Bizzare fairytail housing development in Turkey turns into ghost town
PigMine 7
732 houses times $400K each comes to not quite $300 million. While it's not a billion dollar disaster, it's still a big chunk of change. I guess this is what happens when people with excess money start speculating on wild cards. Kind of like venture capital in this country.
No, it's not a miniature, it shows up on Google Maps.
Via RT (Putin's propaganda department, in case you didn't know).
A lot of the Boomers on social media are griping about all the weather talk. "Bah! It barely got above zero in July when we were kids, and we didn't call it any kinda 'polar vortex'! We called it 'winter' and went skinny dipping in the old liquid methane swimming hole!" - Tam
Get in the car to go to lunch, turn on the radio and what's this? It sounds like Russian. I wasn't aware of any Russian language radio stations in our neck of the woods. Could this be coming from Russia? I mean we got that Polar Vortex thing going on, bringing real arctic weather to the Midwest, Maybe somethin's goin' on with ionosphere and I'm picking up a broadcast from Moscow.
Well, no, turns out it was a local station, 1010AM, supposedly some kind of Christian station. I mean that's what the web site says, but I don't understand Russian so I have no idea what they are actually saying.
Still kind of surprising. There seem to be almost as many Spanish language radio stations as English, but I hadn't heard any other language until today.
The push buttons at the bottom of the front panel are kind of curious. They are labeled O, P, L, M, S & US. L, M & S likely refer to Long, Medium and Short wave bands. US might refer to the FM band. O & P are anybody's guess. Does this mean that Europe didn't have FM?
Reader Eck! pointed out that the moonshiner's car radio was an BC603 tank radio from WW2. With a little digging I figured out that the moonshiner's radio was only a receiver. The complete Sherman radio set (shown above) consisted of one transmitter (the big box on the left) and two receivers (the two smaller boxes on the right, the ones with the military grade speaker grills) (and the push buttons).
The whole thing weighed 800 pounds and was mounted in the back of the turret (the white box opposite the gun). The bulge that makes up the back of the turret is for this radio.
Dad vs. the Dress Code, an essay by Elizabeth Crook is assigned reading from Iaman's book club. It's quite the tale, and very instructive about people and politics.
Update May 2019 added "San Marcos" so I can find it next time I go looking for it.
Russia has been flying TU-160's to Venezuela occasionally ever since Hugo Chavez came into power. The TU-160 is a supersonic bomber. It's the only large supersonic aircraft still flying. It's obsolete as weapon, but it is still big and impressive and so these flights make good propaganda.
La Orchila is about 80 miles off the coast of Veneuela and about 30 miles east of Los Roches archipelago, which is a National Park.
My take on this whole thing is that while the upper class was getting along very well in Venezuela before Hugo, the poor were not, and their frustration / desperation was what brought Hugo into power. Now we have Maduro in power, and he doesn't seem to understand the first thing about business, which is why oil production has fallen off and whole country seems to be going to hell. You'd think hanging with Putin he'd figure out that he needs to get his oil business running properly.
But maybe Putin is waiting until Maduro is really desperate so he can step in and save his sorry ass, for a price naturally. Can't really blame Putin for messing about with Venezuela, not after all the messing we (the USA) have done in his neighborhood (the Ukraine). Besides, all these despots need to stick together. Hah. Like they would. Stab each other in the back first chance they get more likely.
I suspect that property rights are at the root of this whole debacle. Pretty much all of Latin America runs on a 15th century model of property rights where the governor doles out land to his cronies and everybody else is screwed. As long as the upper class continues to squash the peasants, the communists are going to have people who are willing to listen to their bullshit, which is where we get revolutionaries.
If you want things to change, you need to give people an opportunity to crawl out of their hole without getting crushed in the process. Problem is, the upper class think they have to give up something, but if they can give the peasants an opportunity, they will reap rewards much greater than anything they are getting now. Hard to imagine, and that, I think, is the problem.
I suppose you might call this a 'slice of life' film. We have an upper class family in Mexico, probably Mexico City, back in 1970 and some of their trials and tribulations, but our viewpoint is from one of their servants. Heartwrenching.
