"About 16m tonnes of fertilisers were transported by sea from the region in 2024, according to the UN conference on trade and development (Unctad). After Russia, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, Iran is the fourth-largest global exporter of urea, the most widely used nitrogen fertiliser."

Just watched the new Frankenstein and super disappointed. After two years of genocide and a year of Trump Presidency what did people see in this film? I honestly don’t get it. It was dull, repetitive and unnecessarily blood covered from start to end. Shameful interpretation of a true masterpiece.

She wasn’t successful enough at being an unethical tool.

Trump is slowly firing all the unqualified women in his administration and replacing them with even more unqualified men.

If your idea of a good morning is a day when crude oil jumps 13% before 10 am, well, good morning!

I used to live in a house where we would pay rent but the lease owner wouldn’t give it to the landlord and lived off of it. In return, we would steal his food. I am telling you this because there was more dignity in that house than there is now in the Democratic party.

Here is the image, via @oliverdarcy.bsky.social, that stirred the White House's ire

No Kings marches barely made it to the online front pages… so what’s next?

I really feel like we are at the dawn of an age in which truth, the simple facts of the matter, will be more valuable than ever and also less accessible than ever.

Being governed by Trump & the crew is like being married to an unhinged husband. You ask him to stop drinking, he starts doing crack. You beg him to stop gambling, he robs a bank. Parents want you to work it out, for the sake of the kids. Landlord & neighbors want you to move out by the morning.

Here we go…

I have the translate function on all my social media apps. None ever asked me to download a language. BlueSky used to have translate but now it requesting to download languages which it claims would be used across all apps. Sounds like a design problem. @bsky.app

Am I the only one who thinks UK Saturday Night Live is going to be funnier than the US one. For 36 years I tried to get into this enterprise but couldn’t. But the UK one is making me giggle before it aired one skit.

"The conflation of capitalism with “free markets” is one of the most successful lies in human history. The historical and ongoing plunder of resources; the police, armies and death squads deployed against those who resist... all this is the opposite of “free”... coercive and extremely expensive."

One day we are going to interpret this war as the one in which the fossil fuel industry and its military industrial complex set themselves on fire, because they knew the were about to become obsolete due to climate change renewable alternatives.

Just as the lived experience of individual wealthy people is largely irrelevant when discussing the reality of capitalism, the lived experience of individual men is largely irrelevant when discussing patriarchy - and yet everything must be couched and approached softly for fear of setting one off.

Patriarchy is a bargain in which men gain structural power over non-men and the fact that the biggest obstacle to making this clear and doing something about it is the insecurity of men when this is made explicit tells you a lot about how that system operates and what they get out of it as a class.

In sci-fi, AI is always discussed in terms of its ability to make humans believe if it’s self conscious. And, whether it’s or isn’t is less important than whether people think it is or isn’t. From Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep to Klara And The Sun, the “outward personhood” counts more.

Israeli attacks kill 13 in Gaza, including 2 children and a pregnant woman https://aje.news/fvuhv9

If Palestinians had set fire to a synagogue in Israel you can bet news channels here in the UK would cover the story. But a mosque in the occupied West Bank set on fire by Israeli settlers? Nah.

Yep, that’s what we thought… wait till the panic at the gas pumps summer.

İran Devrim Muhafızları: Hürmüz Boğazı kapalı kalacak www.diken.com.tr/iran-devrim-...

It’s called Persian Gulf for a reason.

“At present Iran does not need a new leader – dead, alive or injured – to update the IRGC target base. It instead can watch Donald Trump tie himself in knots daily explaining what he is trying to achieve… for the moment if there is one country in this war that is rudderless, it is not Iran.”

Iranians are discovering that Netanyahu doesn’t hate the Islamic Republic but the Iranians themselves. He wants their oil and doesn’t care about the people.

People and the developers are just realizing that AI is nothing but an app. A simple boycott can bring it down to its knees. In virtual reality, everything is a fad, a Ponzi scam. There is no difference between the dynamics that govern the popularity of a porn site and ChatGPT.

Conflicts with Afghanistan, Iraq and now Iran all could have been resolved peacefully. The only reason why they became wars was because the West refuses to share wealth. Everything else, including capitalism itself or even the state of Israel is subordinate to this core greed.

I recommend the Abraham Joseph Heschel documentary titled Spiritual Audacity and compare his idea of witnessing injustice and taking action to everyone who is now closing their eyes and ears to what is happening in Palestine and Israel. We should ask wwhd?

A school in Tehran has been struck in US-Israeli attacks, according to Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei. Baghaei shared a video purportedly showing the aftermath without elaborating on the circumstances or the number of casualties.

Who is footing the bill?

For a president who ran for office promising to keep the United States out of wars, Trump has already launched attacks during his second term in: Ecuador Iran Iraq Nigeria Somalia Syria Venezuela Yemen and on civilians in boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean.

Trump says he doesn’t want to negotiate but don’t fall for it. It was Iran who rejects negotiations “The Iranians’ message is clear: that they have the ability to fight back, and believe that they must impose some kind of deterrence before any talks to stop the fighting, whenever that may be.“

At this point, we must admit that the government doesn't know why it went to war with Iran. Public knows though, they are not as stupid the White House thinks.

I understand the desire for unbiased news from the region but I've been teaching Islam & ME for over 2 decades & nobody did a better job than Al Jazeera covering the current affairs. Brand loyalty to BBC, CNN, NYT & other legacy media keeps you uninformed. Old habits die hard, don't die with them.

Ecclesiastes 10:08

The civilian flight from Dubai is going to be spectacular. The rich deserting the utopia and getting the poor stuck in a dystopia. Stay tuned for perfect ruin porn.

Easier to fight illegal wars that way.

What makes our children worth more than theirs?

Iran is bombing Dubai!

#TraderJoes which proudly advertises its teas as fair trade certified has no problem selling you cheese produced under apartheid by a genocidal state, and mislabeled as Feta even though only the cheese produced in Greece can be labeled as such.

the other state of the union... photo from Fall 2025 Thanksgiving trip to beloved NY.

Nobody believed that Israelis will commit genocide. Three years on, they still deny it against all evidence. So, my guess is the Europe will learn “fuck all” from the Ukrainian experience, be it in 2022 or 2026.