james mbuthia

[james mbuthia @mrj21]

@pixelart1000 @sixtus_66 The duty of the government does not mean the people get to abscond to their own duty and not face the consequences. The people trashing the place are themselves. They choose to wallow in dirt and squalor because they dont care, its not their problem. Which it is.

[james mbuthia @mrj21]

@pixelart1000 @sixtus_66 The woman would rather live in filthy unsanitary conditions that affect her physical & mental health as opposed to cleaning up a common area, her excuse being its not her home. Her rural home isn't any better, just as filthy, neglected, unsanitary which invalidates her excuse

[james mbuthia @mrj21]

@pixelart1000 @sixtus_66 Like?

[Mojave Art Club @MojaveArtClub]

At the end of the day, Israel IMHO missed the chance to knock out Iran about a decade or more ago. The time for knocking Iran off the map was many many years ago. Probably when Bush Jr was president, or at the last Obama.

Their intense anguish is the realization that times run out on this project and Israel is now, well, its future is not what they had planned. They now have to sit in the region knowing a mountainous, naturally fortified, and powerful state looms over the flat plains of the region, from their fortresses in the Zagros the Iranians are the REAL power in the Middle East. The IRGC and the Ayatollah are the real Shahenshah and the Israelis now know they'll either have to pay tribute and kneel or they will be a forever dependency of the USA/Europe, in order to hold out as a bunker state against Persia.

Once more, Israel is well aware Europe is finished as a geopolitical actor of any importance or ability, and America has collapsed with this being the USA's own Suez Crisis.

[james mbuthia @mrj21]

@Pataramesh I have a theory that if Israel isn't careful the US might one day ditch it for Iran as the middle east pointman. It's not gonna happen soon, AIPAC is too strong but its influence will wane over the next couple of generations, who knows what could happen in 20 years time

[james mbuthia @mrj21]

@EricKigada He does have a point though. The UON tower is bland which is disappointing considering who owns the tower and what they do

[Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump]

What a rotten deal we made with Iran. We get nothing (except laughter at our stupidity). They get everything, including delay and big cash!

[Nomadic Maverick @MaalimAbdisalam]

I am a Kenyan of Somali origin, born in Wajir and raised in Mombasa. This issue did not start today; it has existed for decades.
I remember when I was a student in Mombasa during President Moi's era and later when President Kibaki came into office.

[james mbuthia @mrj21]

@AngelicaOung If there's something the western world and Israel can learn from China it's Taoism. Flow with the way not against it, wait before doing something. Effortless inaction. Israel needs to pipe down and let the waters settle but their nature can't let them.

[Not Jerome Powell @alifarhat79]

Americans realizing they spent $75 billion fighting Iran, then another $300 billion rebuilding Iran, just to reopen the Strait of Hormuz that was already open before the war started

[james mbuthia @mrj21]

@DanChepta His nose is in two different counties at the same time 😂😂😂

[james mbuthia @mrj21]

@TruueDiscipline Since when were Jews a race?

[james mbuthia @mrj21]

@denniskioko That's excusing lousy work and incompetency

[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.

[Ivanka Bachvarova ☦️ 🇧🇬🇷🇺 🇳🇱 🍉 @SaintSarmat]

Savage !!!

[The Instigator @Am_Blujay]

President of Botswana 🇧🇼 Duma Boko stunned the audience after stopping midway through his speech to deliver a brutal but powerful lecture on relationships, loyalty, and trust.

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb]

Finito.
I used to hold those who support Israel in moral disgust, eliciting a deep visceral revulsion.
Today I hold ALL those not disgusted by Israel in moral disgust.
Life is too short to tolerate evil & abettors of evil.

[james mbuthia @mrj21]

@Lungah___ @NamedInstigator SA companies earn more money which means they pay more taxes which end up paying for social grants for ordinary South Africans

[Malinga Galabada @MalingaGalabada]

As a brown, this is hilarious 😂

[james mbuthia @mrj21]

@primetateHQ Indians will be so pissed off being lumped as Pakis