Joseph P. Farrell – This week was another of those difficult weeks to schedule blogs, because so many people shared so many articles on all sorts of topics that it was rather difficult to decide what to blog about. Indeed, my usual practice is to delete files from week to week of articles I have not used, but this week is different, as I have retained many important stories for possible blogs in the future.

One of the themes that emerged in this week’s pile of emails and articles, however, was space, and more literal high strangeness. Accordingly, today we begin a two days’ worth of blogs relating to space stories that also emerged in the same context (more or less) as the strange Aldrin-Antarctica story.

The story begins with Sultan Erdogan’s newest policy reversal in a year that has seen many such reversals from the Sultan. Initially of course, the animus of Ankara was directed against Assad’s government in Damascus, and Erdogan was aiding the US-ISIS effort to topple that government, and along the way, collect a lot of swag from ISIS’s oil smuggling.

Then, of course, we had the Russian intervention, the sudden reversal of the radicals’ military fortunes thanks to a few well-laced Russian bombs and ordnance, then the downing of the Russian fighter by Turkey. Tensions rose, Russia placed an embargo on against Turkey and demanded an apology and compensation.

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