A few days ago Juan Cole asked the question: Who Lost Turkey? He discussed the situation and wonders why the current Turkish government is so resistant to admitting a crime of the Ottoman Empire. The current Republic of Turkey arose after a revolt against the Empire, which was collapsing as a result of being on the losing side of World War I.

If you don’t know, the principle criminal was Enver Pasha, the Ottoman minister of war. He had command of the Ottoman troops on the Caucasian Front in World War I and was soundly defeated by the Russian forces which included Armenian volunteer units. At the Battle of Sarıkamış his forces suffered 80% losses, approximately 75,000 troops. As a military commander he made Ambrose Burnside look like George S. Patton.

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John McKay has tagged me for The Pharyngula mutating genre meme

There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, “The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is…”. Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:

• You can leave them exactly as is.
• You can delete any one question.
• You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question. For instance, you could change “The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is…” to “The best time travel novel in Westerns is…”, or “The best time travel movie in SF/Fantasy is…”, or “The best romance novel in SF/Fantasy is…”.
• You can add a completely new question of your choice to the end of the list, as long as it is still in the form “The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is…”.
• You must have at least one question in your set, or you’ve gone extinct, and you must be able to answer it yourself, or you’re not viable.

Then answer your possibly mutant set of questions. Please do include a link back to the blog you got them from, to simplify tracing the ancestry, and include these instructions.

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But you might want rethink the swimming and surfing.

From the Associated Press some good news about fishing in the Gulf south of me: ‘It was like ‘Jaws” — 844-pound shark caught

The fight by Adlee Bruner and friends to pull the 11-foot mako shark onto the boat from the Gulf of Mexico took more than an hour on Saturday. But when they made it back to land, it was a record for the decades-old Destin Fishing Rodeo.

And when they cleaned the shark they didn’t find anything that could be readily identified as a swimmer or surfer…that they reported about…if they found a watch or cell phone they would have reported it…probably. Hemingway gave them a bad rap just because one ate the old man’s fish. Okay, so that leaping into boats thing isn’t very nice, but they didn’t ask us to visit.

If you are wondering why the generals don’t say anything until after they retire:

Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice

Any commissioned officer who uses contemptuous words against the President, the Vice President, Congress, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of a military department, the Secretary of Homeland Security, or the Governor or legislature of any State, Territory, Commonwealth, or possession in which he is on duty or present shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.

This is something that people have to keep in mind – you can’t bitch about the boss when you are an officer or you will be subject to a court martial. Remember, active duty officers, by military law, can only give you the good news, which makes their testimony rather worthless.