Sam Anyona

Science & Tech Enthusiast | Afro-Optimist | Music for Every Season & Reason | Maisha Bora Champion |

[Lempaa Soyinka @LempaaSuyinka]

I saw @CJMarthaKoome showering encomiums of this character. I remember when I was in primary & secondary schools this guy was always in the news doing Moi's bids . He left the judiciary ignominiously in 2003 & history will always remember him & Tuiyot the rabid Nakuru magistrate

[🇰🇪 James WaNjeri @JamesKWaNjeri]

Omondi Tunya was a disgrace to the legal profession and the judiciary. Read here how he jailed a cleric for writing in his diary that Moi killed Ouko. A diary that was never published. But to Martha Koome, Omondi had a distinguished career. We will not allow history to be revised

[Books Behind Borders @MHTruthUltra]

I honestly hate that we've normalized the idea that all opinions are valid. I think we should get back to telling people that they are ill informed & ignorant

[BladeoftheSun @BladeoftheS]

Hugo Chavez was the best thing to happen to Venezuela, he took extreme poverty from 67% to just 6% in a decade.

He was so successful in fact that the USA decided they had to destroy Venezuela or they would lose South America to Socialism.

That is what actually happened.

[‏ً @omgsidewalks]

Unpopular opinion: I believe the goal of a society SHOULD be to secure the happiness and highest quality of life possible for its citizens NOT to endlessly generate capital for the ownership class at the expense of everyone else.

[Rashid Abdi @RAbdiAnalyst]

My daughter Nasimah introduced me to a new coffee blend that is delicious, full-bodied, aromatic.

A small Kenyan coffee startup has opened an outlet in Lavington that is selling finest roasted coffee beans in Kenya.

The coffee is grown in Rongo, western Kenya, south of Kenya's great Rift Valley.

Best Kenyan coffee I have tested so far.

Try it and thank me later.

[Shav Ngah ★ @shavnyuyngah]

If we improve on our furniture traditions, we’ll design beautiful Afrocentric interiors too. Seeing a few African designers already doing it fills me with joy. I can’t wait to join the game.

Castle Royale, Pune, by architects Deepak Guggari and Rashi Sanson of VDGA Architects, for homeowners Girish and Sneha Lakhotiya. Cement tiles and natural stone floors instead of marble, dark IPS finished arches lining the central corridor, exposed brick walls holding handpicked Mata ni Pachedi and Gond tribal artwork. The terrace carries traditional Indian baithak seating and a woven charpoy, paper cord chairs sitting under a rough tandoor stone floor.

None of this reads as generic luxury. It reads as a specific place, a specific craft lineage, rugs from Jaipur, artwork sourced region by region, furniture built from techniques that predate the building itself.

This is the target. Not copying the aesthetic, copying the discipline, dig into what your own hands and region already know how to make, then build a home around it.

Architects: VDGA Architects, Deepak Guggari, Rashi Sanson
Location: Pune, India
Photography: Fabien Charuau, Hemant Patil

[Edwin H. Dande @ehdande]

The argument that financial stagnation stems purely from a scarcity mindset completely breaks down when facing severe structural constraints. Even the most disciplined, economically conscious individuals remain fundamentally broke if they are severely underpaid and trapped in a hand to mouth cycle where survival costs consume their entire baseline income.

An abundance mindset can only push an individual as far as their environment allows. With privileged people having an upper hand at life. Without critical economic infrastructure such as fair wages, active job creation, financial literacy and accessible professional pipelines, internal drive remains mostly a dream, frozen by a system that leaves absolutely no room for execution.

[Shav Ngah ★ @shavnyuyngah]

Most architects design vernacular buildings for clients and go home to something entirely different themselves, an imported aesthetic disconnected from the climate it sits in. The philosophy stays a pitch, not a practice.

Himanshu Patel didn’t do that. Tribhuvana is his own architecture studio, the workspace he actually shows up to every day, built in Khanderaopura village near Ahmedabad, Gujarat. d6thD Design Studio. 2,691 sq ft. Completed 2022.

It is built the same way he designs for clients, vernacular material, local form, detail drawn from the village around it rather than imposed on it. He didn’t build a monument to the idea and go live somewhere else. He built the argument and put himself inside it.

An architect who believes his own philosophy enough to inhabit it isn’t selling an idea. He’s demonstrating one.

Project: Tribhuvana, Khanderaopura, Gujarat, India
Architect: d6thD Design Studio, Himanshu Patel
Completed: 2022
Photography: Inclined Studio

[Shav Ngah ★ @shavnyuyngah]

This school in Niger is built of laterite earth, which the region has in abundance. In most cases across Africa, architects and engineers skip the material beneath their feet and go for sand and cement instead, materials that cost more and perform worse in this climate.

Collège Amadou Hampaté Bâ, Niamey, holds 1,200 students. Article 25 built it from laterite block and earth brick, paired with a double roof system, earth vault below, metal canopy above, angled to pull airflow through the gap and block solar heat from reaching the classrooms. Daytime temperatures here regularly cross 40 degrees. Classrooms stay 7 to 8 degrees cooler than outside air by mid afternoon, fully occupied, no mechanical cooling running.

Sand and cement have to be trucked in and priced up. Laterite is under the feet of the people building with it. We keep paying more for the option that performs worse in our own climate.

Plant trees and grass around the compound and the passive cooling compounds, shade cuts ambient heat before it reaches the walls. The building has already proven the concept works. The landscape is the unfinished part.

Architect: Article 25
Location: Niamey, Niger
Completed: 2022
Area: 970 sqm
Materials: laterite stone, earth brick, metal roofing

[Maitreya Bhakal @MaitreyaBhakal]

China's national bourgeoisie always knew this day would come. They knew what they were getting into. They knew who they ultimately served. They may have received that one golden star on China's national flag, but they never forgot what the large one represents.

The sorest losers of China's real estate "crash" is the western bourgeoisie, including firms like Blackstone. Indeed they were some of its main targets. They spent decades "investing" in China's housing boom, salivating over the prospect that China's housing market would financialize. That China would ultimately do to itself what they had already done to the US - treat houses like a tradable commodity, and benefit from the endless cycle of buying and selling. To turn people's homes into casino chips - to be endlessly bought, sold, inflated, leveraged, and over-leveraged, until the end of time.

Instead, they discovered the hard way who actually governs China.

In all countries, the property market is an important facet of class struggle. And almost everywhere, the wrong class wins. In China, the right one did. The state controls finance capital, not the other way round. The western mind cannot comprehend this.

This also explains why western media and "economists" have been decrying China's "crash" so viciously. They are simply expressing the frustrations and hysteria of the class they serve, the class whose dreams now lie in ruins. That's the real crash.

[Max Blumenthal @MaxBlumenthal]

I've just visited the largest funeral in history, where millions mourned Sayyed Ali Khamenei, the Iranian leader who was assassinated by the US-Israeli coalition along with members of his family

It is practically impossible to understand what this scene is like, or what it means, unless you're here. I've met people from around the world who've come to pay respects, including many from across the West. The crowds pouring in are endless, and grow larger and more intense into the night.

From Tehran's Mosala, there are indignant calls for vengeance, displays of sorrow and defiance, protest, songs and marathons of poetry. These days of mourning will amount to one of the most resonant moments in the history of anti-imperialist movements.

Everyone I've spoken to believes war will return to Iran before long, and none trust the MOU with the US. But they are confident their country can deter another assault. They see their own citizens' mobilization as an integral component of Iran's survival.

If the assassination of Khamenei was designed to spur regime change, his funeral demonstrates how badly it has backfired. And the crime may blow back in ways its historically illiterate authors could have never imagined.

What we're witnessing in the Mosala consolidates the Islamic Republic and its revolutionary society as a political reality that can not be erased through regime change war or sanctions. This is a turning point in the region that will echo for a generation.

[Books Behind Borders @MHTruthUltra]

Between 1971 and 2021, the US murdered 38 million people. No other nation comes even close. Every nation that you have been taught to hate, every leader you have demonized, every government that you call a "regime,” none come close to these numbers. Americans will read this and still believe they're the good guys.

[Cyprian, Is Nyakundi @C_NyaKundiH]

Before Government Touches SACCOs, Kenyans Must Confirm Their Money Exists

The SACCO debate should now move from noise to a hard public audit, because any serious withdrawal pressure would stretch the system and expose which societies are genuinely liquid and which ones are just beautiful buildings, large membership numbers, fake asset values and cooked confidence.

Some SACCOs valued at billions may look strong on paper, yet the real money could be tied up in bad loans, insider borrowing, land games, fake collateral, politically protected defaulters, related party deals and management theft that members only discover when they ask for their money.

That is why government eyeing SACCO savings is dangerous, because it will not just touch private money, it may expose a sector where some societies have been surviving on trust, payroll deductions, member patience and the assumption that everyone will never ask for cash at the same time.

Kenyans do not need a blind panic run that punishes innocent members first, but they need a proper stress test where every major SACCO shows its liquidity, loan book, insider lending, bad debts, cash position, government exposure and ability to pay members without stories.

If SACCO money is now being discussed as infrastructure money, then SACCO members have every right to ask whether their savings are really there, whether managers have looted, whether loans were given to friends, and whether the billions announced every year are cash or just accounting perfume.

The real test should not be chaos at counters, since the real test should be public numbers, regulator pressure, audited books, named weak SACCOs and proof that members’ money is not already gone before government arrives to borrow the corpse.

[Shav Ngah ★ @shavnyuyngah]

This house in Parra, Goa is 100 years old and it is still standing because the people who built it understood what they were building with.

Laterite stone walls, Mangalore clay roof tiles on a pitched timber frame, a sweeping verandah that shades every elevation from direct sun. When Studio Praia arrived to restore it, the plaster on the front walls was sanded back to expose the laterite underneath because the stone beneath was in better condition than anything that had been added on top of it. The original roof tiles were intact. The timber rafters were intact. A century of Goa’s tropical heat, monsoon rain and humidity and the building answered every one of those forces correctly because the materials were chosen for exactly that climate.

This is not unique to Goa. You see the same material intelligence across Kerala, across Tamil Nadu, across parts of Brazil and Colombia where the climate is identical to ours. Laterite, clay tile, timber, lime plaster. The same materials, the same logic, refined over generations into something that outlasts the people who built it.

We share the same climate as every one of those places. We have the same materials in the ground. And yet every single time we construct, we reach for hollow concrete block, zinc roofing and imported paint on walls that crack before the building is two years old.
That is not a resource problem. That is a decision problem.

Parra, Goa, India | Studio Praia | Ar. Rochelle Santimano | Photography: Kuber Shah

[IRAN EMBASSY in KENYA @IRANinKENYA]

Undoubtedly, he was the most patriotic leader in modern Iranian history.
He took Iran from a time we couldn’t even make a simple pitcher — to an era where we produced advanced vaccines against the world’s deadliest viruses.
Proudly injecting Iran-made vaccine while world leaders begged Big Pharma.
A true symbol of dignity and self-reliance.
#MartyrLeader #IranianPride #WeMustRise #martyrKhamenei

[Mark Kaplan @markkaplan20]

I want to tell you about a two-time Nobel Prize winner who figured out why humans get heart disease and almost every other animal does not.

His name was Linus Pauling. He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954 and the Nobel Peace Prize in 1962. He is the only person in history to win two unshared Nobel Prizes.

In 1989 he published something that should have changed cardiology forever.

He called it the Unified Theory of Human Cardiovascular Disease.

Nobody listened.

[Sizwe SikaMusi @SizweLo]

Most people “know” that Joseph Stalin was “evil”. But very few know that

- Under Stalin, and the Soviet Union set the world record for the quickest doubling of life expectancy from 32 to 68 in under 30 years, the quickest turnaround in history

- Literacy rates in the Soviet Union rose from a dismal 30% to 98.5%

- Women made up a third of Societ engineers and 79% of medical doctors

- Women in the ruling party went from 5 to 21%, at a time when Black and Native women in the United States were not allowed to vote

- Stalin took the Soviet Union to the second most industrialised nation globally in a decade, something that took Western capitalists centuries of colonial pillaging

- Healthcare, education, and childcare remained universal and were improved upon, hence the drastic increase in life expectancy

- Racist speech was criminalised!

- The Soviet Union defeated Japanese imperialism in both Manchuria and Korea

- Defeated Hitler and the Nazis

- Took a desperately underdeveloped society to a competing world Power with real, tangible outcomes

- Every national liberation movement that followed, Cuba, China, Vietnam, South Africa, all stood on Soviet shoulders

The popular Western political theory of “totalitarianism” which frames Stalin and Hitler as “twin monsters” of the 20th century is an ideological tool meant to hide the dark side of Western liberalism, specifically its history of White supremacy, the genocide of Indigenous peoples, colonialism, and chattel slavery, which actually served as the closest ideological inspirations for Nazism.

Western historians hypocritically isolate Stalin’s actions from the global context of the early 20th century, whereas in reality, the mechanisms of the Soviet state were the same things done by Western liberal democracies at the time.
For instance, France casually killed 10 million Algerians and tested an atomic bomb on their soil.

Westerners harp on about Stalin’s Gulags as if they were the same thing as Nazi extermination camps. In truth, the Gulag was a punitive penal system focused on forced labour and political re-education where redemption was officially possible, rather than a system designed for industrial racial extermination.

Meanwhile, the British in South Africa, the Germans in Namibia and the US with the Japanese population in the US, all used concentration camps when they thought it was necessary. A lot of projection going around.

In the end, Stalin was just a typical European leader. What sets him apart from the rest of the capitalist west, and why he is demonised is because he was attempting to build a socialist state while under total siege by civil war and foreign capitalist encirclement.

Source:

[Lai Group Ke @lai_group]

One of the most stunning properties in Makuyu❤️

[Max Blumenthal @MaxBlumenthal]

US lawyer and antiwar activist Dan Kovalik just had his devices seized and was interrogated by counter-terror police at Liverpool Airport

Meanwhile, Palestine solidarity activist Sarah Wilkinson is heading to trial on terrorism charges for a couple of Twitter posts, and refusing to give police her mobile pin

The Canary, one of the UK’s most doggedly antiwar independent media outlets, was just debanked by Lloyd’s

The UK recently refused entry to Hasan Piker and Cenk Uyghur, two of the most recognizable voices of the left wing of the US Democratic Party, on national security grounds

It did the same this month to US journalist Jeremy Loffredo

UK counter terror police detained and interrogated my colleague, Kit Klarenberg, seizing his devices, and grilling him about his investigative journalism. PM Keir Starmer’s Labour Together slush fund even hired a private intel firm to smear Kit and The Grayzone.

UK police raided journalist Asa Winstanley’s home and illegally seized his devices on suspicion of “encouragement of terrorism”

The UK Crown Prosecution Service attempted to prosecute journalist Richard Medhurst under the Terrorism Act, but failed

The list of journalists and activists repressed by the British regime goes on and on. And they have one thing in common: outspoken opposition to Israel’s genocidal agenda.

Who’s actually in charge in London?