June Mutahi

Lorem Ipsum

[Decoded @Bygones_24]

My uncle used to tell me James Orengo was leading university protests way back in 1974/1975. Decades later, the man is still protesting over real and imagined issues.

The truth is, whenever he gets executive power, he performs terribly. At the Ministry of Lands, his only legacy was dishing out coastal land to tycoons and buying KES 500k linen shirts.

Now, his tenure as Siaya Governor is so catastrophic that he’s looking to run for president just to escape an imminent, humiliating defeat in his re-election bid.

[IVY @ivymuthe]

For the first time, I am with President Suluhu on this. Why should she be forced to speak their language? Russia uses its own language, so she would need a translator anyway. Shouldn't she speak Swahili instead, forcing them to need a translator too?

[Kithure Kindiki @_KithureKindiki]

It's okay

[Paddy Onyango, HSC @paddyonyango]

I get it now! The rush! The World Cup and potential loss in Billions of dollars in business if word leaked that some Ebola infected American citizens were brought home. The prime consideration is the money, not the lives and wellbeing of the affected Americans and their families.

[Rutger Bregman @rcbregman]

This sounds nice, but it's a great way to undermine the welfare state.

The strongest welfare states in the world (the Nordics) tax everyone, including nurses. And they give everyone universal healthcare, childcare, pensions, education in return.

When the middle class has skin in the game, they defend the system. When welfare is 'just for the poor', it becomes a poor program: stigmatized, underfunded, easy to gut.

That's why billionaires keep pushing this idea. The real scandal isn't that this nurse pays $12k.

It's that Jeff Bezos pays $0.

[Vanessa Jaye @vanessajaye]

This is the danger of only learning Eurocentric history

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper.

Her name is Audrey van der Meer.

She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth.

The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time.

Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen.

Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task.

When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once.

The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected.

When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely.

Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG.

Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events.

The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem.

Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next.

Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve.

Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews.

Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad.

Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page.

A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched.

The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall.

The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down.

The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page.

That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it.

Two studies. Two countries. Same answer.

Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast.

Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth.

You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick.

The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew.

Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

[Ms. Angie @AngelMwendee]

Diesel car owners right now

[June Mutahi @TheJunieMutahi]

The proposed Thika County would have ~750,000 voters. Residual Kiambu, ~700,000. Together they’d still be the two largest counties in Kenya outside Nairobi. The GEMA response to having too much electoral weight is apparently to have it twice, separately, and at war with itself.

[The Standard Digital @StandardKenya]

Calls grow for establishment of Thika County bringing together Juja, Ruiru, Thika and Gatundu constituencies. Video by Gitau Wanyoike

[Mohamed Wehliye, MBS @WehliyeMohamed]

The creative guys in naming ministries all seemed to have died. Moi days kulikua na serious thought in naming ministries 😃 😀 😄 😁

[Chasing Ennui @rwlesq]

Who should it be returned to?

The British Royal Family has had it since 1850, when it was given to Queen Victoria by the British East India Company.

The British East India Company got it the year before, when it was surrendered by the then 10-year-old Maharaja Sir Duleep Singh of the Sikh Empire to the British at the end of the Second Anglo-Sikh War.

He had it because he had been installed as Maharaja of the Sikh Empire in 1843 after a coup in 1839 and several years of instability.

The Sikh Empire had it since 1813, when its founder, Ranjit Singh, took it from Shuja Shah Durrani after Shuja Shah Durrani was deposed and exiled from the Durrani Empire in Afghanistan. Shuja Shah Durrani claims that Ranjit Singh had his son tortured until he gave him the diamond.

Shuja Shah Durrani had it because the founder of the Durrani Empire, Ahmad Shah, was given it c. 1750 by either the grandson of Nader Shah or the head of Nader Shah's harem, following Nader Shah's assassination.

Nader Shah was the founder of the Afsharid dynasty of Iran. He got it when he looted the Mughal Empire in India in 1739 and took it from the Peacock Throne of the Mughal emperors.

Before that, it gets a little hazy. However, it appears to have bounced around the Mughal empire since 1526, occasionally being gifted or stolen (or stolen while being gifted). The Mughal Empire got it as ransom after Humayun, the son of Babur, the founder of the Mughal Empire, got it in ransom for a family captured during the Battle of Panipat, in which the Mughal Empire was founded with the conquest of the Delhi Sultanate in northern India.

The Delhi Sultanate had it since 1310, after it subjugated the Kakatiya dynasty of southern India. I wasn't able to easily determine where they got it from.

So yeah, the British may have it as a result of colonialism and empire, but that colonialism and empire dates back to before the United Kingdom existed. Maybe the British Royals shouldn't keep it, but chances are that whoever they return it to is just the second-to-last (or third-to-last or fourth-to-last) conqueror of the diamond.

[Mbabz @Kalasinga_]

How to annoy every matatu driver. Drive infront of them and give way to other cars at every junction.
If they overlap and pass you, overtake them when you have a chance and repeat the process. Works like a charm. They always have a melt down.

[War Intel @warintel4u]

Strait of Hormuz 😂 🇮🇷 🇺🇸

[AfricanJesu @AfricanJesu]

Can you imagine the tribalism and chaos that would consume these European nations (overlaid with the map of Nigeria) if they were to be "forcefully amalgamated" into one country?

The true size of Nigeria's problems.

[Sam Nato @SamNato]

The way Nigerians see Nairobi, is the way Kenyans see Addis Ababa

[Henry Kabogo 💧 ❄ 🇰🇪 @Kabogo_Henry]

Forget the Singapore plan, Kuwait and Somalis..
A Kenyan has opened the Strait of Hormuz here in Nairobi..Kenyans 😂😂

[Henriette Geiger @EUAmbKenya]

Kenya’s National Security Adviser Monica Juma delivering farewell remarks at a big reception tonight in Nairobi. As Executive Secretary of UNODC and Director General of UN office Vienna she will hold the third highest office in the United Nations. The pride of Kenya!

[Captain Tytan @captaintytan]

China 🇨🇳 has been arguing for a decade that the rules based international order is a selective system designed to protect Western interests rather than universal principles, and Washington 🇺🇸 pressuring France 🇫🇷 to disinvite South Africa 🇿🇦 from the G7 for filing a genocide case at the ICJ has just produced the single most effective piece of evidence Beijing 🇨🇳 could present to every undecided government in Africa , Asia and Latin America about which argument was correct.

[Jostein Hauge @haugejostein]

A new paper shows that neoliberal austerity policies implemented by the World Bank and the IMF in Sub-Saharan Africa in the 1980s and 1990s were associated with a *20% decline in real incomes.*

The destruction caused by these organisations across the Global South is staggering.

[June Mutahi @TheJunieMutahi]

Interesting. Where is the requisite action for print media?

[Media Council of Kenya @MediaCouncilK]

Advisory: Full responsibility lies with all media houses for every piece of content broadcast on their platforms. @MediaCouncilK advises that a mandatory 7-second delay be strictly enforced on all live transmissions, without exception.