menere

“𝘚𝘰𝘮𝘦 𝘱𝘦𝘰𝘱𝘭𝘦 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘧𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥 𝘎𝘰𝘥 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘥𝘦𝘱𝘵𝘩 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘪𝘳 𝘴𝘪𝘯 𝘸𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘦 𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘭𝘰𝘴𝘵 𝘩𝘪𝘮 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘩𝘦𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘪𝘳 𝘣𝘭𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘴.” — 𝘙𝘶𝘮𝘪

Indigo dyes of West Africa

- MARCUS AURELIUS

Marcus Aurelius:

Friday... ©️ Tagliaferri Art

From all I’ve painted this is probably one of my favourite Acrylic on paper 2021

We keep judging the world from our own moral compass. The world isn't fair, we need to make peace with that. Equality is a facade though it sounds good to the ears. Moral justice is a cry of the oppressed and downtrodden. In this world, as we can all see, Might is mostly right. Like they say: The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. Empower yourself! It's a brutal world out here!

When Dostoevsky began gambling away the money he earned from writing The Gambler—a novel about a man ruined by roulette—he was painfully aware of the contradiction. Emotionally, he described gambling as a cycle of feverish hope followed by despair and self-loathing. While playing, he felt electrified, convinced that one more spin could change his fate. After losing, he was disgusted with himself and felt morally degraded. The fact that he was losing money earned through intense mental labor made the experience even worse, since writing was exhausting for him and often done under severe deadlines. Intellectually, he understood exactly what was happening. He knew gambling wasn’t about money but about surrendering to fate, challenging chance, and briefly escaping responsibility. That is why The Gambler reads less like a warning and more like a confession. He wasn’t surprised by his actions, but he was horrified by his inability to stop, even with full awareness. Morally and spiritually, the contradiction fed into Dostoevsky’s lifelong themes of sin, self-punishment, and redemption. He believed suffering could lead to truth and transformation, and gambling became one of the ways he enacted that suffering. He felt degraded and trapped, yet unable to break free—an experience that later deepened the compassion and psychological realism in his greatest novels. In short, he felt ashamed, lucid, and powerless all at once, painfully aware that understanding a vice does not free someone from it.

Okay… but why? Acrylic on canvas

Memories painted Acrylic on canvas

I'm pretty sure everyone at my company saw this article and now they all think we're in an AI crisis. We're not in an AI crisis. We use Claude to summarize Slack threads. But here's what's actually interesting: this whole panic reveals something nobody wants to admit. Every company in America has been bullshitting about their "AI strategy" for two years. We all saw the hype. We all knew we had to say something. So we rebranded our existing automation as "AI-powered" and called it a day. My company isn't special. We're all doing the same thing. The problem is now the executives actually believe their own bullshit. They think we have "significant AI exposure" because they've been telling investors we're "AI-first." I just got pulled into an emergency meeting. Six executives asking me to explain our "AI dependency matrix." There is no AI dependency matrix. There's Claude for meeting summaries, there's some sentiment analysis in our support tickets that came free with Zendesk, and there's whatever Gmail is doing when it autocompletes my sentences. But I can't say that in a room full of people who told their boards we're "transforming the business through AI." So I said we have "distributed AI touchpoints across multiple vendors with no single point of failure." Which is technically true. We use a bunch of different services that all have AI features we mostly ignore. The CFO asked if we should "hedge our AI exposure." I have no idea what that means. Neither does he. What am I going to do: nothing. Because in three weeks, Anthropic will say something reassuring, the stocks will recover, and everyone will forget this happened. But I'll have documentation showing I recommended a "risk assessment" that mysteriously never got prioritized. The funniest part is that half these executives probably don't even know what Anthropic is. They just saw "AI" and "crash" in the same headline. We're all pretending. The whole industry is pretending. And articles like this just remind everyone how fragile the pretending is.

A child who can pass standardized tests but can't question authority isn't educated. They're trained.

The ability to write was not a 'gift' bestowed on me by genetics or something. It is a skill that was honed by years of practise and doing the hard stuff. Human effort is what gives value to things. The Mona Lisa can be generated by ChatGPT, but it would be completely worthless because what makes the Mona Lisa valuable is Leonardo da Vinci's human labour. What these white billionaires are selling to you as "AI" is basically the idea that you no longer have to put in effort to become objectively decent at something and you can now do everything you ever wished you could do without putting any effort or sacrifice into it, with no consequences whatsoever (as long as you pay them a monthly subscription for access to these wonder platforms). Pay OpenAI/Microsoft a subscription for ChatGPT and you are now a 'writer' without knowing how to spell or punctuate. Pay Suno a subscription and you are now a 'musician' without knowing how to play a simple octave scale. Pay Google a subscription for VEO-3/Nano Banana and you are now a 'visual artist' without knowing the first thing about physical or digital art. You don't seem to realise that the obvious thing being done here is the billionaire capitalist takeover of all kinds of human craft and endeavour, such that someday the only 'education' kids will get is how to write 'prompts', and all actual skill or proficiency will be things that are exclusively controlled by AI platforms domiciled in the US and owned by rich oyibo men who charge you to do anything you need to do in your life - because you are completely dependent on them. And whatever human proficiency remains will become so expensive and inaccessible that actual musicians and writers will become private performers for the super elite, like in medieval Europe. Real art and craft for rich white people, AI slop for everyone else (who will also have to pay for the privilege). This AI thing is NOT some sort of benign technological progression and I find it very frustrating how Africans of all people - we who should be the very first ones to immediately recognise "AI" as yet another oyibo Pinky & The Brain scheme to take over something free and start charging for it - are dancing mindlessly into this giant trap. What they're selling to you as a shortcut or a technological aid is actually a threat to your very existence, and I don't know how you can't see it!

"I hate African puppets more than I hate their foreign puppeteers because foreign interference can't work without local collaborators..." This is a bullshit statement uttered by cowards and colonised people. What you really mean is this: "Even though I know that my ultimate enemy is not really my idiot brother who has an outsider's hand up his ass, but the outsider who has his hand up my brother's ass, I am afraid to confront the powerful outsider who is the ultimate source of the problem, so I'd rather fight to the death against the easy target next to me." It's just regular old African self hatred dressed up in pseudo-intellectual clothes, but some of us see right through it. It's the exact same cowardly behavioural pathology that leads Africans to carry out the most brutal street justice against people who steal phones and snatch purses, while genuflecting on the same street before people who steal entire budgets for hospitals, schools, and roads. When you are too much of a bitch to tackle your real adversary and confront your own fear, you deflect that energy towards easy and more accessible targets. That's why many Nigerians will agree with me that Bola Tinubu is the spawn of Satan, but the minute I point out that Satan lives in Washington, Tinubu is really just his water carrier, and the US State Department is the actual mastermind behind the deadly assault on Nigeria's economy and security over the past 17 years, the number of retweets will suddenly reduce. They want to drag Tinubu that looks and sounds like them, but not the CIA director in Langley that is Tinubu's boss. It's also why some Nigerians completely lose their minds at the mention of the word "Fulani", but they are not interested in finding out how come a nomadic indigenous group of cattle herders suddenly began having access to weapons that even the Nigerian military does not have. They see news about Fulani militia ransacking villages in a mineral-rich region, and their only takeaway is "fuck Fulani people." It never occurs to them to wonder how come these semi-literate nomads came to possess weapons that cost more than Nigeria's per capita income, and why displacement of villages sitting atop mineral riches suddenly became a "Fulani" preoccupation after 2010. Nobody needs that information. Just "Fulani bad" is enough! The ones who think that Muslim/Yoruba/Hausa/Fulani people are their biggest enemies in the world and that Netanyahu/Trump will give them "Biafra" are not interested in knowing how come what was supposed to be a 6-week "police action" in 1967 turned into a deadly 3-year civil war costing over 3 million lives. They're not interested in the fact that Israel provided arms to both sides, and that France armed "Biafra" not to win, but to make the war drag on and cause maximum suffering to Nigeria as retaliation for Nigeria's public opposition to French nuclear bomb testing in Algeria. All this important context is unimportant. All they know is "This black man that looks just like me and lives down the road from me is my biggest enemy in the world." Same phenomenon in DR Congo where many Congolese nationalists will tell you that Paul Kagame is Satan himself and Rwanda is the source of all their security problems - but they will never acknowledge that Rwanda by itself can never destabilise a country nearly 100 times bigger without the active and ongoing involvement of a powerful foreign backer. Tshisekedi will loudly excoriate Kagame and condemn Rwanda, then he will enter a plane and fly to Washington to sign a "peace deal" with Rwanda brokered by the very USA that has carefully manufactured every crisis in DRC since 1962, and which is currently building a giant metal straw to suck cheap Congolese minerals from the Kolwezi mining district to Lobito port. Always avoiding the necessary confrontation with the criminal masterminds by displacing the aggression toward fellow African bottom feeders! Look how well that's been working out for you!

OVERPRICED!!! Dear @icpcnigeria & @officialEFCC @SenGodswill Project Code ERGP20247175 is listed in the 2024 FG budget as the construction of an ICT Centre in Etim Ekpo, Akwa Ibom North West Senatorial District, with a total allocation of ₦355 million. The project is being executed through the Federal Cooperative College, Ibadan, under the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security. Records show that over ₦220 million was released in September and November 2024 alone. ₦102 million was paid to Alpuba Services Limited, Abuja, for construction, while ₦118.3 million went to D’Frontiers Multiproject Nig. Ltd for equipment and furnishing under Lot G29. This project was facilitated by Senate President Godswill Akpabio, yet its placement raises serious concerns. An ICT centre has been pushed through an agency whose mandate is cooperative education and rural agricultural development, not digital infrastructure. The Ministry of Agriculture exists to address farming, food security, and agro-related development, not ICT construction and furnishing. This pattern reflects a wider problem in constituency projects, where unrelated agencies are routinely used as channels for political allocations. The result is weak oversight, poor delivery, inflated costs, and projects that fail to meet community needs. Tracking by the Tracka team, using publicly available spending data, shows that the project is located at Ikono Annang Comprehensive Secondary School in Nkwot Ikono, Etim Ekpo Local Government Area of Akwa Ibom State. While the building exists and has been partially furnished, the outcome does not reflect the scale of public funds spent. Only 25 desktop computers, basic tables, and stools were supplied. Essential facilities are missing, including UPS systems, printers, backup power such as generators or solar solutions, ceiling fans, whiteboards, and a perimeter fence. The centre remains largely unusable and locked, denying students and teachers any real benefit. Beyond the delivery failure, there is also concern about political branding. Constituency project signposts increasingly carry the images of political office holders, including the Senate President, turning public infrastructure funded by taxpayers into personal political billboards. This project fits into a broader pattern of questionable allocations linked to the same Ministry of Agriculture, where funds meant for agricultural development are diverted to unrelated projects such as police facilities, transformers, solar streetlights, and ICT centres, often presented as rural interventions. The Federal Cooperative College, Ibadan must work with anti-corruption agencies to ensure contractors return to site, complete the project to standard, and account for every naira spent. Public funds must translate into real value for communities, not poorly executed projects wrapped in political promotion. #AskQuestions #GetInvolved