Prolific immigrant and ethnic minority. Likely cause of death either curiosity or the number 137 bus.
Singapore, SEA, HK, PRC.
Joined August 2009
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Arthur K retweeted
Looks like Confucius institutes are the domestic twin of the strait of Hormuz: they keep re-closing one - third time already - and re-opening the other.
Also, pretty weird to be so obsessed that young Americans shouldn't learn Chinese: in China, English is a mandatory subject at school - and it's often taught in full-on American schools. Over there, learning your rival's language and culture is called strategy 🤷♂️
Arthur K retweeted
The striking design, characterized by the central cut-out in the shape of a Chinese character, was, alas, not as original as it seemed, as it was in fact a replication of an earlier print that had been produced in Taohuawu, Suzhou at the close of the 19th century. 27/
What a smoking hot shirt you have there... #haze #indonesia
Received Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs of the Hellenic Republic, H.E. Theoharis Theoharis @htheoharis (14/10) to discuss the outcomes of the first meeting of the 🇮🇩-🇬🇷 Joint Committee on Economic Cooperation.
Also exchanged views on further strengthening our economic ties particularly in trade, investment and maritime affairs as well as multilateral cooperation.
Indonesia and Greece look forward to the timely conclusion and implementation of the I-EU CEPA, which will open up new economic opportunities for both countries.
Arthur K retweeted
New Sky channel, Sky Death, pledges to be the UK home of livestreamed US executions along with the best state killings from around the globe
Arthur K retweeted
I’ve had a lot of people asking me about the botched execution of Christa Pike in Tennessee, as well as the upcoming execution by firing squad that’s supposed to be livestreamed. Having spent nearly 20 years on death row, my thoughts and feelings about these things are so vast that I sometimes struggle to find a place to begin. I became close friends with a man who had committed murder. He was like a brother to me. I once watched him break down crying, trembling as he told me he wished he was as evil as the world believed him to be, because then he wouldn’t have to care about what he’d done. Fifteen years later, he was still having nightmares about it. I know in my soul that he would never hurt another person again. But I’ve also watched a man being stabbed to death in prison. I cried for days afterward, and something inside me was changed forever. I learned that some people are capable of extraordinary transformation, while others remain capable of terrible violence even behind prison walls. There are no simple answers here. No slogans or political arguments that can adequately address the complexity of human beings, guilt, punishment, and suffering.
But there is one thing I want to say about the upcoming execution by firing squad. Don’t watch it. Whatever you believe about the death penalty, even if you think the person being executed deserves to die, don’t watch it. You cannot witness a human being being killed and simply walk away unchanged. What you see becomes part of you. It follows you into places you never expected it to reach. There are things I witnessed in prison that I would give anything to forget, things that still cast a shadow over my life decades later. There’s a difference between understanding that terrible things happen in the world and deliberately making yourself a spectator to them. I don’t have all the answers about justice, punishment, or forgiveness. But I do know that killing another human being should never become so ordinary that we turn it into something to watch from the comfort of our living rooms.
Arthur K retweeted
En 1960, cuatro chicos británicos grabaron una melodía instrumental inspirada en una película del Lejano Oeste.
Nadie, ni en sus sueños más locos, podría haber imaginado que trece años después esa misma canción daría nacimiento a toda una cultura en las calles de Nueva York...
Arthur K retweeted
That Mitchell and Webb Look Offensive Banned Sketches Full Episode
Arthur K retweeted
The lovely people at Fabulous Films have given me one of these to give away.
You will get it a couple of weeks before it's released.
All you have to do is retweet this tweet & I will select a winner at random.
Good Luck!!
fabulousfilms.com/products/m…
Arthur K retweeted
You can say what you want about Iran but they're definitely pretty unique in their communication: never seen a country threaten another with a math equation before 😅
For those who didn't get it: there is a famous monetary policy formula used by the Fed called the "Taylor rule" that says a central bank's policy rate (i) should equal the neutral real rate (r*) plus target inflation (π*), plus 1.5 times the inflation gap and 0.5 times the output gap (the "i = r* + π* + 1.5(π−π*) + 0.5(y−y*)" part of Ghalibaf's formula).
Ghalibaf adds α(SOH−SOH*) and β(BEM−BEM*): SOH referring to the Strait Of Hormuz and BEM to Bab El-Mandeb. Both have positive coefficient, meaning the more those chokepoints are choked, the higher the rate the Fed would have to set to fight the resulting inflation.
In a nutshell this is Ghalibaf trolling the Fed, telling them that Iran is - in a very real way - setting American monetary policy.
Did nobody consider how the "cake" would be cut, who gets which bit?
#opportunityknocks
Arthur K retweeted
British Prime Minister Andy Burnham plays The Smiths’ 'Rusholme Ruffians' on guitar with a Ukrainian soldier in Kyiv, August 2026.
Worth a read.
I'm typically not one to toot my own horn but I think I may have written the single best article on Xinjiang this past decade.
Never has writing an article taken me so much time: almost two months.
It involved, as amply documented on this platform, a six-week RV roadtrip through Xinjiang during which I posted so relentlessly that I suspect several of you muted me somewhere around day six, and are only reading this now because someone told you the ordeal was finally over 😅
More seriously, I did what unfortunately all too few writers do these days when writing about a topic: I genuinely went deep.
Not only did I travel almost everywhere in Xinjiang and spoke with hundreds of people in the process, but I also spent a further 10 days afterwards in Urumqi - the province's capital - to engage with the local intelligentsia (journalists, university professors, public servants both junior and senior, XPCC/Bingtuan executives, businessmen, etc.) to get as accurate a read on the place as I could.
Meanwhile, when back in Urumqi after our roadtrip, I placed my 2 daughters in a holiday camp with local Uyghur kids - learning as a result something no discussion with an adult could ever tell me: what life is actually like for Uyghur kids in today's China.
On top of all this, I read widely and voraciously. The academic historians - Brophy, Gladney, Rudelson. The UN reports. But also books like Li Juan's wonderful Winter Pasture, a Chinese writer's account of living through a winter with Kazakh nomads in the Altay region.
The end result is an 8,000-word article that, I hope you'll agree, does something no article on Xinjiang has done in a very long time: treats the place and its people with the depth they deserve.
Maybe uncharacteristic for me, I don't shy away from the uncomfortable parts - on either side. I write about the omnipresent police checkpoints and the institutional paranoia as candidly as I write about the breathtaking shallowness and lies of the Western discourse on the topic.
If you're looking for propaganda - whether pro or anti-China - you'll be disappointed. If you're looking for honesty and nuance, however, I think you'll like it.
Enjoy the read here: arnaudbertrand.substack.com/…
