NM's blog

Mayfair means money

In 2025,  Elon Musk  received the median Tesla worker’s pay every 4.23 seconds. He received  over 2.5m times as much compensation at  Tesla  as the company’s average worker. The report also looks at  Donald Trump ’s  income  in 2025. At  $2.2bn , largely from his crypto holdings, Trump’s income rose nearly 254% from 2024. The median US worker would require 43,154 years to earn what Trump received in 2025. That's what the far-right and the neofascists applaud and justify, including their support of imperialist aggressions.

Cuba: a tiny island nation that upset U.S. hegemony through the power of example. Even as a revolutionary, Castro often spoke in radical-liberal tones about freedom, about democracy, about the rule of law. He insisted that these values could not be realized without the economic justice of state-distributed medicine, of education, of collective ownership of Cuban energy and utilities. “We haven’t chosen this struggle,” said El Presidenté while wearing military fatigues and brandishing a rifle in 1967; “It’s been imposed on us.” As a statesman, Castro was at his best when he asserted how socialism was needed to achieve the liberal ideals that were stymied under free-market capitalism. At the same time, El Presidenté was at his worst as a dictator who ruled undemocratically. The customary military fatigues; the strident hours-long speeches; the greying beard: by the end of the 20th century, they all appeared the gamey trappings of an aging autocrat. Same-sex relations were officially decr...

A report by the Transnational Institute  (a pdf document)

From Rami Abou Jamous's diary

The army resides in the DNA of Israeli society. It is in the education system and the media, in cinema, television and the myriad images that surround society.  My oldest sister left the country with her family just before her eldest son turned 16 so that he wouldn't be drafted into the IDF. — Israeli filmmaker Netalie Braun

Some topped Palestine. Others were killed before their results were announced Related Fatima Nofal gave birth to Zaid after losing three sons in an Israeli air strike in 2023. Fifteen months later, another Israeli strike killed him in central Gaza.

In her 2024 book “Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Freedom to Palestinians,” Israeli scholar Maya Wind argues that Israeli universities have long helped produce knowledge that sustains Israel’s rule over Palestinians while presenting themselves as liberal, democratic institutions.  Amid an increase in academic partnerships between U.S. and Israeli universities , Wind  told +972  last August that the latter “are in fact deeply implicated in Israeli settler colonialism and now in genocide” — not least because entire academic disciplines “subordinate their knowledge production to the needs of the Israeli state.” 

Andrew Zimmern, a TV host and food system advocate: “I  learned everything I needed to learn about Moroccan culture in that room. That the Muslim women took sanctuary in that kitchen… it changed the way I looked at womanhood.” How many Moroccan women has Zimmern seen or known in his life? There is no Western-like Moroccan women with 'Western culture' or a hybrid of cultures, with a very similar culture in the kitchen, at work, without a headscarf. I have been in Morocco and at least in 5 of its cities from the south to the north. Zimmern knows next to nothing about 'Moroccan Muslim women in their diverse 'culture' and outlook .  Because he met one kind of women, he generalised his experience on all Moroccan women and the 'Moroccan culture': on the one on the field, the one in the factory, the one in shorts, the one wearing a headscarf, the student in jeans, the one in sport, the artist, the girl that takes her bras in a concert, the underground prostitutes …...