Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Let's banish the term 'Arab world'

How could any society fail to recognize that big problems are looming up, and why doesn’t the society take measures to alert disaster?  It was surprise  at this question that caused the archaeologist Joseph Tainter, in his 1988 book The Collapse of Complex Societies, to dismiss out of hand the possibility that complex societies could collapse as a result of depleting environmental resources.  Tainter considered it implausible that complex “societies [would] sit by and watch the encroaching weakness without taking corrective actions.”  But that is precisely what has often happened in the past, and what is happening under our eyes today.  Hence my chapter draws up a roadmap of group decision-making, starting with failure to perceive a problem in its initial stages, and ending with refusal to address the problem because of conflicts of interest and other reasons. — Jared Diamond

  Mindanao: a miniature history

An interview with the Lancet editor Richard Horton

The article can be accessed by typing the headline on google seach. Clashes break out in locked-down suburbs Related Rich of Saint-Tropez 'given coronavirus tests'

On the Frontlines of Inequality During Covid-19

"Amid this unprecedented crisis, we face a unique opportunity to transition to a regenerative civilizational paradigm which no longer breaches environmental boundaries in ways that make pandemics like this inevitable." Will Covid-19 end the age of Big Oil?

The same criminal state that bombed water treatment facilities and food-storage warehouses  in Iraq denies its citizens water during an epedemic. "I can't wash my hands—my water was cut off"

"Neoliberalism is dead, capitalism lives"

Doctors and activists face threats for reporting on coronavirus Take note though that according to WHO, Russia in 2013 had 8.2 hospital beds per 1,000 people. Germany had 8.3 me France 6.5. In 2016 Russia had 4 physicians per 1,000 people. Germany had 4.2 and France 3.2.

Coronavirus deaths are more than double, according to a FT analysis

The multidimentional crisis and alternative approaches

The  links  connecting  livestock  and  crops  to  germs  were  unforgettably illustrated  for  me  by  a  hospital  case  about  which  I  learned  through  a  physician  friend.  When  my  friend  was  an  inexperienced  young  doctor,  he  was called  into  a  hospital  room  to  deal  with  a  married  couple  stressed-out  by  a mysterious  illness.  It  did  not  help  that  the  couple  was  also  having  difficulty communicating  with  each  other,  and  with  my  friend.  The  husband  was  a small,  timid  man,  sick  with  pneumonia  caused  by  an  unidentified  microbe, and  with  only  limited  command  of  the  English  language.  Acting  as  translator  was  his  beautiful  wife,  worried  about  her  husband's  condition  and frightened  by  the  unfamiliar  hospital  environment.  My  friend  was  also stressed-out  from  a  long  week  of  hospital  work,  and  from  trying  to  figure out  what  unusual  risk  factors  might  have  brought  on  the  strange  il

A tale of three cities transformed by pandemics

What the world can learn from Kerala

Young Afghani women building ventilators from car parts

A new world won't emerge as if by magic

The Philosophers' Epidemic

The making of Putin's Russia

British supermarkets have been making contingency plans to cope with bouts of panic buying and potential disruption to food supplies caused by the coronavirus pandemic.  One country that the UK depends on more than any other for fresh fruit and veg is Spain, where around a quarter of fresh produce sold in UK supermarkets comes from in the summer.  But there are questions over how some Spanish companies are treating their migrant workers, who mainly come from Africa. "If you want to work like a slave, then there is a lot of work," one labourer, who did not want to be named, told the BBC. "But if you ask for your rights, then you can't work." The conditions are miserable. Some are paid below the minimum wage, live in shanty towns and work without breaks in greenhouses that are 50C inside. Source: watch a BBC report here Related Authorities in the town of Buñol, in Spain's Valencia province, have postponed a festival where thousands gather to t

"In recent weeks, some people have optimistically predicted that the Covid-19 outbreak will force governments to build  fairer economic systems." I have a problem with the language in the title and in the sentence above. "Fairer economic society" means a society that is already fair should become fairer. That is what the comparative form means.  "What history can teach us about building a fairer society after coronavirus"

The euro's corona crisis

In a  speech on Brexit  in Greenwich on 3 February, he made clear his views on Wuhan-style lockdowns. “We are starting to hear some bizarre autarkic rhetoric,” he said, “when barriers are going up, and when there is a risk that new diseases such as coronavirus will trigger a panic and a desire for market segregation that go beyond what is medically rational to the point of doing real and unnecessary economic damage. “Then, at that moment, humanity needs some government somewhere that is willing at least to make the case powerfully for freedom of exchange, some country ready to take off its Clark Kent spectacles and leap into the phone booth and emerge with its cloak flowing as the supercharged champion of the right of the populations of the Earth to buy and sell freely among each other.” Britain's [and others'] response to coronavirus