Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Last summer, the mayor of San Antonio, Ron Nirenberg, ordered all schools closed until September 7 as a mitigation measure against the spread of the coronavirus. Texas had a major outbreak this summer, one of the country’s worst hot spots. Texas has had over 800,000 cases and 16,444 deaths. Fundamentalist […]
Archives for October 2020
The Catastrophic Saudi War in Yemen heads for more Disasters, for Yemenis
By Yaseen Tamimi | – ( Middle East Monitor) – The commander of the Southern Transitional Council in Yemen, Aidarus Al-Zoubaidi, appeared last month in the guise of a full-fledged president, surrounded by Saudi Arabian guards, meeting figures who are said to be separatist southerners and raising the separatist flag alongside the Saudi flag. All […]
Free at Last! How my Electric Car let me Escape the clutches of Big Carbon and Mideast Oil Dictatorships
Montreal (Special to Informed Comment) – As someone who regularly teaches courses on both Middle Eastern and environmental subjects, I have long been keenly aware of the double implications of participating in an economy that simultaneously destroys the planet while supporting human rights-abusing dictatorships. From the moment the first electric vehicles hit the market I […]
Surviving the long Trump Pandemic+ or, 210,000 didn’t Have to Die
(Tomdispatch.com ) – After all these months and 210,000 deaths, you’d think I’d be used to it all, but I’m not. It doesn’t seem even a little normal yet. I’m still full of absences, missing so much I used to take for granted: hugs and handshakes, rooms crowded for funerals and weddings, potluck dinners and […]
How ExxonMobil’s plan to Surge its CO2 output is Like Trump’s plan to Deal with the Coronavirus
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Trump made a mad dash to escape his hospital room at Walter Reed, browbeating his military physicians into letting him go while he was pumped full of a cocktail of potions that included euphoria- and delusion-inducing steroids. His lungs laboring with broken glass syndrome, he vaulted up the stairs to […]
More Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: ‘With soul afire, words flowing like a sea’
In 1882 Edward Henry Whinfield (d. 1922) brought out a bilingual Persian and English edition of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, based on eight medieval manuscripts. It is really his own selection, since he admits he played down the wine poetry (!), and several of his manuscripts are late and Indian. Whinfield did not know […]
Saudi Arabia continues to conceal its human rights abuses
By Tasnim Nazeer ( Middle East Monitor ) – Two years since the brutal death of respected journalist Jamal Khashoggi, why has Saudi Arabia still not been held to account? Khashoggi, a veteran journalist from Saudi Arabia, was last seen entering the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul in October 2018, where he was due to obtain […]
Two guises of racism, disdain as well as envy
Amsterdam (Special to Informed Comment) – Discussions still focus on who can and who cannot be called racist, while the question of what racism actually is, is posed much less and is often fobbed off with vague descriptions in the direction of ‘believing population groups to be inferior’. Looking down on people is of course […]
Ban Plastics! We estimate there are up to 14 million tonnes of microplastics on the seafloor. It’s worse than we thought
By Britta Denise Hardesty, Chris Wilcox and Justine Barrett | – Nowhere, it seems, is immune from plastic pollution: plastic has been reported in the high Arctic oceans, in the sea ice around Antarctica and even in the world’s deepest waters of the Mariana Trench. But just how bad is the problem? Our new research […]
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