Ahlan wa Sahlan

I hope one day the rail network in Egypt is connected to Saudi Arabia. There has been talks about a bridge across the Gulf of Aqaba, but maybe that won’t be necessary.

As far as I know, economy seats are still sold at a loss. They make up for it in the higher classes. I don’t fly through Doha often but when I do, I do like getting on Qatar Airways.

This is a map for whales

Interesting, not a projection that I have seen before.

English is confusing and before making this post I had to double check that I am using the correct word and not the other one that you mean here.

The dishes made with them are prepared in a similar manner. Rice in Mashreq replaced bulgur sometime over the past century or so.

The map doesn’t include Iran or Turkiye.

Is bread a processed food? It doesn’t grow on trees. Bread can also be a staple food.

The loss of the Hejaz Railway is still a great tragedy. There are planned railroads that will connect to Iraq, and it is possible to go to Jordan from Saudi Arabia by train, but nothing like what has been lost so far.

The line is a bit more blurry on the East side than the West but this might just be my own bias coming from Lebanon.

I always thought Urban Hejaz and the Levant [and Egypt] share in a dialect continuum or at least a sprachbund, I don’t know a lot of dialects that say مرق to mean pass except those two. Urban Hejazi dialects also drop the use of interdentals like in Lebanese. In the same way Bahrani dialect Bahrain/Eastern Saudi Arabia shares with Mesopotamia in having Akkadian and Aramaic influences.

Here’s a fun comparison between Hejazi and Najdi dialects https://youtube.com/shorts/Fi9_bNiazOA

More aggressive in tone on average.

Only the Bedouin and Najdi dialects which happen to be over represented. Jeddawi in particular and other Urban Hejazi dialects are seen as effeminate https://youtu.be/AHWbA0b9bK4

1. Arabs at the rise of Islam already were speaking different dialects and so they took those differences with them.
2. Different regions have had different influences, e.g. Coptic and Greek in Egypt, Punic, Latin and Amazigh in North Africa, Nubian in Sudan, and so on.
3. 1400 years of divergent history, including different foreign rule in different regions.

the Sahel countries too have a significant Arab minority but aren’t part of the Arab League and not included in this map.

The highest point in Europe is actually in Asia, interesting…

The US is the biggest producer now ahead of Russia and Saudi Arabia, Venezuela is at 21st. This post is about future production expansion.

I didn’t notice, good catch. I wonder if it is an aliasing/resolution issue.

Not sure what you are trying to say. Anyways, we are seeing progress in science and technology happening again because of the availability of capital and investments.

This map is about future oil and gas expansion. You can see the list of countries by past and present coal production here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_coal_production

The US is also the biggest consumer ahead of China.

No one minds you voting for Biden believe it or not. We do mind being demonized and straw-personed for not voting for him.

Yet more progressive than many US states on things like abortion and divorce.

Haaretz May 26, 2019: Alabama, Iran, or Saudi Arabia? We Checked Where Abortion Laws Are Better for Women.

Sherine Hamdy, a professor of Muslim bioethics at the University of California, Irvine, notes that for Muslim women, the U.S. anti-abortion trends are worrying not only because they harm women’s rights to reproductive agency, but also because they diminish religious freedoms, since Muslim religious ethics make a strong case for women’s well-being taking priority over that of the fetus. [emphasis mine]

The Center for American Progress JUL 8, 2022: Authoritarian Regimes Have More Progressive Abortion Policies Than Some U.S. States.

This means that Americans in states that effectively outlaw abortion, including Alabama, Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and South Dakota, will have fewer human rights protections than those in Iran or Saudi Arabia—countries that are often vilified by politicians across the ideological spectrum for their treatment of women. Iran, for example, allows abortion in cases of fetal impairment, and Saudi Arabia allows for abortion when the health of a patient is at risk—including mental health, which can function to allow for abortion in cases of rape or incest—contrary to only the narrow “life” or “medical emergency” exceptions that are now increasingly common in state bans in the United States. [emphasis mine]