shunil hossain

[sarah @sahouraxo]

Iranian Professor Marandi:

“ISIS was created by your regime.

Al-Qaeda was created by your regime.

The head of Al-Qaeda went to the White House — the same organization you say carried out 9/11.

So how are we supposed to know who the terrorists are, based on your standards?”

[Vijay Prashad @vijayprashad]

Haven't seen Arundhati in a while, but here she was on the cover of Quatro cinco um. Made me happy to see an old friend in São Paulo.

[Amitav Ghosh @GhoshAmitav]

"Rising hunger, stagnant yields mark Gates initiative’s 20th anniversary."

Requiem for Africa’s Green Revolution | by Timothy A. Wise | Aug, 2026 | Medium https://t.co/kSRKG21NDp

[Tariq Ali @TariqAli_News]

https://t.co/5CoKfOK1RS

[Maitreya Bhakal @MaitreyaBhakal]

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

And it was propaganda.

You thought you were just entertaining yourself (in every way), but it was all part of your programming. They caught you in your formative years, they weaponized your own hormones, and they made you love and worship the West - right under your very nose.

They tell you that sex sells. But they'll never tell you WHAT it sells.

America is sexy, hot, beautiful, young, wealthy, fun, glamorous, modern, and progressive. And your own country? The opposite of all that.

First they came for your lust. And you did not speak out - because you loved it.

[shunil hossain @ShunilH]

Chinese scientists boost hydrogen fuel cell power fourfold with new design https://t.co/DQZDMBcge6

[COMBATE |🇵🇷 @upholdreality]

Meanwhile on Chinese TV, they're explaining why America's economics Nobel Prizes don't add up to anything.

Zhang Weiwei: every country that modernized needed a first pot of gold -- the starting capital that gets an economy growing.

"The West got theirs through violence, war, the slave trade. Ruthless plunder, ruthless slaughter."

China earned its own -- "through its own effort and sacrifice."

US-trained economist Wen Yi adds the punchline: Western models literally can't explain where that starting capital comes from. "Economics assumes it's given -- by God."

Which is why copying the Western model was never on offer for the Global South:

"Tell developing nations to copy you -- no pot of gold!"

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

They will tell you the Holocaust was the exception.

The aberration. The moment Europe lost its mind, was seized by a peculiar madness, produced a unique evil that has no connection to the broader tradition of European civilization.

The Holocaust happened in Europe. To Europeans.

That is the exception.

The method: racial categorization, systematic dehumanization, organized mass killing, bureaucratic record-keeping of the dead, did not originate in 1933.

It had been practiced for four hundred years on every other continent.

The scholars who have written this most clearly, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Hannah Arendt herself, have documented the line:

What Europe did to the rest of the world, it eventually did to itself.

The techniques perfected in the colonies came home.

The Holocaust was not an interruption of Western civilization.

It was Western civilization encountering, for the first time, what Western civilization had been doing to everyone else.

The difference was the victims were European.

That is the only thing that made it, in European memory, unforgivable.

[Rafael R. Guthmann @GuthmannR]

A couple of years ago I actually did a spreadsheet of real GDP levels by computing PPPs based on a basket of 50 goods, I did two base comparisons: using US and Chinese baskets, but they mostly agreed with each other.

It looked like that China (specially), but also Japan, Hungary, Brazil, and Spain are a bit richer than official world bank's estimates, while Egypt (specially), and also Indonesia, Taiwan, Switzerland, South Korea, and Norway are a bit poorer. Most other countries are nearly perfectly matched to their official estimates.

The gap between China and Egypt, official World Bank estimate is only 30% in favor of China, increases to nearly 200% in favor of China. Which I think its much more realistic as China is indeed much more developed than Egypt.

[Ma Wukong 马悟空 @Ma_WuKong]

Los mejores resultados del mundo en matemáticas han sido para:

🇨🇳 China
🇸🇬 Singapur (chinos)
🇨🇳 Macao (China)
🇨🇳 Taiwán (chinos)
🇯🇵 Japón
🇰🇷 Corea
🇨🇳 Hong Kong (China)

China le saca a España 150 puntos de distancia.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

If you really want to understand where the world is at and where it's going, you probably cannot get anything more meaningful than the OECD's PISA study - a global test given every 3 years to an insane 760,000 15-year-olds across 91 countries.

No report globally, by any institution, better captures whether countries are building or squandering their future.

The latest PISA results just came out yesterday (https://t.co/FbHx266LH4) and the results are genuinely fascinating, and in some way pretty depressing.

Why depressing? Because, sadly, the numbers show that the world is getting dumber: as you can see on the first graph below 👇, since roughly 2012 scores in science, reading, and mathematics have been in continuous decline across OECD countries.

The reading score is particularly concerning: it literally cratered, dropping 28 points since 2015, the equivalent of almost 1.5 years of schooling lost according to the report.

To make matters even worse, the reading skill that's dropped the most across the board is precisely the one we most desperately need: the capacity to critically assess what you read, cross-reference sources, and tell signal from noise.

On average, sadly, 15-year-old kids globally are - more and more - incapable of slowing down and actually thinking about what they're reading.

Interestingly though, when you look into the details, this great "dumbing down" isn't across the board: it's overwhelmingly concentrated in wealthy Western countries, while many developing countries are actually getting significantly smarter.

For instance rich countries like Finland, the Netherlands, and Norway are in freefall, while countries like Cambodia, Türkiye, and the UAE are posting big gains.

To be clear, this doesn't mean that developing countries are now "smarter" than rich ones: save for one notable exception, that's still not the case. But they are catching up fast, both because rich countries are getting "dumber" and because they're themselves getting smarter.

The one exception is, as you'd expect, the "smartest" of them all, by a huge margin: China.

It is pretty much in a league of its own: just look at the ranking in the table (only kids in Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang got tested - 4 regions covering 200 million people).

China's maths results are particularly insane: according to the report, the best level in maths - level 5, where "top performers" begins - starts at 607. The AVERAGE kid in China is 612: "normal" Chinese kids are at a level that is considered elite in the rest of the world.

In fact, and that's probably the funniest number in the entire report, look at the column called "Share of low performers in science, reading and mathematics": China is only at 1.8% 😅

Which means that only 1.8% of Chinese kids are rated as low performers in all 3 subjects, almost a rounding error. Even Singapore, the second best and generally considered best-in-class in education, is at 6.8% - almost 4 times worse. My country France, is at 21.3% - almost 12 times worse 😢

All of this - incidentally - dispels the common myth that there would be some kids who are just genetically beyond redemption and simply can't be taught: China proves that with the right system, virtually every child can reach proficiency.

So what does this all say about the world and where it's going, besides the fact that, if the future belongs to those who can think, China has never been better positioned to own it?

I think the more general picture is this: there is nothing inevitable about any country's trajectory.

Finland was the world's education darling fifteen years ago - now it's in complete freefall (see the last graph 👇). Cambodia was at the bottom of every table - now it's posting the biggest gains ever recorded in the study. What changed wasn't the children: it's still Finnish kids (Finland has one of the lowest levels of immigration in the West), and it's still Cambodian kids.

It also doesn't matter much - or at least it matters less - if a country is wealthy or not. For instance in Southeast Asia, both Malaysia and Indonesia - the 2 biggest ASEAN economies after Singapore - are faring very badly, while Thailand and Vietnam, both poorer, have better educated kids whose scores are continuing to improve.

So that's the final takeaway: the kids don't change, they all have potential, always, as China's 1.8% proved.

What does change is what adults decide to do with that potential. It's both hopeful - because it means any country can choose to turn things around at any time - and also sad given the results - because it means so many countries are choosing to fail their children.

[Tariq Ali @TariqAli_News]

The situation in Germany reflects the state of Europe as a whole: disintegrating extreme centre parties, budgets designed for the ultra-rich, collapsing social infrastructures and a huge decline in educational standard. That is what I argue in more detail on my substack on 'Turbulence in Germany.'
https://t.co/dNgFYUJXsh

[Isabella M Weber @IsabellaMWeber]

Let me be very clear: There is no silver bullet to fight the rise of the extreme right and there is no one explanation either.

Anti-fascist Economics is not about providing magical solutions or about saying the threat of fascism is a mono-causal story.

It’s saying instead: As economists, we have a responsibility to figure out how our policy advice safeguards or undermines democracy. In that sense, “never again” is an economics question. But like with most questions economists should not have a monopoly on causes or cures. I strongly reject economics imperialism.

[观察者网 @realGuancha]

Living in China is just so exhausting. Every morning, you wake up stressed about how everything is so convenient you are losing basic life skills. You don't even need a wallet anymore. Even the old lady selling fresh lotus seedpods on the street corner forces you to scan a QR code. They’ve completely robbed us of the simple joy of counting paper money. And if you get hungry in the middle of the night? You can get piping hot food delivered in minutes. Or you can just wander the streets alone at 3 am completely off guard, totally missing out on that adrenaline rush of being cornered by "gun freedom." It’s just so painfully boring.

The insane speed of economic and infrastructure growth here is another massive headache. Bullet trains spread across the country like wildfire in just a few years, and cities change so fast you’re constantly forced to adapt. It’s nothing like the "authentic" vibe of other countries, where cracked, decades-old roads give you a real sense of history. Don't even get us started on the lack of "culture." There are no open-air drug users puffing away or relieving themselves all over the streets to enrich the local culture. No skilled pickpockets to help you "declutter" your wallet. Not even a single homeless person in the subway. Life has zero drama.

But the absolute worst part is the politics. We don't get those entertaining presidential election drama shows. No billionaires and actors fighting on stage like stand-up comedians. We never get the chance to use a sacred ballot to elect a talk-show host who only feeds people empty promises. We seriously lack that democratic entertainment value.

Living every single day in this stable, safe, tech-convenient bubble, we have practically forgotten how to survive in a chaotic, dangerous world. Honestly, how do people live like this? 😏😏😏#China #chinamaxxing #Chinese

[Alvin Foo @alvinfoo]

Elon Musk’s point about China is worth thinking about not because “China is peaceful,” but because China’s historical experience is fundamentally different from the Western imperial model we often use to interpret it.

For much of its long history, China’s biggest wars were fought within China, not across oceans to build overseas colonies.

Think about the scale of its history, the Three Kingdoms, the An Lushan Rebellion, the Mongol conquest, the Ming–Qing transition, the Taiping Rebellion, and countless periods of fragmentation and reunification.

Some of these conflicts produced demographic catastrophes on a scale that is difficult to comprehend today. Elon frequently cited “70%” figure is debatable and shouldn’t be treated as a precise historical statistic. But the broader pattern is real, some of China’s bloodiest chapters were civil wars, rebellions and struggles over the reunification of the Chinese heartland.

That matters because history shapes strategic culture.

China is a continental civilisation with thousands of years of written history, repeatedly experiencing fragmentation, famine, invasion, reconstruction and reunification. Its strategic instinct has often been about maintaining internal cohesion, securing its borders and building economic strength.

This doesn’t mean China has never expanded, fought neighbours or exercised imperial power, it absolutely has.

And history is not destiny… But I think the mistake is assuming that China’s rise automatically follows the same trajectory as 19th-century European imperialism, overseas colonies, resource extraction and permanent expeditionary warfare.

Look at what China has poured enormous resources into over the past few decades: high-speed rail, ports, manufacturing, cities, energy infrastructure, technology and industrial capacity.

That tells us something, the question isn’t whether China is “good” or “bad”, the more useful question is what kind of superpower is China becoming?

If we want to compete with China, collaborate with China, invest in China or simply understand China, we need to stop projecting our own historical experience onto it.

You cannot understand a civilization with 5,000 years of history by viewing it through a 200-year-old Western lens.

[The Resonance @Partisan_12]

In 2021, the UN wanted to recognize food as a human right?

Only 2 countries opposed it:

USA and Israel.

[shunil hossain @ShunilH]

@RnaudBertrand My Schadenfreude: this voting misbehavior of the USA will definitely have boomerang effect on Africa: China BRI will boom more than ever in Africa and elsewhere. Atlas could be the declining destiny of the USA?

[Ben Norton @BenjaminNorton]

An ex White House staffer proposed US military attacks on China to prevent it from developing advanced AI tech.

This warmongering insanity is bipartisan in Washington.

It's not just Trump/Rubio/Hegseth. This is a neoconservative Democrat who worked for Biden in the Obama admin.

[Love Music @khnh80044]

One of the most unforgettable moments in pop music history. 🕺💃❤️✨

[Rakesh Kumar @Rakeshhkumaar]

“I don’t believe in charity. I believe in solidarity. Charity is vertical, so it’s humiliating. It goes from the top to the bottom. Solidarity is horizontal. It respects the other and learns from the other. I have a lot to learn from other people.”

-Eduardo Galeano