IMAGE/ by Codex Kingsborough/Wikimediacommons, in public domain
Modern history is replete with events so extraordinary, aberrant,
revolting, and surprising that one feels like exclaiming: how is this
possible!? Normally, this exclamation, as a generalized phenomenon, does
not arise at the moment such events take place, but years or centuries
later: how was this possible!? The astonishment is such that, often,
what has happened exceeds not only the limits of what is possible, but
also the limits of what is thinkable: how does the unthinkable happen or
how has it happened?
When the great art historian E. H. Gomrich set out to write (in six weeks) the book A Little History of the World for Young Readers (Eine Kurze Weltgeschichte für junge Leser),
published in Vienna in 1935, his aim was to teach history to young
people. The book was a huge success and was subsequently updated several
times. One of the leitmotifs of the narrative is precisely to show
young people how things that seem beyond the realm of the possible, or
even beyond the realm of the thinkable, often happen in history. And the
strangest thing is that such events are only known many years later.
For example, during World War II, neither Gomrich (who had emigrated
to England in 1936 and worked for the BBC) nor the vast majority of
Germans or Europeans knew or could imagine the horror of the crimes
being committed against the Jews (the Holocaust). There are many other
examples. How could anyone imagine that devout Christians (whether
Portuguese, Spanish, or Mayflower pilgrims) could have engaged in the
horrific extermination of the indigenous peoples of the Americas between
the 16th and 19th centuries? And who would have known what was
happening at the time it was happening? Of course, there were very
eloquent contemporary testimonies, such as that of Bartolomé de las
Casas, but his voice was an exception and little heard. Who could have
imagined, and how many Belgians knew, that the highly civilized King
Leopold II organized the extermination of 50 to 75% of the population of
the Congo in just over two decades (1885-1908)?
The new Marxist culture that emerged in the United States from about
2010 has many merits. It is particularly concerned with empirical
reality and focused on tactical and strategic questions. It displays
thereby a healthy scepticism toward theory, especially toward anything
that smacks of Hegel, Sartre, Lukács or the Frankfurt School. Its maîtres à penser
(to the extent that it acknowledges them) are Wright, Przeworski and to
a slightly lesser degree Burawoy. Kautsky lurks in the background as
well. The basic outlook of this group is a kind of simplified rational
choice or ‘analytic’ Marxism. In this worldview there are classes whose
members have material interests deriving from their position in a system
of property relations. The success or failure of left parties depends
on the degree to which they appeal to working-class interests so
defined. One syndrome that preoccupies the new Marxism is the tendency
of centre-left parties to pursue something called identity politics
instead.
A key question, however, is rarely asked: what does ‘material
interest’ mean? On closer inspection the term takes on a peculiarly
metaphysical and timeless quality. Interests are said to ‘derive’ from
property relations, without any further specification. But this is an
essentially unreal way of understanding them.
Marxism must not forget that ‘members’ of classes are people, and
people live toward their future as they understand and imagine it. It is
thus a fundamental error to base one’s politics on an appeal to a given
status – a present state of social being – and the interests supposed
to flow from that. For an anthropologically well-grounded politics
entails the attempt to mobilize groups and classes around a project to
realize a future that is possible for them under a given set of
determinant historical circumstances. Interests are ‘material’ to the
extent that they emerge from those objective circumstances; they are
‘interests’ to the degree that they are oriented toward a horizon.
Marxism thus cannot be, in Labriola’s wonderful phrase, ‘una filosofia del ventre’ (a philosophy of the stomach).
This raises the question of how horizons are constructed. One crucial
way is through a process the new Marxist materialist metaphysics says
relatively little about: class struggle. Grasped materially and
dialectically, classes do not have a priori interests about
which they subsequently struggle. Rather, class struggle is
fundamentally about which futures are, and are not, realizable in
present conditions, and it is only in that prospective context that
material interests acquire substantive meaning. It makes little sense to
say that a serf in thirteenth-century England had an interest in
socialism. However, it might have made sense to say that a steel mill
worker in nineteenth-century Germany had an interest in socialism,
because it was among the possible futures embedded in historical
reality.
The People’s Liberation Army National Defense University (PLA NDU) plays a pivotal role in “military education diplomacy” to attract Egyptian and Arab military elites.
The People’s Liberation Army National Defense University (PLA NDU)
plays a pivotal role in “military education diplomacy” to attract
Egyptian and Arab military elites. This role has gained increasing
momentum since the Gaza War (October 2023), as China seeks to present
itself as a strategic security partner, either as an alternative or
complement to Western powers. Cooperation between Egyptian military
academies (including the Nasser Military Academy) and the “PLA NDU” has
also grown through the exchange of delegations and expertise in the
fields of strategy and national security. Faculty members and students
are hosted in Beijing to exchange views on managing regional crises,
particularly the Gaza War and the Palestinian issue. The “PLA NDU”
offers several advanced programs specifically designed for foreign
officers and their Egyptian counterparts of the rank of colonel and
above, enabling it to build a strong network of relationships with the
“future elite” in the Arab and Egyptian armies. Through these courses
with Egypt and other countries, Chinese military academies seek to
instill Chinese military soft power in Egypt and developing countries of
the Global South in particular and to disseminate and promote Chinese
military doctrine and Beijing’s vision of global security. This is
evident in the “Chinese Position Paper,” which calls for comprehensive
political solutions to conflicts such as the Gaza war, in line with Arab
orientations.
Here, the People’s Liberation Army National Defense University
(PLAU) played a pivotal role in deepening strategic and academic
military relations with Egypt and Arab countries, particularly in the
post-Gaza War era. This was achieved through several avenues, most
notably attracting Egyptian and Arab military elites (academic
cooperation). One of the most recent forms of professional military and
professional training between them is the PLAU’s organization of
high-level seminars for commanders. For example, the university
organized a seminar for senior military officers from China, Egypt, and
other Arab countries (June-July 2024), entitled “Sino-Arab Security
Cooperation: A Future-Oriented Approach,” aimed at deepening defense
cooperation and promoting the building of a community with a shared
future for mankind. Furthermore, the “PLAU” has been keen on organizing
numerous international camps for military students and researchers from
Egypt and other Arab countries. For instance, the university hosted
military students from Egypt and other countries at an international
camp in November 2025, which included training activities and academic
and cultural exchanges.
SheikhShakhbut bin Sultan Al Nahyan in 1961 IMAGE/Wikipedia
On transfer of Kingship
Heart transplants are a recent phenomenon. Stomach transplants have yet to be attempted. [Gluttons are counting the days.] Head transplants, however, have been practiced for millennia, especially when the head is crowned.
For example, Alexander’s vast empire was large enough – stretching from Greece to the Indus – to satisfy the covetous ambitions of his many generals. After Alexander’s death, one of them – Ptolemy I Soter – ousted the earlier rulers of Egypt and founded the Ptolemaic dynasty which lasted 300 years.
The last Egyptian monarchy owes its propulsion to the British when, after relinquishing their mandate in 1922, they saw Fuad I installed as King of Egypt even though he was more Albanian, Circassian, and Turkish than Egyptian.
Similarly, modern Greece imported its monarchs, first in 1830 from Bavaria when the Great Powers (Great Britain, France and Russia) installed King Otto. After his deposition in 1862, George Prince of Denmark was invited, elected, and enthroned with Allied support.
In time, King George I’s grandson Philip married Princess Elizabeth. The night before their marriage in November 1947, Philip was granted British nationality and a Dukedom. (The satirical magazine Private Eye always referred to him irreverently as ‘Phil the Greek’). King Charles III therefore has Greek and Danish lineage from his father’s side and German, Danish and French blood from his mother’s side. The British Royal Family has more foreign blood than migrant dinghy dodgers.
Perhaps the most blatant transplants of monarchs occurred in the Levant when the British and later the Americans sought to retain their control over the viscous sands of Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Jordan, and Iran.
King Faisal bin Saud refused to loosen the kingdom’s purse strings. He was disposed off when his U.S. educated nephew Prince Faisal bin Musaid assassinated him in March 1975.
Sheikh Shakhbut bin Sultan Al Nahyan, ruler of Abu Dhabi, thought he could ration his unstoppable wealth. The British decided otherwise. They engineered his removal in 1966 and replaced him with his younger brother Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan. A diplomat once asked the British Foreign Office why it did not just take over the Gulf states. The reply given was: ‘Why should we, when we can rule the rulers?’
In Iraq, the British midwifed a kingdom in the 1920s and supported the short-lived Hashemite dynasty that lasted three generations – Faisal I, Ghazi I, and Faisal II. They could not prevent the uprising that overthrew and then murdered the young 23 year-old King Faisal II in July 1958. Unusually for an Arab ruler, Faisal had a talent for drawing and painting, honed perhaps during his education in Harrow Public School, England.
His cousin King Hussein of Jordan (also educated at Harrow) suffered the twin trauma of seeing his grandfather King Abdullah murdered and having to succeed prematurely his mentally ill father King Talal. Again unusually for an Arab ruler, Hussein ruled continuously, for 47 years. Perhaps his British education inclined him towards taking an English girl Toni Gardiner as his first wife.
His mother Queen Zeyn objected. She relented only when Hussein agreed that no child of that marriage could succeed to the Jordanian throne. His younger brother Hassan bin Talal was declared Crown Prince. He remained so for 34 years and would have been king. However, Hussein, on his deathbed, under pressure from the U.S., declared his son Abdullah from Ms Gardiner to be his successor. As short as his father, Abdullah now struts on the international stage by grace and favour of the White House.
The latest pawn in the hands of western powers is the self-styled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi. The dynasty to which he lays claim came into existence in 1925 when his grandfather Reza Khan (with British support) replaced the tottering Qajars.
It is almost half a century since his father Reza Shah fled Iran and sought refuge in the United States. Opposition even in the U.S. proved too strong, exacerbated by the capture of the U.S. embassy in Tehran by revolutionary guards. The last Shah – once hailed by President Jimmy Carter as ‘an island of stability’ – was forced to seek asylum in Egypt.
During the recent conflict between Iran and Israel, Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi betook himself post haste to Tel Aviv where he offered himself as a candidate for the Persian throne. (His father had been a covert ally of Israel. His secret police Savak had been trained by Israel’s Mossad.)
Israel’s PM Netanyahu did not bite. He knew his Edmund Burke: ‘The difference between the real leader and the pretender is that the one sees into the future, while the other…acts upon expediency.’
The days of detachable monarchs have gone. America has replaced them with disposable allies.
Now China has a kill switch for US defense and high-tech industry, and that explains Trump’s lust for Greenland and Canada
“The Middle East has oil,” Deng Xiaoping is reported to have remarked. “China has rare earths.”
Deng was visiting one of China’s biggest rare earths mines, in
Baotou, Inner Mongolia, in 1992 when he made that observation about the
vast deposit of critical minerals in his country. At that time, no one
took his statement seriously – except the Chinese leadership and Chinese
Communist Party.
Beijing had shown its interest in the importance of rare earths as a strategic asset by including it in early Deng-era national planning documents (1981-1985) of its five-year plan.
Deng’s vision and American missteps combined to give China what is today a huge critical edge.
Mining and processing are the hard parts – not finding
The 17 critical metallic elements
in the middle of the periodic table that are grouped under the term
rare earth elements make up the invisible backbone of the modern
technological world. Smartphones, electric vehicles, wind turbines,
military drones and even sophisticated aerospace systems (F-35) and
radar all depend on rare earth elements.
Rare earth minerals aren’t rare. They are called “rare” because they
are highly unlikely to be found in pure form or in economically viable
high concentrations in nature.
These minerals are either dispersed or mixed with other minerals,
making it challenging and costly to extract and refine them. The process
is also not environmentally friendly. The difficulty is precisely what
fuels their strategic importance.
Dirty work
The Chinese didn’t decide to dominate the rare earth years ago. The
US and others in the West decided to dump the “dirty work” and China
became the one left doing it.
Until the 1980s, the United States was the world’s leading producer
of rare earth minerals, but the Americans gradually shifted the
production to China, enticed by lower environmental standards and lower
labor costs.
Trump’s Board of Peace is viewed by some as an attempt to circumvent the United Nations. IMAGE/Anadolu, Wikimedia Commons. Design: Palestine Chronicle
Permanent membership to the board reportedly carries a price tag of at least $1 billion with exemptions for states that make larger upfront financial contributions.
US President Donald Trump formally introduced his controversial
“Board of Peace” at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Thursday,
flanked by several world leaders who have agreed to join the initiative.
The initiative, which will purportedly oversee Gaza’s post-war
reconstruction, has received backing from key Middle Eastern powers,
including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Qatar, as well as Türkiye, while
traditional US allies such as European nations and Canada have either
declined participation or remain hesitant to commit, according to the
Anadolu news agency.
The Board of Peace is part of a 20-point plan proposed by Trump and
later adopted by the UN Security Council in November 2025. The
initiative was originally conceived to oversee the ceasefire and
reconstruction of Gaza. However, draft versions of the charter reveal
that its objective extends beyond Gaza, granting the body authority to
intervene in global conflicts, with Trump retaining decisive control
over membership and final approvals.
Permanent membership to the board reportedly carries a price tag of at least $1 billion, with exemptions for states that make larger upfront financial contributions.
Invitation Accepted
Several countries have accepted the invitation to join the board,
with their representatives attending Thursday’s ceremony in Davos.
These include: Türkiye, Egypt, Jordan, Indonesia, Pakistan, Qatar,
Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Morocco, Bahrain, Argentina, Azerbaijan,
Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Vietnam, Albania, Bulgaria,
Paraguay, Uzbekistan, and Mongolia.
Confirmation Pending
Several countries have confirmed receiving invitations but have yet to announce their final decisions.
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday said Moscow is “ready”
to allocate $1 billion to US President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace,
adding that he would discuss the use of frozen Russian assets during a
meeting with US envoys in Moscow later in the day.
LIVE: Speaking at the official signing of his Gaza “Board of Peace,”
Donald Trump marveled that he didn’t dislike a single leader on stage,
calling every member “a friend of mine” and saying, “I actually like
this entire group.”
China confirmed receipt of an invitation without stating whether it
would participate, while Germany acknowledged the invitation and said it
is under consideration.
India and Brazil said decisions would follow internal consultations,
while the Vatican confirmed that Pope Leo XIV received an invitation.
Canada’s Invitation Withdrawn
Canada, meanwhile, has taken a cautious approach, with Prime Minister
Mark Carney yet to announce a final decision on joining. Later, Trump
said that he is withdrawing an invitation for Canada to join the “Board
of Peace.” This follows sharp exchanges between the two leaders.
In the 1990s, I met a person in the Bay Area whom I knew from back home. A successful businessman, he showed me his business card and pointed with an emphasis at the word “President” on the card.
He then asked me to help him in setting up an NGO which would fight for the rights of children in South Asia working for multinational companies for just a pittance.
I declined for two reasons: I had no knowledge of how to set up an NGO and the person wanted to make money out of that project.
I would have easily overcome the first hurdle through conducting research and getting in touch with some people I knew who were associated with NGOs but for the second reason I didn’t pursue the matter.
The gist of the above story is that there are people who feel good when they see their names on top of the hierarchy while enabling them to mint money through that powerful position.
Our Dear Leader Donald John Trump is one of those leaders who loves to be on top with his name embossed on every monument and what not.
As a humble subject of His Global Emperor, I hereby recommend that every country, ocean, galaxy, star, airport, center, and so on should bear our Dear Leader’s name.
IMAGE/ by John Von Wicht/Wikimedia Commons, in public domain
The name Homo sapiens—Latin for “wise man”—has always carried an air of self-congratulation. Carl Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy, coined the term in 1758,
confident that his species stood apart by virtue of intelligence and
reason. But what if wisdom, properly defined as the capacity to act with
foresight and moral restraint, has proven not to be humanity’s defining
trait but its greatest delusion? In an era of mass extinction, climate
collapse, and ecological disintegration—each driven by our own
actions—perhaps it is time to set the record straight.
The species that burns its own home for temporary comfort, poisons
its water for profit, and annihilates the other inhabitants of its
shared planet for convenience should no longer be known as Homo sapiens. The more fitting name is Homo stultus—“foolish man.”
Our folly is not merely in error, but in pattern. Every major
technological triumph has been followed by an ecological tragedy. The
Industrial Revolution, heralded as the dawn of modernity, unleashed the
carbon age that now suffocates our atmosphere. The Green Revolution,
celebrated for ending hunger, saturated the planet’s soil and water with
synthetic poisons. The Digital Revolution, promising connection and
enlightenment, has given rise to surveillance capitalism and vast
amounts of e-waste. We create miracles, but cannot master moderation.
Unlike the natural systems we disrupt, our civilization is not
circular but linear: it extracts, exploits, exhausts, and discards. We
treat the Earth as if it were a warehouse of infinite inventory, not a
living organism with its own limits. The philosopher Hans Jonas warned in The Imperative of Responsibility
(1979) that technological power had outpaced ethical maturity. He
advocated for a moral framework that considers the long-term
consequences of human actions on the planet’s future. Yet, four decades
later, the counsel went unheeded. We continue to act as if tomorrow were
someone else’s problem.
Our ignorance is willful. It is not that we do not know, but that we
prefer not to know. In the words of philosopher Günther Anders, humanity
suffers from “apocalyptic blindness”—a
refusal to comprehend the full extent of our destructive power. We are
like Icarus, wings aflame, marveling at our altitude while plummeting
toward the sea.
The root of our folly lies in the myth of human exceptionalism—the
belief that we stand apart from and above the natural world. This myth
is the theological residue of a species that once believed itself made
in the image of a god. It gave rise to the notion of dominion: that
Earth and all its creatures exist for our use. The Bible’s command to “subdue the Earth” became the philosophical foundation of extractive capitalism and colonial conquest.
But biology tells another story. We are not lords of creation, but
products of evolution—kin to the chimpanzee, cousins to the coral,
participants in the web of life we now unravel. As the primatologist
Christine Webb argues in her 2025 book The Arrogant Ape,
the supposed chasm between human and animal intelligence is
“systematically rigged in our favor.” For centuries, researchers
compared privileged, well-fed human subjects to captive animals deprived
of social and environmental richness, using the results to claim our
superiority. We design experiments that confirm what we wish to believe:
that we are singular, elevated, unique. It is not proof of wisdom, but
evidence of vanity.
Even this vanity is learned. Webb notes that children naturally
assume agency and feeling in animals until they are “trained out of it.”
Anthropocentrism, in other words, is a kind of education—a cultural
conditioning that replaces empathy with hierarchy. We begin life sensing
kinship and end up defending dominion. Homo stultus’ estrangement from the living world is not instinct but indoctrination, a symptom of modernity’s arrogance.
Online traders are betting millions on war, airstrikes, and political unrest.
Want to bet on whether the U.S. will attack Iran? An increasing
number of people are using Polymarket and similar online prediction
markets to gamble on war and other geopolitical events. The payoffs can
be thousands, even millions.
These platforms have grown in popularity since the 2024 U.S. presidential elections,
which drew significant interest from geopolitical gamblers. Although
most online bets are still placed on sports, Polymarket, Kalshi, and
other prediction markets have wagers available for a wide range of
subjects — from the Oscars to Spotify charts and the potential for
another U.S. government shutdown. Polymarket was valued at $8 billion in October,
making its 27-year-old CEO, Shayne Coplan, a billionaire. Eighty-seven
percent of accounts on the platform incur losses, according to market
researcher LayerHub.
At a time of escalating geopolitical tensions, bets have swirled around U.S military action in Venezuela and Greenland, and potential Israeli strikes in Iran. Polymarket’s team creates betting events, while also inviting suggestions on Discord and X. In January, users created 191 new geopolitical events on Polymarket, a 260% increase compared to the same month last year.
…
Iran
Traders have put down large sums of money on potential U.S. and Israeli intervention in Iran, including one market whose volume has ballooned to $155 million as of February 2. The odds of a U.S. strike on Iran have dropped from 65% to 33% since President Donald Trump began hinting at ongoing negotiations with Iran on January 31.
