Saturday, June 8, 2013

Dongan Hills Ferry - Staten Island Ferry - 1945





View from a ferry boat main or car deck - 1940s

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It is Time to Go Erdogan – You are A Pig – No Longer as Great as You Think You Are in Turkey


Police Brutality in Turkey

As popular as Ed Koch was as mayor of New York City, when he went for a fourth term, he went in the Primary. Too much of a good thing in a democracy and it is time to go. Same thing for FDR and his fourth term. In retrospect it was too much and in the end, FDR’s ego was too much. America could have finished WWII without him. In fact it did anyway with his death.

The Prime Minister of Turkey has served, self-served for ten years and ego is no substitute for wise and serving government instead of the arrogant thing Prime Minister Erdogan now represents and what his subordinates think they can get away with in abusing passersby such as the infamous now “lady in red” assaulted by one of Erdogan’s police thugs, let along genuine protesters.

The Secular Turkey State needs no return to religion parasitism or phony holier than thou god culture to function.

The people want their park and not a monument to your ego asshole. It is time to go.



The protest found an immediate if reluctant icon in Ceyda Sungur, an academic who became known around the world as the “woman in the red dress” after being pepper-sprayed as she walked from her office past riot police. The poor soul – quite obviously an innocent – was targeted by some dreadful robocop who immediately thinks any girl without a headscarf is fair game. The photographer who captured the shocking image was later in hospital after being shot by police.

You might think that Erdogan would have agreed to halt the building but he went off on a trip around the North African capitals, expecting to be lionised there. He used to be, when he spoke up for the Palestianians, and provoked trouble with Israel, with which Turkey traditionally has good relations, but was snubbed by the Morrocan king.

On his return to Istanbul yesterday, Erodgan was in combative mood, telling supporters that the Taksim development will go ahead – although plans to demolish this Sixties equivalent of the South Bank and replace it with yet another shopping mall and concrete mosque have been shelved, it now seems, in favour of a new cultural centre.