Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2014/11/15/1000-room-palace-for-turkey.html
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Not sure what the tower of babel has to do with this?
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Wow! It’s going to cost as much as the football stadium that a local town built to steal the regional team away from the big city and make the owners very happy, at the taxpayers expense!
And yes, it totally sounds like corruption, and there’s presumably lots more where that came from.
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Best part is, it was built on dedicated green space
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Sniff. A paltry sum.
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Is there any government anywhere that has been able to pass 10 continuous years in power without betraying much of what made them worth voting for in the first place?
That seems to be the upper limit before it all falls apart: left-wing, right-wing, centrist…
It’s why crowing at the idea that your opponents are down and out forever strikes me as madness. Can one imagine anything worse happening to your favored party than having it in power for decades?
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I’d be happy if any of the bastards lasted for 10 minutes. 
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Turkey seems like it’s becoming the late Ottoman Empire again – sans Empire. Not that Ataturk’s state was all that laudable either, but he really must be spinning in his grave.
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$313k/month of electricity?!? Is that a small aluminium smelting plant, or what?
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It is good to be the king
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Let them eat Güllaç.
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I guess nobody thought to integrate any energy saving technologies in there.
Imagine a janitor trying to turn off all those lights
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Of course, the Turkish word for white is Ak. So it’s not just the “white palace”, it’s also the “AK palace” as in “AK Party”…
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At least the time and the money being wasted on this is time and money that isn’t being used to support ISIS and otherwise encourage islamic fundamentalism.
If there was anyone with some backbone left in the Turkish army, I would say that now would be the ideal time to explore Turkey’s traditional method of upholding the constitution.
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What gets me is that the cost overrun, besides being due to the imported trees, is from the addition of a 250-room “private residence” somewhere in the 1000 room palace complex ( in contrast, the White House has 132 rooms total and the British Prime Minister has to make due with “over 100”). They essentially added a giant mansion to the palace complex. It really does raise the question for me of what all that space is supposed to be for.
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The cost of this palace is a drop in the bucket compared to what American corporations get away with annually in America. Seriously, ‘one point something billion’ is one single no-bid crony defense contractor fee or look-the-other-way tax break. Like to see a little more outrage at what is happening in America, this is small potatoes.
Nonetheless an interesting post Cory, as most of your’s are. Thanks 
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I didn’t say that. I suggest you re-read what I said. What has conspiracy theories got to do with it?
Clearly Erdogan is engaging in conspiracy theories… that’s pretty plain. But to imagine that the Islamic world (if you can even call it that) has some sort of lock on believing nutty things, then you’re willfully ignorant. We have a whole group of people right in our own back yard who believe the current president isn’t an American citizen and is in fact a trojan horse of islamo-fascist-crypto-communist through hell bent on destroying America from the inside. Some of these people are in actually positions of power within the US, so it’s not just some fringe nut-jobs… And they claim the mantle of christianity.
So when you point to a leader (who isn’t entirely popular in his own country) as some sort of evidence of the inherent insanity within Islamic thought, you are indeed saying that the religion is based on paranoid conspiracies. You are ignoring the exact same phenomenon right in our own back yard. The supposedly imminent “foreign” Islamic take over, with Sharia for all, is exactly the same paranoia that Erdogan is exhibiting as Turkey’s leader.
Religion isn’t necessarily the problem. The problem is how systems of power employ religion as a system of power and oppression. Religion can also be employed as a weapons against oppression.
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