{"id":23554,"date":"2017-04-14T08:52:32","date_gmt":"2017-04-14T13:52:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=23554"},"modified":"2017-04-14T08:52:32","modified_gmt":"2017-04-14T13:52:32","slug":"america-the-waning-days","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=23554","title":{"rendered":"America, the Waning Days"},"content":{"rendered":"
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America, the Waning Days<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n
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\nFrederick Carl Frieseke Girl In Blue Arranging Flowers <\/b>1915<\/center>Potential earthquakes and black swans are right ahead of us. What else is new? On April 16, Turkey has a referendum to decide whether Erdogan will become de facto supreme ruler. What happens if he loses the referendum is completely unclear, undiscussed even, but it\u2019s obvious a loss would have the country shake on its already shaky foundations.<\/p>\n

The Turkish economy is in horrible shape and Erdogan\u2019s post-coup firings (hundreds of thousands) and jailings (tens of thousands) have made large parts of society unattended. The biggest of which may well be the army; you can\u2019t fire large numbers of officers and pilots and expect to retain the same strike effectiveness.<\/p>\n

Erdogan\u2019s ongoing war on the Kurds is also turning against him, or at least internationally. Both Russia and the US acknowledge the important role Kurdish forces play in the battle against ISIS, and they\u2019re not going to turn against them. So while Turkey demands a major role in neighboring Syria, it has essentially been put off-side, or benched.<\/p>\n

Russia maintains (some of) its boycotts of Turkish products ($260 million worth of tomatoes) that were the result of Erdogan downing a Russian jet in late 2015, and the refuses to deliver arch-enemy G\u00fclen, despite Michael Flynn\u2019s best efforts. This means, by the way, that the country simply hasn\u2019t provided irrefutable proof of the man\u2019s role in the coup (if it was ever a real coup).<\/p>\n

If Erdogan cannot come up a winner on Sunday, he would lose a lot of face. And he might lose more than that. Of course one must question if it\u2019s even a option that the Turkish people vote NO, and that that would subsequently be announced as the referendum result. He controls just about anything in the country already; why not this too, by right or by might?!<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

America, the Waning Days Frederick Carl Frieseke Girl In Blue Arranging Flowers 1915Potential earthquakes and black swans are right ahead of us. What else is new? On April 16, Turkey has a referendum to decide whether Erdogan will become de facto supreme ruler. What happens if he loses the referendum is completely unclear, undiscussed even, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[35,77,259,333,660,13924,5177,10522,818,862],"class_list":["post-23554","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-assad","tag-black-swan","tag-empire","tag-france","tag-putin","tag-raul-ilargi-meijer","tag-the-automatic-earth","tag-trump","tag-turkey","tag-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23554","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23554"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23554\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23555,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23554\/revisions\/23555"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}