Afrex

[The Spearhead @Spearhead_Af]

The West’s “Universal Values” Are A Weapon Against Africans – Marimba Ani

In this excerpt from her groundbreaking book, ‘Yurugu: An African-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior’, anthropologist and author Marimba Ani sheds light on a truth that far too few Africans recognize:

The “universal”, “humanistic” “values” of the West are, in fact, neither universal nor humanistic.

There is nothing “universal” or “humanistic” about values which always place a particular group of (alleged) human beings, culturally, politically and intellectually, above everyone else. With its “universal values”, the West has imposed systems on the nations of the Global South which have entrenched, in these nations, some of the most corrupt leaderships in known history. With its “universal values”, the West has “intervened” in sovereign nations, in order to replace “authoritarian” nationalist governments which actually put the interests of their own people first, with “democratic” governments willing to sell their people to Western corporate interests.

In the name of its “universal values” of “freedom”, “democracy” and “human rights”, the West has waged a forever war against all life on Earth for more than 500 years.

And to this day, the West continues to sabotage nationalist movements in the Global South, including and especially Africa, by demonizing, attacking and sowing division within these movements.

Yurugu is a must-read for all Africans who wish to truly understand the mind of the European – whatever other names they may call themselves in whatever lands they presently occupy. For those who cannot access the book at this time, we recommend searching ‘DR MARIMBA ANI AUTHOR OF THE BOOK YURUGU’ on YouTube, and watching Ani’s illuminating 2-hour lecture on this book.

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔Nvidia announced agreements yesterday with the six biggest names in private capital, Apollo, Blackstone, BlackRock, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR, to raise over $500 billion so its own customers can buy Nvidia chips. These are memorandums of understanding, with final terms still to come. Jensen Huang is calling GPUs a new investable asset class, like real estate or toll roads. The financing lets OpenAI and others buy hardware without putting it on their balance sheets.

My Take
I flagged Nvidia's customer financing back in July. This is that same idea, now at 60 times the size. Lucent and Nortel ran this exact play in the late 1990s, when they lent customers the money to buy equipment they couldn't otherwise afford. Both ended in the largest corporate bankruptcies of their day. The vendor lends to keep its own revenue up, the sales look strong for a while, and the risk stacks up on the buyer's side of the ledger. We have seen how the story ends.

I don't buy the idea that a GPU is an asset like a toll road. A toll road still earns money in 30 years. A GPU is close to worthless in five, and Nvidia's own next chip crushes the resale price of the last one. So they want pension funds and insurers to lend half a trillion dollars against hardware that ages like fruit, and the six firms who put the deal together collect their fees up front no matter how it turns out. Huang keeps his sales up and hands the downside to whoever holds the paper. I have watched this movie twice now, and the vendor never ends up holding the bag. Everyone downstream does.

Hedgie🤗

[gst @wearegst]

Tinubu's friend Chagoury is set to receive up to 27 trillion Nigerian Naira (around $20 billion), sometimes tax-free, to build roads.

For context, the world's first ocean airport in Japan was built with $20 billion.

https://t.co/wWPHVZUhLT

[Kathleen Tyson @Kathleen_Tyson_]

The war against Iran became inevitable from the 2019 agreement of the East Med Pipeline. Israel intends to control the Levant coast from Turkiye to Egypt, occupying Lebanon and Syria permanently.
As Trump has done with Venezuela - set up an oil proceeds account in Qatar that Venezuela can't reach - Israel intends for the Gulf, Levant, and Iran.
US, UK, EU and Israel agreed that profiting from West Asian oil and gas should be 'whites only', with indigenous people impoverished and dispossessed.
And, of course, East Asia brought to heel too.
Trump confirmed again today he will do to Iran what he is doing to Venezuela.

[Zoey 🌤️ @Zoeycialist]

Rod Liddle was nice. Keir Starmer was decent. Peter Mandelson was an unscrupulous operator

Activists trying to stop a genocide are violent thugs. Pensioners protesting against the murder of children are terrorists. Striking nurses are holding the country to ransom

Get it yet?

[Ilir Aliu @IlirAliu_]

AI in robotics gets all the attention right now, but sometimes the most interesting work is very practical.

Viet built a small vision system that counts potatoes on a conveyor belt. No giant dataset. No huge model. Just a clear problem and a smart setup.

He used Ultralytics’ ObjectCounter, trained a tiny YOLO11 nano model, and because there was no potato dataset, he annotated a single frame with SAM 2 and trained from that. One frame. Still works across the whole video.

It is a good reminder that useful AI in industry often looks like this.

Focused. Lightweight. Solves a real task.

If you work in manufacturing or robotics, these small systems are usually the fastest wins. They save time, reduce errors, and do not need massive infrastructure.

Nice work, Viet.

His projects:
https://t.co/PCUV05CW24

——-

Weekly robotics and AI insights.
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[Kathleen Tyson @Kathleen_Tyson_]

The Pentagon is the biggest oil client in the world. Just one more reason why wars are inflationary.

[Luke Gromen @LukeGromen]

An inauspicious start to trying to get Africa to pour hundreds of billions of dollars into USD stablecoins to finance US deficits at near-0% rates...🤣

Via @wmiddelkoop

[Compounding Quality @QCompounding]

The World's Largest Asset Managers

[Artur Nadolny @ArturNadol7566]

NHS PAYS 574 BOSSES MORE THAN IT PAYS THE PRIME MINISTER

The TaxPayers' Alliance @the_tpa published its NHS Rich List today.

574 senior @NHS managers earned more last year than Prime Minister salary entitlement of £172,153.

Up 12 percent in a single year. Somewhere a boardroom decided the real crisis facing the NHS was underpaid executives.

The number of managers clearing £300,000 or more more than doubled. Up 134 percent to 292 people.

Meanwhile 1,758 senior managers took home £100,000 or more in total pay.

Top of the pile is Newcastle Upon Tyne Hospitals chief executive J Mackey on a £377,500 salary. His trust ranks 41st out of 140 in England for A&E waiting times. Not top of the class. Comfortably top of the payroll.

While that spreadsheet filled up, 6.16 million patients sat on NHS waiting lists across England. 105,000 have been waiting more than a year. None of them got a bonus for their patience.

Shadow Health Secretary Stuart Andrew @StuartAndrew says paying managers big money while patients get poor care helps nobody but the managers. Fair point from a party that spent 14 years building the same system.

New Health Secretary @YvetteCooperMP inherits this chart days into the job. She promised urgent action on maternity services and social care.

She might start by asking who signs off these pay packets.

Patients wait. Managers collect.

Sources
@the_tpa @GBNEWS

[Douglas A. Boneparth @dougboneparth]

Trump every time the 10-year Treasury approaches 5%…

[Gary Marcus @GaryMarcus]

Partial list of Elon’s many missed promises (eg AGI by 2025 is omitted).

$SPCX would be trading even lower if more people were more cognizant of these facts.

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they're free of AI-generated text. A federal judge ruled the practice is fair use because eliminating the original means only one copy exists at a time. Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books partnerships to obtain "all the books in the world."

My Take
This got to me. A bookseller told 404 Media that rare books with almost no surviving copies are being fed into this pipeline. Books that survived wars, fires, and centuries of handling are being shredded so an AI can learn to write a better marketing email.
ISBNdb's website literally says "'AI company destroys two million books' is not a headline that generates sympathy," and they still built an entire business around making it happen quietly. They offer NDAs as a feature. They coach clients to call it "digital preservation."

I've covered AI companies scraping the internet, torrenting libraries, and stealing music. This is worse because it's irreversible. You can re-upload a website. You can reprint a bestseller. You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal. So it's going to accelerate.
"We shred rare books and offer NDAs so nobody finds out" is a legitimate business model in 2026. What a timeline.

Hedgie🤗

[gst @wearegst]

Residents of Abuja, the nation's capital, no longer have access to a steady supply of running water.

[Richard Murphy @RichardJMurphy]

John Healey? No, I didn’t see that one coming. Nor do I see it as good news. He is far too conventional to take on the Treasury and all its faults when managing the economy. If Burnham meant to bring about change, this was not the appointment we needed.

[IPPR @IPPR]

🏚️ Renting in Britain is broken. But there’s a straightforward, low-cost solution.
Well-designed rent controls would protect renters from increasingly unaffordable housing costs, without costing the government billions or undermining housing supply.

🔗 Read our report to find out more https://t.co/YApqO2q3G7

[Citizens for Sound Money @4SoundMoney]

Why does inflation hit the middle class hard while the ultra-rich get richer?

Richard Cantillon was an Irish-French banker in the early 1700s. He watched the French government flood the economy with paper money to pay off royal debts. 

Cantillon noticed something profound: the people closest to the King (the aristocracy and big merchants) got the new paper money first, before prices went up. 

They spent it while it still had high purchasing power. By the time that money filtered down to the working class, prices had already skyrocketed, leaving the poor with less buying power. 

Cantillon shorted the system, made a fortune, and laid the groundwork for Austrian economic theory.

Remember: Inflation is a wealth transfer mechanism. New money printing always enriches the issuers and early receivers at the direct expense of everyone else.

[David Hundeyin @DavidHundeyin]

As they say in South Africa, if you beat the dog, the owner will come out.

The 'owner' of South Africa's current problems has finally come out.

[The Autonomy Institute @Autonomy_Inst]

1 in 20 people in the London Borough of Newham are living in temporary accommodation.

Bekah Hesse from @LDNRentersUnion on how the housing crisis is affecting their local area.

Watch the full panel on our YouTube channel: https://t.co/epTs6KRDUQ