!
Damascectomy
Damascus
We eventually piled onto our little bus with the driver and his “cousin” and headed south to Damascus.
Inlaid game table
I don’t know how Damascus fared during the recent Troubles, but in 1993 is was a beautiful historic city with wide boulevards and secret crevices. As our driver’s “cousin” settled into a comfy chair with a newspaper and coffee in our hotel lobby, we set out to explore (and shop). Syria in general, and Damascus in particular, have a not insignificant non-Muslim population. We found ourselves talking to a shopkeep, who offered us tea and coffee. We soon found out our new pal was a Christian and therefore didn’t give a damn about Ramadan rules. He invited us up to his attic where we got to sit around and smoke cigarettes and drink our fill of tea. My friend wanted to buy a rather pricey inlaid game table, at which point the merchant gave her a bank account number in Cyprus to which to send the payment. Smart man.
And there we have some brief memories of half a year in the peace and love of the Eastern Mediterranean.
In Loving Memory: DSA, 1965-2012. I can still hear your voice.
A gang of miscreants
Deniz
I like images from places I’d never be brave enough to visit.
There was a time to be brave, now it would just be foolish. That makes those memories and stories even sweeter. Thanks KK!
Fascinating…thank you for sharing all this!
After reading this, I went to the bookshelf…
I read his bio of Ataturk – good stuff!!
A Peace to End All Peace was required reading in my degree program
More travel stories! Awesome!
That bath house part sounds vaguely SugarFree-like. I think he’s rubbing off on us.
Great…thanks for that. Now I cannot unsee that.
Corrected for accuracy.
Now I have to.
KK, Have you ever been in a Turkish prison?
Do you like biker movies?
I have….it was very nice!
I went to the same bath house. I didn’t get the full treatment, but one of my friends got the wash down and massage by one of the male attendants.
Very cool and some places I’d like to visit. From classical Rome through the Middle Ages the coast of Turkey was dotted with many prosperous Greco-Roman cities.
It’s always remarkable to me to see structures that are over a thousand years old. Here in VA, I go to places like Williamsburg and marvel at how “old” it is, when it’s a blink of an eye on a global scale.
I shared a train compartment with a Jordanian once. He was showing me pictures of Petra and other sites in Jordan, saying how much he liked to visit old places. He asked what old places he could visit in the US. We definitely had a different perception of old.
Even the Anasazi Pueblos aren’t Petra old. To get in that range, you’d have to go outside the US and look for Olmec sites.
Mesa Verde?
Young’uns.
This is one of those moments when you remember that there was more time between the building of the Pyramids at Giza and Caesar than between Caesar and today. Petra was lived-in at the time of Caesar. And stuff from that time frame is vanishingly rare on this continent.
My little brother spent some time in Jordan driving a 1 star around. He got to see Petra. He told me it is a lot smaller than what he imagined.
Americans think 200 years is old and Europeans think 200 miles is a long way.
Nice story.
I was in Istanbul for a week in 95. I wish I had known more about history before I visited. I feel like I missed a lot and would love to go back.
Thanks for that. Very cool.
What a great post, thanks especially for the old pictures. Love them.
Turkey is a wonderful example of how demography is destiny. All the modern secular Turks have modern secular birthrates, while the traditional and Islamic Turks have tradition Islamic birthrates.
i wonder why America appears to be bucking this destiny, and is currently trending toward the society wanted by “modern, secular Americans” who have a sub-replacement birth rate (I think).
Yes. It is quite curious.
You would think that Latinos would have more political power than they do. And most of them are decidedly unwoke.
Temporary insanity, and a lack of homeschooling.
I don’t think the baby makers have quite caught up to the Boomers yet. Give it another 20 years.
Probably because the leaders of both parties are of the same secular liberal tribe in America. Erdogan actually believes what his supporters believe. Meanwhile George W Bush has voted Democrat for POTUS at least twice since leaving office.
Yes, and to add some color, we outsource our childrearing to a class of people who are most likely to be old, angry spinsters. By and large, they’re not being taught by one of their classmate’s parents or a neighbor, but a person from a different worldview who lives in a different part of town.
Education as a transmission of values from parent to child doesn’t happen when the primary caregiver is hostile to the parent’s values. “Protestantization” was what they called it in the 1800s. The progs ditched God and substituted government, so I guess it’s “Progtestantization” these days.
(or young angry spinsters, don’t want to leave them out)
(oh, and by progs, I mean progs and socons, the original progs)
Please don’t.
I know a few middle-aged ones as well.
‘Demographics is just one of a bunch of poorly-understood elements of destiny’ just doesn’t have the same ring…
It seems to be pretty close to worldwide, that the moment a society goes from children-as-assets to children-as-liabilities – the birth rate plummets.
Neat stuff! Turkey would have been a cool place to visit once upon a time.
Thank you
Sorry about the formatting – an attempt was made.
The singer in the video, coincidentally, had her biggest international hit in 1993. It was in all the dance clubs all over Europe & Asia that spring & summer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSlOGG5Ohgg
Thanks, KK, good that you made the trip. I can’t help but think those that are deciding the future of this country may never have been outside the county.
Great piece, KK.
I got to visit Istanbul for a week in early 2001 with some friends. We were older than you during your visit (we’re all within 3 years or so of my guess at your age), being nearly ten years later, but we had a similar visit, and got to visit some of the same places you mention, albeit in a greatly compressed time frame.
We cruised up the Bosporus for a day and visited a couple of towns and also some ruins on the shore of the Black Sea.
I would have loved to go back–there are so many things to see and do there, but these days I wouldn’t think of visiting Turkey, very unfortunately.
What a great trip! I was in Turkey on a vacation cruise in 92, saw istanbul and Ephesus mostly. Very interesting historical place and i wish I’d seen more. Thing i remember most was the tour guide having to come rescue me on the palace grounds when i got surrounded by a group of local boys calling me a whore. No idea what he said to them but their expressions as they slunk away suggested it was basically “your mothers would be ashamed of all of you.” It was kind of funny.
Aaaand that’s why Turkey is what it is today!
Well, I just hope those youngsters get triggered by twitter
I spent 20 hours in Istanbul in 2019, managed to visit the Hagia Sophia when it was still a museum.
That sounds like a whole lot of fun. Also, to echo UCS, places I was never brave enough to visit.
Well, should I say, things it never occurred to me to do, and if it had, I wouldn’t have been brave enough to do it.
Hats off to you, KK!
Good stuff KK, Thanks!
Great article. Istanbul is my top “want to go there” city. Isfahan and maybe Tabriz are up there, too.
Awesome stuff Kristen!
I’ve been on an ancient/medieval history kick recently, and Turkey sounds like an incredible bang for your buck if you want to see historic sites from a variety of civilizations. I wonder how safe it is to visit today.
One thing that bums me out is that most of the Middle East will probably be insanely unsafe for Americans for the foreseeable future. Oh, what I wouldn’t give to wander around the sites of Mesopotamia without getting slaughtered…
You can see the Ziggurat at Ur, last I was there…
Our Chaplin tried to put together a trip to Nineveh when I was in Mosul in 2004. The commander shot that down as the security situation… less than ideal… for a group of American soldiers going sight seeing.
If I wanted to get slightly political, I’d say the writing was very clearly on the wall for the future of Turkey in 1993.
Turgut Ozal (he’s up there among the greats of the Cold War 80’s – Thatcher, Reagan, Gorbachev, etc.) died that year. They had an election. I listened to all the politicians speak, and could hear how out of touch they were. They were making speeches about the EU (EEC at the time) and markets and NATO. Meanwhile, the Islamic parties (which the government made various attempts to ban) were promising a chicken in every pot for the gecekondus.
The establishment counted on the military to save secularization, like they had previously. Erdogan won that battle.
Not to mention that when the bulk of your military is made up of poor rural conscripts, they may not be so inclined to help out in maintaining secularism.
Demographics – the Islamics in country out-bred the city folk.
There definitely seems to be an urban/rural divide that’s even greater than ours. When I wandered off the beaten path in Istanbul where many of the newcomers from the country lived there was definitely a different vibe. Not hostile, but not terribly welcoming either.
I’ve also watched a couple of Turkish comedies on Netflix. They look like they could have been filmed anywhere in Europe, but they are raunchier than even most Western movies. I can’t help but think that they don’t play well with most of the people in the country.
Very cool. Gutsie for the time! I can’t even imagine what an adventure it may have been. Do you have any plans for more traveling like it? Possibly a return trip?
I won’t give any money to Erdogan, and I fear it’s probably changed a lot, not for the better. I’d like to go to the Northeast, though. Maybe someday.
Japan or Norway are next on my list if the world ever opens.
https://babylonbee.com/news/trump-closing-in-on-filling-impeachment-punch-card-for-free-sub-sandwich
Have you come up with a plan for getting Amazon out of your life’s logistics?
My moves so far: no social media, duckduckgo, Signal, protonmail.
I working towards that as well. Not sure what to do about the movies I have purchased.
Amazon is lower on the list at the moment.
My business heavily uses the Google Workspace system so I’m working on that first since my annual billing is in February.
Looks like it will be:
Protonmail for Business for email
IDrive for storage
WPS Office for editing
My ERP is hosted on Amazon Web Services thru another company. I don’t think that’s going to change unless I want to host it myself. I’m loathe to do so as I’ve got enough to do without worrying about backups, etc…
Purchasing thru Amazon will just require me to go thru my commonly bought list (toner, toner, and more toner) and find other sources.
We’re switching to Brave for browsers once Google is gone. I need Facebook for my business page otherwise I would shitcan them.
Yeah, I’ve still got a Facebook page for business, but it’s a couple layers distant from my real self, or so I keed myself.
Some things I can only find on Amazon. But I might start getting certain things through work accounts and repaying via petty cash.
I have just spent months trying to convince members of a 501(c)(3) org I am part of to sign up with Amazon Smile for donations. I hvae made tons of pleas to members to use Smile and designate us as their org of choice. I personally use Amazon for many purchases because I’m lazy and prefer to do one stop shopping, plus don’t care to maintain online accounts at other retailers.
I know Amazon the retailer and AWS aren’t the same entity, but they’re too close to make any difference.
I don’t think that buying my stuff online from Wal-Mart or other places is really striking a blow for liberty, either. And there aren’t any local stores that really sell the kinds of things I buy from Amazon anyway.
* Starts drawing up plans for Glibazon.com
I’ll consult for shares
We really do need an IAAS service that is not subject to the vicissitudes of wokeness.
And I would invest real money (not a ton, mind you, but real money) to see it happen if we had a good shot of making it work.
I do draw the line, however, at writing checks to “Glibazon Corp. C/O Psycho Effer, CFO.”
My goal is to both strike a blow to companies that would censor/cancel, economically for sure, and also data collection wise. Idk if they have a way to measure the latter, but I can’t help but think that with people moving to VPNs, encryption, etc., that somehow data collectors like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, et al, are taking a hit if they can’t provide as much info to marketing firms or whomever purchases that data.
My view on it is that if I object to their business practices but I don’t adjust my own habits to not provide them with money or things they consider the equivalent (data), then I get what I deserve.
Besides, they’ve shown they are willing to cut you off on a whim without recourse. I’m an idiot if I make myself dependent on them knowing that.
I have Prime, and that’s all. I don’t use their movies, music, or anything else beyond free shipping. Not using Amazon at all isn’t realistic for us.
I need to remain on Facebook for 1 reason: I’m on the board of a local adult baseball league, and FB is our main avenue of communication. I hate it, and would love to delete that fucking account too, but it is what it is. I am doing my best to minimize my use of it, however. That place is a shithole.
I deleted my Twitter account last night (after not using it since 2017). Fuck Twitter.
Never even joined any other social media.
I’m torn with YouTube. It’s well over 1/2 of my entertainment, and I subscribe to all manner of things there that make life better. The biggest stick in the mud is that I pay $20 for YouTube premium. I started as a way to keep my kids from having to be bombarded by “I’m Amy McGrath, a Marine and a mother” ads that were happening several times on every video they watched for months on end. And since all of their YT (and mine too) is done via an Apple TV, a browser plugin that may or may not block those ads isn’t possible.
But the hardest part is Apple. My family is heavily intertwined with Apple, and we have been for a long time. All of our phones are iPhones (and have been since 07 – I was one of those assholes waiting in line for several hours on launch day to get the very first batch), all of our computers are Macs. Each of us has an iPad. We watch all of our TV via Apple TV boxes. We have Apple Watches. We’ve been heavily invested in AAPL for 15 years now, and have made a ton of money off it. In fact, were it not for AAPL, we’d have been broken financially while paying for a lawsuit to recover a shitload of stolen money that we were then taxed to the tune of $116k this year (nearly double our normal annual income) just for getting those stolen funds back.
I tried switching to DuckDuckGo, but the formatting is so fucking terrible it made me want to choke a bitch. I’ll try it again, I think. I fucking hate google. But I’ve had a gmail for so long that literally almost everything I’m signed up for on the internet uses that account (though not here). Accounts at dozens if not hundreds of sites are all using gmail because I didn’t want to spam my own email servers with hundreds of bullshit ads a day.
Apple is a problem. I’m Mac, iPad and iPhone, too. And the programs I use… there are no PC equivalents. Idk why, but I’m thinking that if Disney can come around from being too woke, Apple can or will, too. Quien sabe?
I’ve spent days transitioning from gmail and it’s far from over I’m afraid. But it’ll be worth it when I can delete that account for good.
if Disney can come around from being too woke
There was a trigger warning on Aladdin 2: Robin Williams Isn’t In This One when my daughter turned it on the other day.
Just because some group buried way down in LucasFilm isn’t getting stomped by the woke zombies doesn’t mean that Disney is back from the brink.
I agree, but that that group is allowed to exist at all, especially in the face of fierce resistance from wokeland, says something.
Ultimately all of these private companies have a bottom line. If their wokeness starts to dig in to that very much, especially when revenue is down across the board, non-woke things will start to get through, and a trickle becomes a flood.
Getting rid of that worthless suck-up Kennedy should help.
And this is Netflix related, but Kobra Kai has been pretty good. The toxic masculinity blonde dude is being portrayed more as the hero, and Ralph Maccio is his usual whiny bitch self, but not portrayed in a cute sensitive light. There’s some hope out there.
The new CEO of Disney is from park management.
That gives me some hope they can be salvaged. Parks are a capital business with real overhead and cost issues.
I need a smartphone. Apple is more tolerable than Google.
Fuck Google
What an interesting trip! Thanks for writing about it.
So cool, Kristen!
I bought a lighter from a tacky tchotchke vendor in Sultanahmet that had a drawing of Ayasofya, but the text said “Mosque Saint Sophia”. Literally everything is wrong with that (or was at the time, because it wasn’t a mosque). Haghia, Aya, Sancta – they all mean “Holy”. Sophia/Sofia/Sofya isn’t a person’s name – they all mean “Wisdom”
Thanks Kristen. Also, haven’t forgotten your e-mail. First week of classes this week + bunch of admin stuff has slowed me down.
No worries, mate! S’truth!
I can’t believe you got to go on a trip to Turkey with Bridget Fonda. Totally hot.
This was fun, thanks KK!
I would love to go visit that part of the world. Absolutely beautiful!
Occasionally, intelligent reporting slips through.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-s-speech-probably-defensible-every-court-except-perhaps-senate-n1254258
On the other hand, the free-speech clause of the First Amendment protects a wide variety of speech even if listeners may consider it deeply offensive. Speech is not “incitement” unless (1) there is proof the speaker intended the speech to produce imminent lawlessness and (2) the speech is likely to produce that lawlessness.
Speech with only violent imagery would be protected by the First Amendment. Even the mere tendency of speech to encourage unlawful acts is not enough to punish it, according to the Supreme Court.
Punishable incitement must “specifically advocate” for listeners to take unlawful action, give the crowd detailed instructions on how to break the law, or enlist the crowd to carry out a criminal act, the high court has said.
Under the Supreme Court’s Brandenburg test, speech cannot constitute incitement unless the speaker intends lawlessness to result.
Burn the heretic.
Surely there’s a “but” in there somewhere, though I’m not clicking that link. Fuck NBC.
Some will argue that Trump’s intent was evident in his use of words like “strength” and “fight.” That may be. Courts have protected arguably more violent speech in other cases. Statements such as “We’ll take the street again” and “If we catch any of you going into these racist stores, we’re going to break your damn neck” appear closer to advocating violence than the language in Trump’s speech.
There’s also the issue of “imminence” required for incitement. There was no reported violence at Trump’s speech, which was at the Ellipse. The Capitol is more than a mile away. The invasion of the Capitol clearly happened after the rally, but not seconds after the rally, and not in the same place as the rally.
Even if there is proof Trump “intended” to cause violence with his speech, and even if there is proof that the violence he intended to cause was storming the Capitol, there is potentially an issue of whether the violence was “imminent” enough to be criminal.
Some will conclude that words like “fight” and “strength” gave the crowd the detailed instructions to violently enter the Capitol building. The Senate can still convict even if reasonable minds can differ on these factual conclusions. A criminal jury must be unanimous.
A criminal jury is bound by the reasonable doubt standard. The Senate is not. It is bound by the two-thirds supermajority vote standard and not much else.
That’s the closest you’ll see to a waffle in the article.
Broken clocks and all.
“The invasion of the Capitol clearly happened after the rally, but not seconds after the rally, and not in the same place as the rally.”
In point of fact, I believe the invasion of the Capitol began while Trump was still talking one mile away.
We live in a real time world.
OT: I about bit a hole through my tongue when my MIL took it upon herself to chastise us for planning on attending church this weekend.
MiL: “This crisis is as bad as it has ever been, don’t you know?”
Wife: “No, we don’t watch the news here”
MiL:”Oh, well it’s just getting really bad. You’re not planning on taking the baby, are you?”
Wife:”Well, I don’t know what else I’d do with her.”
MIL: “I just, I don’t think it’s a good idea when it’s going to be the worst yet over the next 2 to 3 months.”
At that point, I was doing everything I could to avoid telling her to get the hell out of my house and stop harassing my family. Thankfully I had my work laptop with me and could bury myself in work, because I was seething mad. I’m a spiteful person, so you know i’ma gonna get some Jesus in my life this Sunday. Thankfully, wife is probably more pissed about it than I am.
Sounds just like my mom. Are we related?
It’s funny. I don’t like going to church and I’m agnostic, but I’m finding myself with a desire to go.
Maybe I’m just being contrarian, or maybe I’m having a hard time reconciling my philosophical framework without a higher power involved.
Who knew rebelling against The Man would be simply attending church? Well, Martin Luther, Zwingli, et al aside…
Yeah I had a call an hour ago with someone who all of a sudden had to get off because Governor Sainted Klansman was giving his COVID Update. Like, this dude had to reschedule a work call so he could watch Coonman live, instead of reading the fucking press release.
I watched one of those. It’s just Ralphie stroking his own ego.
The governor said getting the vaccine is the quickest way to recover the economy and get life back to normal.
That’s not the quickest way, but you know that.
And in regard to something you mentioned this morning, there is something missing in this article.
Yeah, “Following my instructions is the quickest way to get my boot off your neck, Peasant. Unless you’d prefer I press harder.”
I think I watched maybe two of DeWine’s addresses live. Both were when there was a prediction of an extension of the stay at home order, or allowing bars/restaurants to reopen.
Watching any other time is not good for my blood pressure.
More Va bs.
The Department of General Services is preparing Capitol Grounds for possible unrest, which is closed starting Thursday, January 14 until Thursday, January 21.
Access to certain state buildings will be restricted from Saturday, January 16 through Thursday January 21.
DGS says these safety measures are subject to change based on the situation.
Safety concerns are also prompting Richmond Police to be on high alert ahead of Lobby Day.
Signs banning firearms will be placed around the city to remind people that they are banned at permitted events as well as areas near permitted events.
Signs stop people with violent intent. It is known.
Safety my ass. That’s primarily to keep the sheep away from their betters during the legislative session.
The House is virtual, the Senate is at the Science Museum.
VCDL should totally dismount the caravans and do a livestream from the chamber since they aren’t using it.
So she didn’t buy the table?
I just love Turkish ceramics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iznik_pottery
I think she did – she had her husband back home wire the money and the table was shipped.
My state is at it again. New Jersey Government Seizes $165,000 from Atilis Gym’s Bank Account — 100% of Gym’s Assets for ‘Crime’ of Remaining Open
The only way to stop this is wide scale civil disobedience by the small business owners.
I hope they converted some to bitcoin first, lol. But really, those m-fers. They probably laugh and joke to each other while they are filing the paperwork to destroy someone else’s livelihood.
You can bring that statement to the bank, because it’s money.
Under asset forfeiture?
Regardless, that’s a great way to make people start storing cash in assets and avoiding the banks.
That and increase the violence. That’s fucking evil.
Yep. Remember when we were saying people had too much to lose? That’s one way to change that real fast.
By the way, cool story and great pictures.
My state is at it again. New Jersey Government Seizes $165,000 from Atilis Gym’s Bank Account — 100% of Gym’s Assets for ‘Crime’ of Remaining Open
I [REDACTED]. Given the opportunity, [REDACTED] followed by [REDACTED] and then a good dose of [REDACTED].
asymmetric warfare
Uh, supposed to be a reply to Drake above.
“My goal is to both strike a blow to companies that would censor/cancel, economically for sure, and also data collection wise. ”
We have enough talent here that we could just write our own versions of everything. We can put it all on a server and keep it in someone’s closet. I hear that’s the way really important people do it.
Sorry, folks, but I want to vent for a moment. I swear to God, if I hear another person blame the Great COVID Upsurge of 2021 on “carelessness” or “holiday gatherings”, I’m going to want to slap them. A winter upsurge isn’t a surprise to anyone who has paid attention. I remember discussing it with a colleague in fucking April of last year. And yet the assholes who pat themselves on the back about “following the science” seem to think this is some sort of unexpected and scandalous surprise.
The COVID freaks in my life are already pivoting to Vaccine is Here, We’re Almost Through. I figure it will be the Landmark Achievement of Kindly Uncle Joe’s Wonderful First 100 Days.
As an engineer, and of a very scientific mindset, I have had it up to my ears with people telling me how much they “understand science” and “love science” and “respect science.”
I have literally spent my life since I was in first grade learning how to understand the world around me through the scientific method. I have spent years of my life and tens of thousands of dollars being educated in the methods of science and engineering. I have built a career on taking factual observations about the natural world and synthesizing them together with theoretical propositions and practical techniques into real processes that create new value in the world.
And a bunch of assholes show up on Twitter and Facebook telling me how much they love it because Bill Nye or Neil deGrasse Tyson had a fun TV show, and that people who disagree with them politically must not LOVE THA SCIENCE? Fuck those people, frankly.
It would be like me professing to be a great librettist or composer because I really enjoyed 9th grade English and my time in the high school Orchestra.
Paste that in FB and Twitter…verbatim. Please.
Not gonna do that ever.
1. I don’t use them
2. Ironically, doing that might well end my career and ruin so much that I hold dear.
I hope I didn’t come off as too much of an asshole above, and I am really glad that some people who don’t specialize in science can appreciate its contributions and complexity and beauty, but it’s the faux signaling and attempt to associate their opinions with science as if it were a set of religious tenets to be agreed with and prayed to that bothers me.
It doesn’t bother me, at least. Look, you’ve worked hard to learn your field. And it’s probably a major element of who you are as a person. I could see getting upset with people who try to co-opt so much of what you’ve worked for and so much of who you are to gain a couple of cheap political points.
And my guess is, given how committed you seem to be to the scientific approach, that if someone said something you knew to be wrong, you’d show them that they were wrong. You’d explain to them why what they were saying wasn’t right. That’s the scientific approach. My guess is you wouldn’t say “I’m a scientist. Shut up and obey me.”, which seems to be the approach favored by the “I fucking love science” crowd.
Seconded.
My strength in statistics is fairly weak beyond the basics, but my differential equations background went into post-grad territory and I spent a good decade in the field theory/electromagnetics end of electrical engineering, which is more similar to black arts than engineering.
I think what offends me most is the MOTHER-FUCKING COMPUTER MODELS. I spent a few years working on models to simulate electromagnetic cavity filters and antennas. The math is beyond complex and has to be simplified way, way down in order to be of any practical use. In doing so, you give up a significant amount of accuracy as you dump everything beyond a second order effect. As such, prototyping and empirical results become absolutely necessary. And that’s just for a machined and silver-plated block of aluminum about 6 inches by 4 inches by 12 inches that behaves in accordance with strict physical laws of nature.
Now, they produce computer models for everything which are based on suspect observations, half-baked theories, and natural processes where chaos comes into play and the idiots treat it like the Newest Testaments handed down from God. Not only that, scientists who should fucking know better point at that shit at pronounce BEHOLD! SCIENCE! BOW DOWN AND OBEY!
Makes me livid beyond belief.
And they dismiss the empirical results when they don’t conform to the model.
That’s a cardinal sin.
Absolutely. And I admire your abilities in EE. Black magic is right, as you get further and further along with that stuff.
Your point about giving up accuracy as you leave behind higher order effects due to the need to simplify the model to get it to run in a reasonable time or with existing hardware is important.
It feels like the models that pass for science in some –some, not all– of these studies are the most basic linear models that will miss huge amounts of nuance.
Add to that the willingness to ignore contradictory results, and so very little of it is worth a shit.
Plus: fitting a curve is not a model. Models need to be based on some real understanding (flawed or incomplete as it may be) of the real processes underlying the observed effects.
For my favorite rant on shitty science and regulatory action, look into the Radon Linear No-Threshold Theory and how the EPA implemented it.
It feels like the models that pass for science in some –some, not all– of these studies are the most basic linear models that will miss huge amounts of nuance.
This comports with my experience taking a social science stats class. “Enter data into SPSS, massage where necessary, don’t bother understanding what you’re doing”
Guilty until proven innocent
Delta Air Lines won’t allow travelers flying to the airports serving the Washington metropolitan area to check firearms on flights ahead of President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration, CEO Ed Bastian told CNBC on Thursday.
The new policy, which starts this weekend and runs through next week, comes after last week’s deadly pro-Trump riot at the U.S. Capitol and a spate of politically motivated disturbances on flights and at airports. Law enforcement authorized to carry firearms will be exempt.
“We’re all on high alert based on the events over the last couple of weeks in Washington,” Bastian said in an interview on “Squawk Box.”
Who needs the Stasi, when the Citizens’ Brigades voluntarily put the boot to our necks?
Unbelievers will be hunted down and dealt with.
I turned on the radio for just a moment while going to lunch.
Glenn Beck was begging, literally begging, people to not do anything stupid next week.
The National Mall is closed to all peasants. I mean citizens. Closed to all citizens.
last week’s deadly pro-Trump riot
Hm…
Haha, “runs through next week.”
Now do, “two weeks to flatten the curve.”
Biden’s capitol must be perpetually militarized for all the unity and healing he is going to impose on us.
Hes gonna stand there, addressing an empty National Mall in an imperial capital that’s totally locked down, surrounded by handpicked troops in full battle rattle that he himself termed a “ring of steel” and promise to defend democracy against fascism.
They’ll pack in some press and congress critters, and use tight shots to make it look like it’s crowded. Then a day later you’ll get a wide view someone took on their phone.
I think its more likely they play up the DOMESTIC TERROR THREAT plus DEADLY PANDEMIC angle and really emphasize what Serious, Dangerous, Unprecedented Times these are as they attempt to whip up support for their crushing of the deplorables.
He’ll then drop dead of irony poisoning, and in comes Harris.
Like this?
No booze on American.
Between January 16 and January 21, 2021, American Airlines is suspending alcoholic beverage service on flights to & from DC area airports (BWI, DCA, and IAD)
I swear to God, if I hear another person blame the Great COVID Upsurge of 2021 on “carelessness” or “holiday gatherings”, I’m going to want to slap them.
Tell them nobody in California wears a mask, and that’s why they’re so overwhelmed. See if you can get them to have an aneurysm.
Tom Woods has been including graphs in a lot of his daily e-mails lately. Now, I don’t know if he’s cherry-picking but all the graphs have basically the same shape, regardless of state, country, etc. EVERY. SINGLE. ONE.
What if uh…..uh……um…..virus gonna virus?
Of course Tom’s graphs are false. Facebook and youtube fact checked and removed one of his talks where he goes over them.
Yeah, he moved his private members’ group off FB after that.
I dont think they are all the same, but there are only a few patterns and none of them match up with government dictates.
The mosaics and frescos at Kariye;
Kariye eleison down the road that you must travel?
eating illegal stuffed mussels from questionable street vendors
Did you pull them from a shell?
*grabs firmly, squeezes Ted’s neck*
The previous reference wasn’t worse?
Keep it up, mister and see where that road takes you.
It’s a weird experience, not being in your home country during times of historical significance.
Yeah; I was studying in Russia when the Rodney King riots happened.
On the other hand, I was visiting my German relatives in the summer of 1989, which was a very significant time. Hungary was opening up its border with Austria, and East Germans realized they could get to the West that way. So East Germany stopped issuing visas to Hungary, stranding a bunch of East Germans in Czechoslovakia, who responded by flooding the grounds of the West German embassy and setting up a tent city.
I was in Switzerland for a wedding a few years ago, and I was struck with the feeling of how nice it was to be in a country that was at war with *no one, anywhere*.
Our semester abroad in Russia had an orientation in Helsinki, from which we took the train to St. Petersburg. I’ve always wanted to get back to Finland.
As an engineer, and of a very scientific mindset, I have had it up to my ears with people telling me how much they “understand science” and “love science” and “respect science.”
Nothing shows true devotion to the SCIENCE-tistic method like desperate appeals to fear and emotionalism.
Science is an article of faith and love, not some silly exercise in the testing of hypotheses.
Papiere, bitte (email from the office manager back in DC)
Fun read KK. Thx
Tom Woods has been including graphs in a lot of his daily e-mails lately. Now, I don’t know if he’s cherry-picking but all the graphs have basically the same shape, regardless of state, country, etc. EVERY. SINGLE. ONE.
It seems to me (strictly on an intuitive level) the most meaningful correlation is probably population density. In Montana, I believe we are still far below a 1 per thousand overall mortality rate. I haven’t seen a number recently, most likely because it isn’t scary enough to broadcast.
I hope I didn’t come off as too much of an asshole above
Nope.
We need a lot more of that.
I’ve always wanted to get back to Finland.
One of the few parts of the world I actually have a serious interest in visiting is that region; Finland and the Baltic states.
I think its more likely they play up the DOMESTIC TERROR THREAT plus DEADLY PANDEMIC angle and really emphasize what Serious, Dangerous, Unprecedented Times these are as they attempt to whip up support for their crushing of the deplorables.
Yes. Only SERIOUS LEADERS intent on SERIOUS GOVERNANCE would forego the great outpouring of relief and gratitude represented by millions of ecstatic Americans paying obeisance to the New Order in person. The thronging can wait.
Meanwhile, there are lists to be made, and axes to be honed.
I think they’re going to gore a few oxen while they’re at it.
Thank you all for reading!
This is a great read. Thanks.
Thanks Kristen. This is an interesting travelogue. It looks like it was a good trip.