james mbuthia retweeted
The reason for the return of diplomacy between Europe and Russia is the change in the geopolitical and geoeconomic environment. With oil at over $100, and France on the brink of a debt crisis, Europe is politically and financially not able to maintain its support for Ukraine at the level needed for Ukraine to resist Russia's advance, let alone push back. At no point during the last five years did western European leaders have a strategy to secure Ukraine's victory. Nor did they have a strategy for peace. It is too early to say what yesterday's call between Støre, Stubb and Putin will accomplish, but we are now entering a different phase.
eurointelligence.com
james mbuthia retweeted
A great rant from a friend:
“I don't know who's running the British newspapers at the moment, but I reckon somebody's accidentally given the editorial jobs to a bunch of fucking doomsday preppers.
Have you seen the absolute state of the news lately?
World War Three. Nuclear Armageddon. Russian cyberattacks. Chinese hackers. Emergency survival kits. How to prepare for the end of civilisation.
Every bloody newspaper seems to be running the same story.
You'd think Vladimir Putin had been spotted at Dover services with a tank and a packed lunch.
And apparently, the most important thing we can do to prepare for all this is go shopping.
Seriously.
We're being advised to stockpile food, water, torches, batteries and enough toilet roll to survive the collapse of Western civilisation.
Do they genuinely believe we're all going to read these articles, leap off the sofa and charge down to Asda like there's a fucking trolley dash on?
I reckon somebody's looked at the Christmas retail figures and thought, "How can we get these bastards to spend another two hundred quid?"
"Tell them the Russians are coming."
"Brilliant. We'll shift those seventeen pallets of corned beef we've had sitting in the warehouse since Easter."
And what exactly am I supposed to do with all these emergency supplies if there's a nuclear attack?
Imagine it.
You're sitting in your living room, minding your own business, when suddenly there's an enormous flash outside.
The windows explode. The roof comes off. There's a nuclear shockwave tearing through the city, flattening everything in its path.
And there you are, crawling across the kitchen floor, desperately trying to get the fucking tin opener out of the drawer.
"QUICK! SOMEBODY GET THE BEANS!"
What fucking difference are beans going to make?
You're about to be vaporised at several thousand degrees. I don't think the nutritional benefits of baked beans are going to be particularly relevant.
But the politicians are the funniest part of all this.
Angela Rayner was asked what she'd be stockpiling.
Sauvignon Blanc and mascara.
Sauvignon Blanc and fucking mascara!
I love that.
The world's coming to an end, millions could die, civilisation might collapse, but Angela's making sure she's got a decent bottle of white and her eyelashes done.
Then Andy Burnham comes along telling people not to stockpile alcohol because they need to keep a clear head.
Well, thank Christ we've got that sorted.
One politician's preparing for the apocalypse like she's going to an all-inclusive resort in Tenerife, and another's telling everybody to drink responsibly.
And apparently Andy's emergency supplies include Twiglets.
Fucking Twiglets.
I mean, at what point did the national security discussion turn into everybody comparing what they've brought to a children's birthday party?
We're supposedly facing the possibility of World War Three, and our political leaders are having a conversation that wouldn't sound out of place in the middle aisle of Aldi.
And then there's the cyberattack warnings.
Apparently, Russia or China could launch a massive cyberattack and bring down our communications, electricity supplies and essential services.
Right.
And what am I supposed to do about that?
Unplug the kettle?
Put the laptop in a biscuit tin?
I can just imagine some highly trained Russian cyberwarfare specialist sitting in Moscow, surrounded by millions of pounds' worth of sophisticated computer equipment.
"Comrade, we have penetrated the British national infrastructure."
"Excellent. Shut down their electricity."
"We cannot, sir."
"Why not?"
"Some bastard in Ellesmere Port has wrapped his Virgin Media router in fucking Bacofoil."
It's a good job Churchill isn't around to witness this.
"We shall fight them on the beaches. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender."
"Unless we've run out of Pot Noodles, in which case we're absolutely fucked."
What a fucking pantomime.”
james mbuthia retweeted
Les coureurs aux États Unis qui essaient de comprendre lequel est le pistolet de départ
james mbuthia retweeted
我很愿意认真回答这位德国朋友的疑问。
你的第一个问，其实是在说，由于中国是一个威权政府，因此人民在政治上不受认真对待。
这个命题本身就是错误的。威权政府，并不意味着人民不受认真对待。民主政府，也不意味着人民就受到认真对待。
新加坡是威权国家，菲律宾是民主国家，难道新加坡人的处境，不如菲律宾人吗？中国是威权国家，印度是民主国家，难道中国人的处境，不如印度人吗？
你的第二个问，你的发问本身并不严谨。不能笼统地说，中国人没有政治自由。这个问题要分两个维度来讲。
1、政治参与自由。
从这个维度讲，中国任何人有参与政治的自由。中国人都有权利申请入党、考公务员。筛选规则与民主制度不同，但不等于中国人没有参与政治的自由。
中国制度与民主制度的区别在于：
民主制度下，一个人只要有钱，可以在任何时候参与政治。就像川普一辈子没有从政，老了突然想要竞选总统，他就可以参选，而且成功了。
但在中国，任何官员都必须从基层公务员做起。一个人无法因为有钱，就能一步登天当上高官。
这种制度的好处有：
A、公平性。
中国有大量的高层领导人出身平民家庭，如胡锦涛、温家宝、汪洋、李强，等等。像习近平这种红二代，反而是个意外。
B、专业性。
任何一个高层领导人，都必须经过几十年不同级别岗位的历练，他对国家各个层面的情况的了解，以及他的治理经验，不是一个企业家、一个明星，或者一个未治理过一个城市的议员，所能相提并论的。
C、远见性。
由于领导人不受制于短期的、非理性的民意，因此可以规划长远的发展战略，并以唯一执政党确保该战略的长期、有效的实施。
D、政策不受资本干涉。
你选择从政，就不能从商。你选择从商，就不能从政。这样一来，资本的归资本，政治的归政治，资本无法干涉政治。
2、政治权利自由。
当然，中国制度有其“表面上”的代价。为什么只是“表面上”的，后面再说。先说这种代价。
代价就是中国人不拥有谩骂政府、抨击政策的自由。我们可以批评政府，但必须在一种就事论事的理性语境中。我们不能喊“习近平下台”或者“共产党下台”。
我们也不拥有全民选举的自由，建立政党的自由。
这些“代价”为什么只是表面上的，可以从一则寓言说起：
一农场主临死前问儿子；猪抱怨饲料太差，牛报怨活太重，鸡报怨窝太脏，怎么办？ 儿子说：“喂好饲料，干轻活，清理鸡窝。” 农场主摇摇头说：你啥都别做，给他们选票，让它们选择你或者你媳妇管它们，让它们以为这个家是它们做主。
这个寓言让我们思考，作为人民，我们要的是什么？我们要的其实是更好的生活，而不是选票以及骂政府的自由。
回到开头那个举例，新加坡缺少很多民主国家所具备的政治自由，但没有人会认为新加坡人受到压迫。
这就涉及到自由的定义，自由到底是什么？
按照罗斯福的定义，自由包括：言论自由、信仰自由、免于匮乏、免于恐惧。
在我们计算一个社会的自由度时，我们计算的是自由的总量，而不是单项自由的含量。
举个例子，很多非洲国家拥有选票和骂政府的自由，但人民生活贫困，出行只能靠双脚。我在中国，生活富足、商品丰富、服务便捷、社区安全，我坐3个小时的高铁可以抵达一座大城市，我也有经济条件时不时出国旅游。
你认为非洲人自由，还是我自由？
诚然，中国还有很多人口，在物质生活上并不自由，但这是经济发展不充分导致的，不是政治压迫导致的。一个贫穷地区，无会因为给你民众选票和骂政府的自由，他们就变富裕了。
因此，当你谈自由的时候，你要计算自由的总量，不能单看一项自由的有无和多寡。你也不能将经济问题，归咎于某一项政治自由的问题。
坦率讲，我觉得你们的民主制度，已经病入膏肓了，中国人并不羡慕你们那种制度。
james mbuthia retweeted
L’un des passages les plus poignants de la littérature russe,
Anton Tchekhov écrit dans l’un de ses récits :
" À l’arrêt d’autobus, un vieil homme et une jeune femme enceinte attendaient ensemble.
L’homme ne cessait de fixer le ventre rond de la femme, intrigué. Puis il osa lui demander doucement :
- Vous êtes à combien de mois ?
La jeune femme semblait ailleurs, perdue dans ses pensées. L’inquiétude se lisait sur ses traits fatigués. D’abord, elle ne répondit pas. Puis, après quelques secondes de silence, elle murmura :
- J’en suis à la vingt-troisième semaine...
- C’est votre premier enfant ? demanda-t-il.
- Oui, répondit-elle d’une voix à peine audible.
- Il ne faut pas avoir peur, ajouta le vieil homme. Tout ira bien, vous verrez.
Elle posa la main sur son ventre, regarda droit devant elle, les yeux brillants, luttant contre ses larmes.
- J’espère… répondit-elle.
Le vieil homme reprit :
- Il arrive parfois que l’on se laisse submerger par des inquiétudes qui, au fond, ne le méritent pas…
- Peut-être…, souffla-t-elle tristement.
Il la regarda avec plus d’attention, plus de compassion.
- Vous semblez traverser une période difficile. Votre mari… n’est-il pas avec vous ?
- Il m’a quittée, il y a quatre mois.
- Pourquoi ?!
- C’est compliqué…
- Et vos proches ? Votre famille, des amis ? Personne pour vous entourer ?
Elle inspira profondément.
- Je vis seule avec mon père… Il est malade.
Un long silence. Puis le vieil homme demanda :
- Est-il toujours ce pilier que vous aviez connu dans votre enfance ?
Des larmes coulèrent sur les joues de la jeune femme.
- Oui… Même ainsi.
- Même dans son état ? Que lui arrive-t-il ?
- Il ne se souvient plus de qui je suis…
Elle prononça ces mots au moment même où arrivait l’autobus.
Elle se leva, fit quelques pas… Puis, se ravisa, revint vers le vieil homme, lui prit doucement la main, et dit avec tendresse :
Allons-y, papa. "
james mbuthia retweeted
🧵 1/15
When accountants stand up with slides full of EBITDA, IFRS 16, and CAGR, most of us just nod so we don’t look ignorant. 😅
I spent hours digging into the official Quickmart investor webinar presentation.
Cut out the jargon, and two massive surprises completely jumped out at me. Let’s break it down 👇
ALT Quickmart Webinar Presentation
james mbuthia retweeted
Good morning to Brazilian reporter Manuela Borges, who’s been waiting eleven years for this petty moment. ❤️ 🇧🇷
james mbuthia retweeted
During such holiday, Mzae had a cheat code back then.
We were a family of 8 na wakati ya holidays we could extend to even 15 juu ya relatives from mum's side wangekuja kutembelea Auntie.
Sasa ugali 2kg, gorogoro moja tungeangusha daily na within a month gunia iko chini, na hyo ni supper tu.
Breakfast hata hamngekula mandazi ama mkate.
Sasa mzae alikuwanga mkulima hodarii na ange time season vizuri such that by hyo Dec ndio sasa Miogo imekomaa kwa shamba.
Mathe alikuwa anatoka shamba na mzizi moja nono hyo mtakula siku mbili, asubuhi na lunch alafu supper unangoka kunde ugali..
Yaani hamkai njaa lakini chakula mnapewa hadi unaamua heri uende kula mapera kwa njia kuliko kula Miogo tena ama ukae njaa.
Miogo ikiisha inapea Mabwoni sub ama malenge
Inafika mid December unatamani shule zifungue buana.
james mbuthia retweeted
Iran's strategy can now be summed up in three words: enough is enough.
For three decades, Iran has been hounded over a civilian enrichment programme it once submitted to the most intrusive inspection regime ever negotiated. Governments that tremble before their own voters at every rise in petrol prices set out, coldly and methodically, to wreck the economy of a nation of ninety million, to push its young people into despair and bury their dreams. Then they gloated. America's Treasury Secretary vowed to "Make Iran Broke Again." He told the Senate, with unconcealed pride, "We created a dollar shortage in the country," and paraded the rial's fall from 800,000 to 2.4 million to the dollar like a hunting trophy. Few governments have ever turned the deliberate impoverishment of a civilian population into a slide in a briefing deck.
The economy was only one front. They cut Iran out of the world's banking system, choked its access to medicine and seized its assets abroad. They loosed Stuxnet on its centrifuges. From London and Washington, they beamed psychological warfare into Iranian living rooms through Persian-language satellite channels, hoping to turn a nation against itself. They vilified it in every forum, then asked why it would not trust them. They gunned down its nuclear scientists in the streets of Tehran and assassinated its war hero at Baghdad airport. Three times in little more than a year, they left the negotiating table for the bomb bay. They killed its commanders and its leaders. And they killed its children: the schoolgirls of Minab, the families in the sports hall at Lamerd, just as in 1988 they killed sixty-six children aboard Iran Air Flight 655.
They signed agreements and shredded them. The JCPOA was abandoned in 2018 despite repeated IAEA certification of Iran's compliance; the Islamabad Memorandum was violated within weeks of its signing. They bent international institutions into instruments of coercion: an IAEA Board resolution passed on the eve of the June 2025 bombardment, a "snapback" triggered by European states that had long since stopped honouring their own commitments.
All of it in the service of a genocidal apartheid regime that has wanted this war for thirty years, and of a lobby in Washington, London, Paris and Berlin that has spent lavishly to deliver it.
They have circled Iran like jackals, waiting for it to fall. It has not fallen.
So Iran has reached its verdict. It will no longer negotiate under bombardment, honour agreements the other side treats as optional, or accept the killing of its children and the penury of its people as routine instruments of policy. It will put an end to this cycle, and it will do so by all necessary means.
They began this war on their own timetable. It will end on Iran's.
james mbuthia retweeted
I don't think you can defeat a people who melt down entire Panzer divisions and build a church with them. This is the Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces, completed in 2020. It was literally built using metal melted down from captured Nazi tanks, artillery guns, and firearms.
james mbuthia retweeted
The Prime Minister of Japan is tweeting to apply the PHP fix patch.
WTF.
皆様に、今夜に対応して頂きたい大至急のお願いです。
多くのウェブサイトで使用されているPHPに関し、PHPのセキュリティチームが、重大な２件の脆弱性に関する注意喚起を行っています。
公開しているウェブサイトでPHPを使用しているか確認し、今夜、10月21日午後11時（日本時間）に公開される修正パッチについて、可及的速やかに適用できるよう準備をお願いします。
修正パッチを速やかに適用することが困難な場合は、例えばウェブサイト等を一時的に停止させることも、リスクを低減させるための有効策の一つと考えられます。
国家サイバー統括室のXアカウントでも関係する情報を発信していますので、そちらも参考にして下さい。
国家サイバー統括室(注意・警戒情報)（@cyber_forecast） / X
james mbuthia retweeted
True, Batwa/Pygmies are natural musicians
I consider Mbuti/Pygmies to be the most musically gifted people on Earth. Someone should record their muscial abilities before we lose them....
youtube.com/watch?v=cATZe_jl…
james mbuthia retweeted
i went on threads for the first time in weeks and this is deadass the first post i see
james mbuthia retweeted
As a young teenager, I wish I'd known about the spotlight effect. It's the idea that we radically overestimate how much our mistakes are noticed. It's easy to think others are paying attention to our cock-ups but most people are far more fixated on their own concerns.
The original study was run by Thomas Gilovich (Cornell University) in 2000.
He requested that participants arrive at his lab at a set time. Then he put them in a small room to fill out a questionnaire.
But Gilovich intentionally gave one participant the wrong start time.
When that participant arrived 10 minutes after the others, Gilovich chided him for his tardiness and said he needed to wear a Barry Manilow T-shirt for the experiment (a singer specifically chosen to be deeply embarrassing).
Then Gilovich brought the "late" participant into the room where the others were completing the questionnaire. Just as he was sitting down, in another twist, Gilovich asked the participant to step back out...
"I'm sorry", Gilovich said, "on second thoughts I think you're too late to take part".
After these bizarre meanderings, Gilovich asked the participant to estimate how many people in the room had noticed his Manilow T-shirt.
The average estimate was 46%.
Then Gilovich questioned everyone in the room as to whether they could remember what the "late" student was wearing. Only 23% had noticed it.
The "late" participant thought they were the centre of attention, "in the spotlight". But most people are focused on themselves, rather than on others.
This means that if you make a faux pas, there's less reason to worry than we suspect - most people won't even notice it. To me, that's a pretty cheering lesson for teenagers and beyond.
But there's a less happy implication for marketers. After all, the main point of the study is that even bizarre incidents playing out right in front of people are barely noticed. Too many marketers assume customers will pay attention to their latest campaign. But that's not the case. We need to go to remarkable lengths simply to be noticed.
Luckily, behavioural science offers many simple ways to do this. If you’d like to learn these, I‘m running a training session on behavioural science for better marketing on Thursday 10th December. More details here: tickettailor.com/events/astr…
(The drawing, by the way, is by the wonderful @sketchplanator).
james mbuthia retweeted
Tsavo’s new “Supertusker,” ARUBA.
Only recently emerged—having gone undetected for decades!
That’s how vast Tsavo is.
