M M Mendi

A system is never the sum of its parts; it's the product of their interaction.
-Russell L. Ackoff

[Basit Alvi @bpk69]

Allah o Akbar ☝️

[M M Mendi @MMendi6]

@China_Fact Now this kind of celeb i like

[Tanya @tanyaelisabethh]

Marriage used to be about building together. You got married and you were broke together. You bought a crappy couch and a crappy car, you figured out the money thing, you made many mistakes, you had children, you figured it all out with one another.

You didn't meet each other at the finish line, instead you ran the race together.

https://t.co/usJdHHQ0dD

[Culture Explorer @CultureExploreX]

Bugshan Palace is a reminder that Yemen should be known to the world for its extraordinary architectural civilization, not only for the conflicts that dominate its modern image.

[M M Mendi @MMendi6]

@CultureExploreX Indeed

[THIERRY D "ardéchois et français" @ThierryTout]

Voici un quetzal survolant une forêt tropicale d'Amérique centrale.
Ces images sont plutôt rares.
La nature est belle. Sachons profiter de ce magnifique spectacle gratuit qu'elle nous offre sans l'abîmer !

[Summer 🌻 @LadyLeo1976]

I sat with my anger long enough, until she told me her real name was grief.

—C.S. Lewis

[• @Al__Quraan]

Verse of the day

[Liz Is Amused @lizisamused]

For most of human history, boys learned how to be men from fathers, uncles, and grandfathers while they worked side by side.

Then fathers disappeared to factories and offices.

In the ’70s, Mattel tested family dolls. Kids put the father in the corner and said, "He’s at work."

You cannot model someone who isn’t around.

Boys can’t learn manhood from Mom and female teachers.

But we spend so much time panicking that mothers left the home that we forgot fathers left first.

[Deep Thrill @DeeperThrill]

When my children finally are ready to learn physics, chemistry, biology, I’m going to make sure they see the best visualizations out there. Too often people are expected to imagine stuff like this in their head after studying the equations and concepts.

[Aseel Swaid @aseelswaid9]

Bookshops and Booksellers of Iraq
As the old saying goes: “Cairo writes, Beirut publishes, and Baghdad reads.”

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

If you can watch only one video to understand current geopolitics, make it this one by George Yeo, one of Singapore's longest-serving cabinet ministers (23 years!)

As Yeo explains, current global geopolitics is fundamentally driven by US "retreat" and "decline", forced by a financial reality that no US administration can reverse: its debt servicing already exceeding its entire defense budget.

To Yeo, this explains why the US insists so much that its "allies" in Europe and Asia spend more of their GDP on defense - to basically pick up the tab for an empire America can no longer afford - but it also means that, inevitably, "once your allies begin to have their own military capabilities, they will think differently, and they will not follow you in everything that you want to do."

As such, American decline becomes self-reinforcing: the more it asks allies to carry their own weight, the less reason they have to follow its lead.

Still, Yeo says that a similar dynamic to one that happened after the fall of Rome could occur where America - like Byzantium did - sheds its empire and consolidates around its own hemisphere, allowing it to remain self-sustaining and powerful for a very long time.

He believes it's the direction things are heading - which would also explain Trump's obsession with Canada and Greenland.

It remains however obviously an open question whether an American "Byzantium strategy" is even achievable: Canada, for one, clearly wants no part of it.

Full video available here: https://t.co/99APyQjG3q

[Tengyu Ma @tengyuma]

😊 I also just uploaded a new version of the lecture notes. https://t.co/bpIvdgG8KO (it's still, and perhaps will always be work-in-progress, given the field is moving fast. Any mistakes are mine :) and any feedback is more than welcome :).

[𝕊𝕡𝕣𝕚𝕟𝕥𝕖𝕣 𝕻𝕣𝕖𝕤𝕤 @SprinterPress]

Here's another news item.

A Japanese photographer captured a moment of an aerial battle between two rabbits on Okunoshima Island.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Artist David Spriggs is known for his ephemeral installations that layer transparent images to create the illusion of a three-dimensional landscape.

[Mak @mak_aura]

We really don’t hate colonialism enough.