When Lionel Messi raised the World Cup trophy in Qatar last year, a flood of media coverage completely unrelated to the sport emerged. Messi was draped with a bisht, a traditional ceremonial garment in the Arab world, during the awards ceremony. Numerous articles emerged to simply answer: what is a bisht? This demonstrated the severe …
Continue reading “The Shallowness of the Messi Bisht Controversy”
Almost a hundred years ago, a genocide was overshadowed by World War I. Around a million (Armenian claims add half a million and Turkish sources subtract half a million from the 1 million mark) ethnic Armenians were deliberately killed, many more fled, as forces of the teetering Ottoman Empire deported and killed an ethnicity they …
Continue reading “Türkiye nears a Century of Genocide Denial”
The peoples that formed the mighty Assyrian Empire clings to their culture in northern Iraq, Syria, and Türkiye (formerly known as Turkey). “Assyrian” is a broad category of Aramaic-speaking Christians since the earliest days of Christianity with three main branches today that all have different identities, which have led to difficulties in presenting a unified …
Continue reading “The Descendents of Ancient Empire Lives On, Barely”
The Lawrence Livermore National Library has now achieved nuclear fusion ignition. Twice. Fusion isn’t likely to replace the world’s energy needs for at least a decade or more, but the writing is on the wall. Hydrocarbons WILL be phased out. Any economy still reliant on hydrocarbons, or fossil fuels, will be relegated to irrelevancy. Saudi …
A million deaths is a statistic. From Riyad, deaths and casualties in the Gaza strip and throughout Israel seems so small. Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) isn’t worried about blood on the streets, he’s probably thinking about the tightrope he now has to walk to preserve Saudi Arabia’s status as the …