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Anand

@calmerfuture.bsky.social

today, I don't know

George Orwell statue
outside BBC Broadcasting House

the quotation carved onto the grey stone wall reads:

if liberty
means anything at all
it means the right to tell people
what they do not want
to hear

January 29, 2026 at 1:16 PM

Anand

@calmerfuture.bsky.social

unexpected
George Fox thoughts

tread lightly on grass

January 29, 2026 at 1:10 PM

Anand

@calmerfuture.bsky.social

took two minutes to find out that Sudan's 'data completeness' is 25%

and just a functional adult to realise something is really odd about a comparison with an active war zone

you must love Britain so very much to attack the NHS in such a twisted, dishonest way

www.imperial.ac.uk/Stories/glob...

January 29, 2026 at 8:46 AM

Anand

@calmerfuture.bsky.social

this is clearly a nonsensical, scaremongering comparison

why would you amplify it ?

Sudan is in the middle of a devastating civil war, genocide and famine

any stats reported from Sudan are meaningless, and being used to push an agenda

@michaelsearles.bsky.social are you always so dishonest?

The UK’s rate of 1.8 per 100,000 people was worse than 25 years ago, when it was 1.5.

Meanwhile, countries such as Sudan have seen significant improvements, more than halving to 1.6 over the same period.

Undeveloped or developing countries are less likely to carry out as many medical procedures or treatments as in the UK, while the accuracy of reporting incidents may not be as robust.

However, the UK’s death rate was more than twice that of European counterparts such as Ireland, Switzerland and Norway

January 29, 2026 at 8:38 AM

Anand

@calmerfuture.bsky.social

Gandalf, outside the urinals, thinking

"He could just take it off and put it on again, once he gets through the door. I know he's earned it, but this is just silly. Three hundred lives of men I have walked this earth and now I have no time…"

January 29, 2026 at 7:54 AM

Anand

@calmerfuture.bsky.social

I've clearly been reading too much British politics

my first thought was how the coastal economy of Fourth Age Middle Earth must have changed dramatically for Sam Gamgee to be pressganged by desperate remnant groups of coastal elves after Vallinexit

a person stands proudly looking at the reader in front of a harbour scene, old book cover of Billy Budd by Herman Melville

January 29, 2026 at 7:47 AM

Anand

@calmerfuture.bsky.social

my timeline 😅

January 28, 2026 at 9:32 PM

Anand

@calmerfuture.bsky.social

London I know you're trying your best but I'm still not convinced

tree silhouetted against a blue and white sky, reflected in a calm body of water

January 28, 2026 at 2:35 PM

Anand

@calmerfuture.bsky.social

teefs are gnawsome 😻

January 28, 2026 at 2:28 PM

Anand

@calmerfuture.bsky.social

not the right time of day but 🤞🏽

a large tree felled by beavers chewing through the trunk

January 28, 2026 at 1:20 PM

Anand

@calmerfuture.bsky.social

amazing way to announce the third film and/or we're in a lot of trouble

January 28, 2026 at 7:48 AM

Anand

@calmerfuture.bsky.social

women are too likely to ask what exactly the magic beans are, if they might be dangerous planted in our back garden, why someone gave them to you — and are they actually worth more than our cow, Jack?

and that is a tragic skills issue, holding back beanstalk growth

(Tim Squirrell's useful framing)

The types of training that those aware of AI want to have also differs, with women being more likely than men to want training on understanding what AI is (34% versus 26%), while men are more likely than women to want training on how to use AI for automation (35% versus 25%).

January 28, 2026 at 7:01 AM

Anand

@calmerfuture.bsky.social

thinking about corporate bailouts and the AI bubble for no obvious reason

a passage from Terry Deary's A History of the British in Ten Enemies, about how official support for the failing East India Company led to the Boston Tea Party

(also fears of the EIC turning its attention to the Western hemisphere, from what I've read elsewhere)

January 26, 2026 at 1:51 PM

Anand

@calmerfuture.bsky.social

snowdrops and birdsong 😻

a low forest undergrowth with a scattering of white flower bulbs, a wooden farm fence or in the distance, coy tractor playing hide and seek

January 26, 2026 at 9:41 AM

Anand

@calmerfuture.bsky.social

sometimes a picture says a thousand words 😹

Rama Duwaji holding up a ceramic plate with an intimidating self-portrait of herself — gently reminding us that we are out of these beautiful talented people's league 😭

January 26, 2026 at 5:53 AM

Anand

@calmerfuture.bsky.social

so angry I nearly protested outside the wrong institution by mistake 😖

thank you

January 25, 2026 at 8:08 AM

Anand

@calmerfuture.bsky.social

I find this, by South Korean economist Ha-Joon Chang, helpful on the malleability of our values

(I guess partly as he sits outside the blinkered Western cultural understanding that culture is always key 🙃)

23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism:
Can Africa change its geography and history?

high levels of development. They built the good institutions largely after, or at least in tandem with, their economic development. This shows that institutional quality is as much an outcome as the causal factor of economic development. Given this, bad institutions cannot be the explanation of growth failure in Africa.

People talk about ‘bad’ cultures in Africa, but most of today’s rich countries had once been argued to have comparably bad cultures, as I documented in the chapter ‘Lazy Japanese and thieving Germans’ in my earlier book Bad Samaritans. Until the early twentieth century, Australians and Americans would go to Japan and say the Japanese were lazy. Until the mid nineteenth century, the British would go to Germany and say that the Germans were too stupid, too individualistic and too emotional to develop their economies (Germany was not unified then) – the exact opposite of the stereotypical image that they have of the Germans today and exactly the sort of things that people now say about Africans. The Japanese and German cultures were transformed with economic development, as the demands of a highly organized industrial society made people behave in more disciplined, calculating and cooperative ways. In that sense, culture is more of an outcome, rather than a cause, of economic development. It is wrong to blame Africa’s (or any region’s or any country’s) underdevelopment on its culture.

Thus seen, what appear to be unalterable structural impediments to economic development in Africa (and indeed elsewhere) are usually things that can be, and have been, overcome with better technologies, superior organizational skills and improved political institutions. The fact that most of today’s rich countries themselves used to suffer (and still suffer to an extent) from these conditions is an indirect proof of this point. Moreover, despite having these impediments (often in more severe forms), African countries themselves did not have a problem growing in the 1960s and 70s. The main reason for Africa’s recent growth failure lies in policy – namely, the free-trade, free-market policy that has been imposed on the continent through the SAP. Nature and history do not condemn a country to a particular future. If it is policy that is causing the problem, the future can be changed even more easily. The fact that we have failed to see this, and not its allegedly chronic growth failure, is the real tragedy of Africa.

January 24, 2026 at 10:16 PM

Anand

@calmerfuture.bsky.social

something which is not US-centred news, but a good reminder that candles for a better world are burning in many places

amazing reception to Mahmood Mamdani (Zohran's illustrious father) in Nairobi, wish I could have been there for it 😻

(flowers for Cheche Books and Ahmed Aidarus, Jahazi Press)