Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Norman Solomon, a longtime peace activist, explains the magician’s trick.

A secret Pakistan cable

An analysis of related words in 161 languages suggests their shared roots lie in the Middle East – a conclusion that also fits with DNA evidence By  Jason Arunn Murugesu 27 July 2023 The common ancestor of Indo-European languages, which are now spoken by close to half the world’s population, was spoken in the eastern Mediterranean around 8000 years ago, according to an analysis of related words. Indo-European languages, spanning from English to Sanskrit, have long been thought to share a common ancestor. The first linguist to make this link, William Jones, said in a lecture in 1786 that no linguist could examine Greek, Latin and Sanskrit together “without believing them to have sprung” from some common ancestor. But researchers have struggled to agree on the origin story of this so-called proto-Indo-European language, says  Paul Heggarty , who is now at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. There are two main hypotheses, he says. The first suggests that the language orig...

“The bank robber John Dillinger is one of history’s most famous thieves, absconding with the equivalent today of about $7 million. You’d think that if someone had stolen $7 million on each of 7 million separate crime sprees, you would have heard about it, right? But you would be wrong. In 2020, the RAND Corporation, a think tank in Santa Monica, California,  released a study with the humdrum title “Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018.” RAND itself resides at the center of America’s establishment. In the decades following its founding after World War II, it was largely funded by and served the needs of the military-industrial complex. Daniel Ellsberg was working at RAND when he leaked the Pentagon Papers, which he had access to because RAND possessed several copies. Incredibly enough, this dreary-sounding paper describes what might be the largest material theft since human civilization began. It examines a simple question: If U.S. income inequality had remained at its 1975 leve...

I am not a follower of Arabic pop, but it is good to have an idea of what is produced and what sections of ‘the masses’ watch and listen to.  The article dates back to 2020.  Rotana, youtube, new ‘urban music’ and more

Danny Katch: “Socialism is a society whose top priority is meeting all of its people’s needs, ranging from food, shelter, and health care, to art, culture, and companionship. In contrast, capitalism only cares about any of that basic human necessities stuff to the extent that money can be made of it.” Nathan J. Robinson: “ Because it’s not that capitalism never produces food—you can go to the grocery store—it’s not that capitalism never produces any kind of shelter—you can rent an apartment—it is that it provides it to the extent that money can be made off it, and the moment those human imperatives of the basic needs conflict with the money being made, the money will come above basic needs.” I do not think that is a full explanation; I think it is partially accurate because it forgets that capitalism also provides certain things and maintains others – erosion but not the dismantling of the welfare system, for example – to keep the social peace, and thus the system protects itself from ...

“So we can indeed call those folk barbarians by the rules of reason but not in comparison with ourselves, who surpass them in every kind of barbarism.” ( “Nous les pouvons donc bien appeler barbares eu égard aux règles de la raison, mais non pas eu égard à nous, qui les sur-passons en toute sorte de barbarité.”) —Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), Of Cannibals And that was before ‘the Enlightenment’, the guillotine, colonialism, the genocide of the red Indians, the Atlantic slave trade and the plantations, the American civil war, the Russian gulag, the British gulag in Kenya, the Holocaust, the two world wars, 

Expensive submarine sea crossing service  Related Al-Hudood and free speech in Jordan

 ” إن   الناس   يصنعون   تاريخهم   بأيديهم،   ولكن   لا   يصنعونه   على   هواهم .  إنهم   لا   يصنعونه   في   ظروف   يختارونها   هم بأنفسهم   بل   في   ظروفٍ  يُواجَهونَ   بها  ومُعطاة   ومنقولة   لهم   مباشرةً   من   الماضي .  إن   تقاليد   جميع   الأجيال   الغابرة تجثم  كالكابوس   في   أدمغة   الأحياء .  وعندما   يبدو   هؤلاء   منشغلين   فقط   بتغيير   أنفسهم   والأشياء   المحيطة   بهم،   في خلق   شيء   لم   يكن   له   وجود   من   قبل،   عند   ذلك   بالضبط،   في   فترات   الأزمات   الثورية   كهذه   على   وجه   التحديد،  نراهم يلجؤون   في   وجل   وسحر   إلى   استحضار   أرواح   الماضي   لتخدم   مقاصدهم،   ويس...

I think it is a very good review of Christopher Nolan’s movie Oppenheimer .

Boris Kagarlitsky

Like other tools, NATO has been an arm of US-led imperialism, and using the liberal language,  acting “as a ratings agency for the European Union in Eastern Europe, declaring countries secure for development and investment. The organization pushed would-be partners to adhere to a liberal, pro-market creed.” Furthermore, “ NATO  has stymied the emergence of any semiautonomous European force capable of independent action... In fact,  NATO  is working exactly as it was designed by  postwar U.S. planners , drawing Europe into a dependency on American power that reduces its room for manoeuvre.” “The war [in Ukraine] serves as a dress rehearsal for U.S. confrontation with China, in which European support cannot be so easily counted on.” And “left parties in Europe, historically critical of militarism and American power, have overwhelmingly enlisted in the defense of the West…” In sum, NATO is about defence of expansion. ********* If Russia sought to divide E...

“ Ms. Manthay and the other uninvited settlers are part of the Landless Workers Movement, perhaps the world’s largest Marxist-inspired movement operating within a democracy and, after 40 years of sometimes bloody land occupations, a major political, social and cultural force in Brazil. The movement, led by activists who call themselves militants, organizes hundreds of thousands of Brazil’s poor to take unused land from the rich, settle it and farm it, often as large collectives. They are reversing, they say, the deep inequality fed by Brazil’s historically uneven distribution of land. While leftists embrace the cause — the movement’s red hats depicting a couple holding a machete aloft have become commonplace at hipster bars — many Brazilians view it as communist and criminal. That has created a dilemma for the new leftist president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a longtime movement supporter who is now trying to build bridges in Congress and the powerful agriculture industry. Across L...

  طبقة حاكمة إقليمية ومصالح متشابكة

An archeological discovery “ The slave trade only began from there in 1663 when King Charles II granted a charter to the Company of Royal Adventurers of England Trading into Africa (later the Royal African Company). He gave it monopoly rights over the trade in human beings. It was only in English hands for another two years before the Dutch seized it but Fort Kormantine played a key role in the initial stages of the slave trade.”

  ملف كبير مفصل عن الوضع في تونس . لا أتفق مع كل ما جاء فيه ولكن المقالات تعطي صورة جيدة. 

Interesting development in this small country , but the geopolitics of it is of a significance in today’s shifting balance of forces. The defeat of French imperialism in the Sahel is welcomed, but having hopes in the Russian regime although understandable is delusional.  It reminds me of some Jordanian Stalinists who have sided with Russia in its invasion of Ukraine. They too are delusional. Related Mapping the Sahel Friends in state terror

“ Anyone who has read Widgery’s report on Bloody Sunday or Hutton’s report on David Kelly will recognize the methodology at work. Instead of beginning with the evidence and proceeding step by step until you reach a set of conclusions, you begin with the conclusions you want to reach and torture the evidence until it signs a full confession. This methodology can be used to condemn the innocent just as easily as it can be used to absolve the guilty.” Lawfare in the UK

  ألمانيا والمملكة المتحدة وفرنسا

Interview with Sevda Karaca Interview with Iskender Bayhan