Mejdi Najjar, MD

Pediatric Neurocritical care and epilepsy @ChildrensNatl. Interested in pediatric neuroICU, neuro monitoring, stroke, and outcomes research

[Mejdi Najjar, MD @PedsBrainMD]

12 months, 13958955794 EEGs, Neurocritical care weeks later ✅ officially done with fellowship. Learned a lot and am forever grateful to the team @ChildrensNatl next stop sticking around and joining the neuroICU team and continue learning/building. Lots of work ahead 💪🏼

[Mejdi Najjar, MD @PedsBrainMD]

Office desk emptied ✅ graduation dinner ✅ now just need to set out of office email and off to vacation 😎… officially done with child neurology fellowship! Next up epilepsy fellowship and lots of ICU EEGs @ChildrensNatl #child_neurology #Neurology #Fellowship

[CNMC Brainy Bears @CNMCNeurology]

We are so excited to welcome our newest class of Child Neurology trainees to the Children's National family! Congrats! 🎉🎉🎉 @LeShellMW @helenwangmd @KsheerajaSriram
@NMatch2024 @ChildrensNatl #matchday24

[Mejdi Najjar, MD @PedsBrainMD]

@orlev_omer @piersmorgan Embarrassing comment

[Jimmy Dore @jimmy_dore]

Holy Shit, the war machine has lost its most loyal soldier at CNN. This is amazing:

[The Spectator Index @spectatorindex]

BREAKING: Save the Children organization says over 3,200 children have been killed in Gaza with another thousand missing

[Jewish Voice for Peace @jvplive]

This is U.S.-backed genocide.

These atrocities cannot continue. Now is the time to speak up for Palestinians in Gaza when the Israeli government is doing everything it can to silence their voices. DEMAND CEASEFIRE NOW!

[Doctors w/o Borders @MSF_USA]

Doctors Without Borders calls for immediate ceasefire in Gaza

People who are wounded and sick must be able to receive medical care, and medical facilities and personnel must be protected and respected.
https://t.co/egNf3vtWiC

[The Spectator Index @spectatorindex]

BREAKING: Palestinian Red Crescent says it has lost contact with its operations headquarters in Gaza

[DD Geopolitics @DD_Geopolitics]

A lesson in hypocrisy.....

[Al Jazeera English @AJEnglish]

“We were not born to die.”

Here is Mahmoud's story from Gaza, where he tells us how his family was forcibly displaced to Khan Younis.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

Israel gets away with a lot by calling this a "war". It's not a war. Israel launches high-tech military explosives at civilian buildings in a huge concentration camp while Hamas fires back with glorified fireworks which do light property damage. That's not a war, it's a massacre.

[Quds News Network @QudsNen]

Reporter: "Why did you shake hands with the Hamas fighters when they released you?"

Released Israeli woman Yocheved Livschitz: "Because they treated us very nicely."

[PRCS @PalestineRCS]

❌ 12,000 displaced people, including 70% children and women, are in imminent danger after Israeli forces threatened to bomb Al-Quds Hospital and demanded evacuation. This place could turn to ashes if those threats are carried out.
#GazaUnderAttack #NotATarget

[MintPress News @MintPressNews]

"Where are our voices? We've been watching your channels!"

An Egyptian woman waiting at the Rafah crossing confronts a western journalist about media complicity in Israel's war on Gaza.

[Mejdi Najjar, MD @PedsBrainMD]

@vumcpedepilepsy Hemispherectomy

[Quds News Network @QudsNen]

#BREAKING| #Israel has bombarded The Baptist Hospital (Al Ahli Arab Hospital) in Al Zaitoon neighborhood in central #Gaza. Hundreds have been reportedly killed and injured.

[ABC News @ABC]

LATEST: At least 33 Palestinian children have been killed in the Gaza Strip since Saturday morning as Israel continues its retaliatory airstrikes, according to the advocacy group Defense for Children Palestine. https://t.co/adwLVTCIRb

[Neurocritical Care @NeurocritCareJ]

Agrawal et al: Neuromonitoring in Children with Traumatic Brain Injury

Link: https://t.co/kpwi1dGbF7

@neurocritical #NeuroCritCare

[Tyler Olson, EA @olsonplanner]

Because they spent over a decade to learn.

Because they made $12/hour for years (as physicians).

Because they put their training ahead of many valuable life goals.

Because they’re on call throughout their working years.

Because they advocate for us.

Because they save lives.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

Been kicking around some ideas for a dystopian novel lately. I'm picturing a story set in a world where everyone's a slave but doesn't know it. People think thoughts they believe they came up with themselves, make decisions and lifestyle choices that they think are their own, buy things they sincerely believe they want, consume entertainment they honestly feel they enjoy, vote for political candidates they truly think they support, when in reality they're all marching in complete obedience to an elite ruling class whose high-level mastery of mass-scale psychological manipulation has bent the public to their will.

In my novel people will be funneled from early childhood through an education system designed by plutocrats and social engineers to create efficient and compliant gear-turners, and then when they are grown their programming continues in the form of mass media indoctrination. If they become politically aware they are funneled into artificially constructed ideological perspectives that are designed to look truthful and appealing but which don't challenge existing power structures in any meaningful way.

In the same way, the political system in this dark alternate reality is designed to look free and democratic, but there's no real connection between how people vote and the way their civilization actually functions. An unacknowledged, unofficial alliance of plutocrats and government operatives makes the actual decisions about how money, industry, government, and military forces will behave from day to day, and this secretive alliance controls the official political system the public believes is responsible for overseeing those matters. What people call "elections" are actually just the public choosing between two lackeys of that ruling alliance, and their only meaningful disagreements are on how the will of those rulers should best be advanced.

My dystopian society is built on endless violence, oppression, exploitation, and ecocide, but because in this world the science of mass-scale psychological manipulation is so advanced, people don't even know it's happening. Mass murder is committed continuously in nonstop military operations overseas, and the public is successfully convinced that it's to promote freedom and democracy and keep them safe from terrorism. People have to work multiple jobs in the wealthiest nation in the world just to put food on the table, and they are brainwashed into believing it's their fault for not making better life choices. People die of exposure on the streets while billionaires rake in exponentially more wealth, and the public is programmed to believe it's because the latter work harder than the former. Police forces and prison systems keep expanding in order to exert more control and people are trained to believe it's to make them safe from crime. Journalists are imprisoned for telling the truth and people are told it's to protect national security. Information on the internet is aggressively controlled and people are propagandized into accepting that it's to protect them from dangerous speech.

In my dystopian novel the powerful will simply do as they please and then promote narratives to explain why those actions were justified. If a smaller, weaker government isn't sufficiently obedient to the world's dominant power structure, reasons will be manufactured to explain why they must be ousted. If it's necessary to exert more control at home or abroad, justifications will emerge for why military expansionism is needed in this or that geostrategically important region or why increased domestic surveillance is required to keep people safe. The armed goons and war machinery move wherever they are needed, and the public is either kept in the dark about those movements or told made-up stories explaining why they must occur.

Endless mass military slaughter is essential for the existence of the ruling power structure in this dystopia, because without it the world's governments would simply behave in whatever way advances their own interests. The government is so profoundly corrupt that the corporations who manufacture military weaponry are inseparably intertwined with the decision-making apparatus of its foreign policy establishment and are permitted to actively lobby for more wars so that more of its expensive weaponry will be used. Mountains of human corpses are amassed for no other reason than because it is more profitable to launch weapons at them than to leave them alone. Nuclear weapons are stockpiled and placed around the world for no other reason than because it is profitable to make more of them.

It's the same with environmental and economic policies. A global system is held in place at gunpoint in which mass-scale human behavior is driven by the pursuit of profit for its own sake, so environmental and economic policies just like military policies are formed not based on what would be best but on what would be most profitable for the plutocrats who shape those policies. Industry moves in whatever way rakes in the most money, no matter who it hurts and no matter how badly it imperils humanity.

And everyone just marches along with it, because they are manipulated into accepting this disaster by sophisticated propaganda systems, by movies and shows designed to normalize the dystopia they exist in, by tightly controlled information access, and by their own psychological compartmentalization since the reality of their situation is too disturbing to look at directly. They turn the gears of their dark world and then stay up late binging on soulless comedy shows to distract themselves from the horrors lurking just beneath the surface.

Obviously such a dystopia would be completely unsustainable and the most obvious ending would be to kill the whole world off within a few books by nuclear war or ecological disaster or something equally terrible, but maybe I could have the populace simply wake up to the manipulations and take back their will and shrug off the elites' control like a warm coat on a summer's day?

I dunno. Something tells me that for some unknown reason today's readers are too inured with learned helplessness and knee-jerk pessimism to be able to even imagine the latter scenario, let alone accept it as a believable development.

Anyway, that's my pitch. What do you all think? Does this thing have legs? Or is it too wildly different from today's world to be relatable?