B.W.

🖖🏼🐼

[Li Zexin 李泽欣 @XH_Lee23]

Louis Vuitton is facing huge backlash in China after suing the Chinese bubble tea Molley for $1.5M over alleged logo infringement.

Chinese netizens are angry that this pattern existed in China hundreds of years before LV was born. You can still see it everywhere in China today.

[Louíse Brás @louise_bras]

Para de mentir japonês ridículo meus manos chineses nunca ficariam do lado de uns otários imperialistas e racistas como vocês, não difame meus irmãos do BRICS 🖕🖕🖕🖕🤏🤏🤏🤏🤏🤏🤏

[mushi 🇧🇷 team tragedy 💧 @dungeonmushi]

No Brasil a gente vai até a praia, no Japão a praia vai até você.

[B.W. @b_othmars]

@yanli87576684 @wjf110 我所在的地方，有很多日结工（进厂很多厂），基本日工资都是230左右，基本无学历要求，还一般都是做6休1，有技术（叉车电焊什么的）还能更高。还包吃，住宿也就300一个月。一个月想省的话根本花不了什么钱。一个月5000都算保底了。只欠个5万，真想还，轻松得很，哪怕是进厂打工。正式工还能更高工资

[B.W. @b_othmars]

@Tsiberia You guys really need to stop sucking up to corporations! Lmfao!

[B.W. @b_othmars]

@oooo0ooooo10 @igeekbb 虽然家长第二句粗鲁了些。但是人家前面不都说了“有事”了吗？

[Carolyn Hinds 🇧🇧 #FreePalestine #CongoInCrisis @CarrieCnh12]

Wait....it was a Chinese businessman living in Cape Verde that helped Vozinha's mother to get to the US by paying for her application, and the US gov't had the caucasity to take credit for, when they're who blocked her in the first place because of the US$15,000 extortion fee.

[Kyle 🚄 @KyleTrainEmoji]

FYI: while 1984 is purportedly an allegory of the Soviet Union, George Orwell never even set foot in the Soviet Union himself. For the book's depiction of censorship and the rewriting of history, he drew instead upon his personal experiences working as a propagandist for the BBC.

[Nury Vittachi @NuryVittachi]

THE U.S. CAUSED THE COVID PANDEMIC, not China, the U.S. government revealed today.

“It's time the American people learn the real story," spy chief Tulsi Gabbard in a sensation-causing video released on X and a statement on the internet.

And what a story it is.

.

TRUTH AT LAST
The US spent millions to finance a lab in China’s Wuhan to experiment on killer viruses.

The research was on a technique called “gain of function” which some people see as weaponization of the viruses.

That research is “now widely viewed as the source of the unintentional lab leak that sparked the pandemic,” said Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence.

“This dangerous research caused immeasurable harm and countless lost lives,” she added.

.

PREFERRED NARRATIVE
After the pandemic broke out, Washington then worked to tell the world it could not have been a lab leak.

The preferred story circulating at the time was to say that animal-to-human transmission evolved in China due to the circumstances there.

But the evidence tells a different tale, the US spy chief said, releasing a new batch of top secret documents today, her last day in office. "It's time you know the truth," she said.

.

120 BIOLABS

The story begins with the US quietly setting up 120 biological laboratories across more than 30 countries. Some of these laboratories were involved in research on hazardous pathogens, she said.

Dr Anthony Fauci, while serving as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, sent millions of dollars of US taxpayer cash to be spent on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, she said.

In 2019, the Covid-19 virus apparently emerged in several locations around the world—but was first formally detected by scientists in Wuhan, China, at the end of 2019.

It was soon found all over the world. The “pandemic caused tremendous hardship and pain for millions,” Gabbard said.

.

PREFERRED NARRATIVE
For the US, the preferred story was that it was NOT a lab leak—because the world would realize that the Pentagon was financing biolabs around the world, and at home.

People raising the alarm about the biolabs were accused of “pushing Russian and Chinese disinformation”.

When the existence of the labs could not be denied, the BBC and other media reported that they were “peaceful labs” which were financed for entirely positive reasons—a line that Pentagon-watchers found hard to swallow.

.

LIED ABOUT INTELLIGENCE CONNECTION
Fauci worked with senior intelligence agents in the early days of the pandemic to shape the narrative but lied about it, Gabbard said.

In his testimony before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic in 2024, he was asked under oath whether he had communicated with intelligence agencies concerning viral research before, during or after the pandemic.

Fauci replied: "Not to my knowledge, about COVID."

In January 2025, many people were puzzled when Former President Joe Biden issued “a pre-emptive pardon” to Fauci. Pardons, by definition, are given to people who have broken the law—but this had not happened at that time.

.

TREMENDOUS HARDSHIP
Gabbard is retiring to spend more time with her husband, who has cancer.

But she wanted to get the truth about this subject out there before she disappeared. She says the evidence indicates US-funded research was the root of the problem.

"The COVID-19 pandemic caused tremendous hardship and pain for millions of our fellow Americans and for countless people around the world,” she said.

Links to her statement and the documents are provided below.

[B.W. @b_othmars]

@O9EeNGaqngy5EA9 @saknaniehsakna 这人家自己不是说了吗？日本人住在中国上海。你那个截图IP所在地后面带了盾牌感叹号的，说明他只是用了显示地址为日本的VPN路线

[B.W. @b_othmars]

@GNshikau Don’t flatter yourself, my friend. We don’t HATE Indians. We’re just extremely annoyed by certain type of Indians.

[B.W. @b_othmars]

@zainchuan @cowcowverycow @chaomeigu_com 真特么的丢人！哈哈哈。人家都特么说他恨中国了，你还在这舔着个b脸说谢谢你对中国的喜欢。孩子，没事读点书！

[B.W. @b_othmars]

@Ma_WuKong This scene isn’t a regular. What’s in the clip is people harvesting at night between rains so hard work of the whole year doesn’t go to waste

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

This is a very good example of how democracy works at a local level in China 👇

To explain succinctly, at every administrative level in China, they have a "people's congress" (人民代表大会 - rénmín dàibiǎo dàhuì).

At the county, district and township level, representatives are directly elected by voters in their constituencies. Above that (prefectural cities, provinces, and the National People's Congress) - representatives are elected by the congress one level below.

Depending on the location, local people's congresses have more or less oversight power on local spending, appointments, and policy.

Zhejiang province is one of the places in China where people's congresses have the most power after an official named Xi Jinping - you may have heard of the guy - established a framework called "do practical things for the people" (为民办实事 - wèi mín bàn shí shì) when he was provincial party secretary in the early 2000s.

What "do practical things for the people" established was a principle that local people's congress representatives should have a direct say in how local public money got spent. Over time, this evolved into a formal voting system where representatives vote on proposed government projects.

They just exercised this power in a major way: the Huangyan District People's Congress (黄岩区人大) in Taizhou, Zhejiang voted on 16 major government investment projects for 2026 but killed two of them on the spot - a sports center and an irrigation megaproject, totaling over a billion yuan - with roughly 80% voting against.

This doesn't mean these 2 projects are dead forever but they're sent back to the drawing board. The responsible departments have to address whatever concerns representatives raised, bring in experts for further review, and resubmit when they're ready.

This is a level of local democracy that many people will probably be surprised exists in China: it's genuine democratic oversight, they can actually block government spending, and the executive has to go back and try again.

It's also - and this is where China is complex - something that surprised many people in China.

As I mentioned above, not all people's congresses have this sort of power and the story generated a lot of national interest - with many national outlets writing about it, such as Guancha (https://t.co/Ad94EJH3vt) or The Paper (https://t.co/EPPcXQxXRV).

So much so that the Zhejiang People's Congress deleted their original WeChat post about it. We don't know why - the story wasn't suppressed since so many state media outlets carried it - but the Zhejiang People's Congress probably didn't love being the face of a national debate about why other provinces aren't doing this too, as it amounts to throwing shade on their peers. I genuinely don't know, just a hypothesis.

Anyhow, that's China in all its complexity and why sweeping narratives about it are always wrong: a country where elected local representatives can genuinely exercise oversight power over the government thanks to reforms initiated by Xi Jinping himself, and where mainstream media boast about it, but where the provincial organ that broke the story would rather avoid the publicity.

[💫 Baja Dai-Han Inhabitant 💫 @AqtobeCNO]

No India, not every ancient social stratification system is Caste.

[Giokielicious @jokieliu]

And y'all thought China was bad for putting Jack Ma in his place.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

As someone who partially grew up among European elite kids like him, this reminds me just how incredibly hollow some of them are.

For a quick background, I went to one of the poshest high schools in France (Janson de Sailly, for those who know) and, afterwards, to what was at the time - and probably still is - the most expensive undergraduate school in Europe (EHL in Lausanne, Switzerland).

Needless to say, many of my classmates were from unbelievably privileged backgrounds. Just in my classroom in Lausanne I had the son of a (very famous) Russian oligarch, the son of Italy's largest real estate developer and the son of Spain's largest real estate developer (funnily, the latter two were flat mates).

Another classmate of mine came from the richest family in Naples, Italy and - while we were at school - his father (known in Naples under the nickname "Il Sultano") got arrested for having bribed half of Naples's city council - which, if you know Naples, ought to tell you something.

These were the kids I was doing group projects on business ethics with (literally) 😅

Anyhow, my story, and probably my luck, was that - before going to high school in Paris - I was raised in very normal public schools in the South of France where my friends were anything but wealthy. Their parents were farmers and everyday workers.

Which means - and I'd come to realize this was very important in life - that it was easy for me to understand how big a mistake it is to see money as identity and meaning - and to confuse someone's net worth with their actual worth.

What really struck me at the time was the contrast with my "poor" classmates of earlier in my life. They couldn't define themselves by what they had - by definition - and this forced them to reach deeper for their identity: their skills, knowledge, humor, etc.

Rich kids can skip that entire process, and the tragedy is that most of them do: they reach for the readymade identity that money provides. I remember being incredibly frustrated by many of my classmates, like "ok, I get it, your dad is rich and you own a lot of nice things but who are YOU, what else is there?" The answer, more often than not, was nothing.

To be fair, there were exceptions. One of my classmates I was most impressed by came from one of Zurich's wealthiest families (which, if you know Zurich, means insanely wealthy) yet he was almost OCD in not showing he had money: driving the shittiest car imaginable, living in a small studio, etc. He was very intellectual, very contrarian, and clearly at war with the idea that his family's wealth ought to define who he was.

I only discovered who he actually was when I started my first company and he approached me to invest: to discuss the investment I went to one of his family homes, which it turned out was a literal palatial castle on the shores of Geneva lake. The guy had decided to live in a small rundown studio when he literally had a castle sitting empty a 5-min drive away.

THAT I was impressed by: it's easy to see that money isn't meaning when you don't have any. To see it when you have more than almost anyone - when everyone around you is organized around the opposite assumption - is much harder. But to actually live it, to choose the studio when you have the castle keys in your pockets - with no audience to applaud you for that - that shows real depth.

At the end of the day, I think, the real distinction isn't between rich and poor but between people who exist from the inside out and people who exist from the outside in.

Wealth just happens to make it incredibly easy to be the latter, to skip the work of becoming someone and settle for a borrowed identity that glitters from the outside but is hollow all the way through. A Potemkin village identity.

This is actually a real societal issue, and magnified by social media (with idiotic posts like this one 👇): the more "outside in" folks out there, the less people with genuine internal anchors, the more fragile everything becomes.

When you think about it, everything that genuinely matters in a society is built by people who think for themselves: they take the world in, pass it through something genuinely their own, and give back something that didn't exist before: an idea, a conviction, a stand.

Every reform, every invention, every act of moral courage in history came from someone with an internal anchor strong enough to resist the current. Remove those people and all you have left is the current.

This isn't new, by the way. Most ancient traditions warn against exactly this, from the Bible (the golden calf story) to Confucius, who built his entire ethics around the distinction between the exemplary person (the Junzi, 君子) - oriented around internal cultivation and righteousness - and the petty person (Xiaoren, 小人), oriented around profit and gain. The junzi builds himself from the inside, the xiaoren chases what's outside.

So please, do not make the mistake of being impressed by wealthy people flaunting their wealth. Don't focus on the glitter, focus on the hollowness it's trying to hide.

[B.W. @b_othmars]

@Leslie899394013 @HayashicoL @Accio0117 @gamggas “不祥”*

[B.W. @b_othmars]

@Leslie899394013 @HayashicoL @Accio0117 @gamggas 因为没文化蠢人们会觉得不应该照顾脆弱期的女性，所以直接来一个“不详”，这下好了，男性同意了，女性也得以休息了。民间有一堆用类似方法达到目的的。道理是听不懂的，所以干脆用迷信的方式去解决。

[Historic Vids @historyinmemes]

He was such a heavy smoker that he would sometimes light up even in the operating room. When ash from his cigarette fell onto the surgical table, he reportedly brushed it off with a joke: “Don’t worry—it’s sterile!”

In the years after World War II, countless Soviet veterans struggled with severe leg injuries that refused to heal. Complicated fractures, chronic infections, and deformities often left physicians with limited treatment options. Working in the city of Kurgan, surgeon Gavriil Ilizarov pursued a radically different idea: that bone could regenerate if it was slowly and carefully pulled apart. During the 1950s, he developed a circular external fixation device made of metal rings and tensioned wires that gradually separated bone segments, stimulating new bone growth in the gap between them.

This breakthrough, later known as distraction osteogenesis, transformed the treatment of complex fractures, limb deformities, and shortened limbs. Although Ilizarov’s work remained largely unknown outside the Soviet Union for decades, it gained worldwide recognition in the 1980s when he successfully treated Italian explorer Carlo Mauri after multiple previous surgeries had failed.

Today, the Ilizarov method is used across the globe and is regarded as one of the most significant innovations in the history of modern orthopedic surgery.