Recent well liked threads

I’m late to this but I wanted to set out some thoughts on the awful @BMJPublicHealth excess deaths article.

Commentary has focussed on media coverage, linking deaths to vaccines, but I want to discuss the article itself, which should not have been published in its current form.

That is not to let @Telegraph @NewYorkPost and others who misreported this off the hook entirely. Reckless reporting has done considerable harm, going well beyond what was claimed in the paper.

More lives will be lost as misinformation fuels vaccine hesitancy.

But as I said below, when @bmj_company distanced itself from media misreporting, this was always going to happen. It's all very well to say the 'study' doesn't establish a link between excess deaths and vaccines, but it's full of inappropriate insinuation.

https://x.com/ActuaryByDay/status/1798950205016162685

1-year-old app.

$300K in monthly revenue.

Wave is scaling in the competitive AI note-taking space with clean UX, strong ASO, and smart SEO plays.

Here’s how they’re stacking paid and organic channels to grow fast: 🧵👇

(1/9)

Onboarding is short.

You’re hit with social proof right away.

Then you land on a clean home screen with one bold red button.

No guesswork.

Just: Tap → Record → Done.

(2/9)

This clarity is a key reason why it converts.

The app doesn’t explain itself - it shows you value in 3 seconds or less.

And when the UX is this intuitive, every ad and organic install works harder.

(3/9)

El nervio más infravalorado del cuerpo:

El nervio vago.

Te han hecho creer que solo sirve para la digestión...
Pero regula literalmente todo tu bienestar.

10 maneras de activar el nervio vago para transformar tu salud: 🧵

El nervio vago es el interruptor biológico del cuerpo.

Cuando está activo, pasas de “alarma” a “reparación”.

Lo ignoras → estrés crónico.
Lo activas → descanso profundo.

Respira con el diafragma.

Inhala 4 seg.
Retén 7.
Exhala 8.

Haz esto 2 veces al día y tu cuerpo empieza a resetearse.

$200K/month in revenue.

11-year-old app.

1 simple idea: daily motivation.

Here’s how this app became a category king (and why you probably can’t outrank it): 🧵👇

(1/12)

The app = motivation quotes. That’s it.

But the execution is sharp:

→ Beautiful visuals
→ Daily reminders
→ Easy sharing

(2/12)

Onboarding is long - but well-crafted.

They ask:
🧍Name, age, gender
🎨 Your preferred background theme

Most themes are set in golden hour light - the exact style that crushes on Instagram & TikTok.

(3/12)

Yesterday I had the rare opportunity to speak with infantry from Ukraine's 14th Brigade. They had just returned from a 90-day posting in Novoekonomichne - one of the hottest parts of the entire front. Their commander, 'Bobruk,' had some very interesting insights.

Thread:

1. Bobruk and his team had just completed 90-day rotation, basically on the zero line/gray area the entire time. Surviving this was almost a miracle. They now had just five days off (mostly still in Donetsk oblast) before heading back - the lack of manpower is that bad.

2. Units are all tiny now, on both sides. Bobruk's team deploys mostly in pairs, and Russians come in ones or twos. 'Even three soldiers together is already enough to almost guarantee a (FPV) drone strike,' Bobruk said.

Babesia spp con la clásica imagen en “Cruz de Malta”.

🔹 Transmisión: Principalmente por garrapatas Ixodes 🕷️; también posible por transfusión, trasplante o vía congénita 👶🩸

📍 Distribución: Endémica en el noreste y medio oeste de EE. UU., con aumento de casos y expansión geográfica en la última década 📈

🤒 Síntomas: Fiebre, fatiga, escalofríos, cefalea y anorexia — inespecíficos y a menudo leves en inmunocompetentes

⚠️ Casos graves: En inmunodeprimidos, ancianos o asplénicos ➜ riesgo de anemia hemolítica severa, fallo renal o distrés respiratorio

🔬 Diagnóstico: Frotis sanguíneo con tinción de Giemsa/Wright o PCR para ADN de Babesia; la serología no sirve para el diagnóstico agudo

💊 Tratamiento:
•Casos leves–moderados → atovacuona + azitromicina (7–10 días)
•Casos graves → clindamicina + quinina, y valorar recambio eritrocitario si alta parasitemia

🛡️ Prevención: Evitar zonas endémicas, usar ropa protectora, repelentes y revisar el cuerpo tras exposición

📊 Frecuencia: Zoonosis poco frecuente en España, pero con tendencia al aumento en los últimos años 📈

🏥 Incidencia hospitalaria: Muy baja → 0,28 casos / 10 millones personas-año

👨‍⚕️ Perfil predominante: Varones de mediana edad

🗺️ Distribución geográfica: Más casos en Castilla-La Mancha, Extremadura y Asturias

🌞 Estacionalidad: Mayor incidencia entre verano y otoño

🧫 Especies principales en España: Babesia divergens, Babesia microti y Babesia venatorum

📍 Predominante: B. divergens → causa más frecuente de babesiosis humana, sobre todo en el norte (p. ej., Asturias)

⚠️ Gravedad: B. divergens asociada a formas graves, especialmente en personas asplénicas

🧬 Emergente: B. microti documentada en España desde 2016, considerada patógeno emergente en la región.

V has arrived!! Thread of official links start here 👇🏼
Remember, engage with media links to push V’s EMV. I’ll post them as they come.

W Korea IG

instagram.com/reel/DPbHQVhjW…

Try not to avoid stuff from media that are NOT at the event. Idk. I can’t tell you what to do.

V FOR PARIS FASHION WEEK
CELINE AMBASSADOR TAEHYUNG
#VxCELINEPFW #CELINESUMMER2026 #TAEHYUNGxCELINE #PFW
@celineofficial @BTS_twt

*its try TO avoid. Curse typos 😵‍💫

What is happening?

The S&P 500 is up +40% in 6 months, Gold is nearing $4,000/oz, and Bitcoin hit a record $2.5 TRILLION market cap.

Meanwhile, the US Dollar is set for its WORST year since 1973.

Are markets THAT strong or is the US Dollar just crashing?

(a thread)

Yesterday, on a casual Saturday night, Bitcoin surged to $125,000, a new all time high.

This makes Bitcoin worth a record $2.5 trillion.

Meanwhile, gold has hit 40 record highs in 2025 and is now worth a whopping $26.3 TRILLION.

That's more than 10 TIMES the value of Bitcoin.

Meanwhile, take a look at Silver, worth $2.7 TRILLION and up over +60% YTD.

Gold, Silver, and Bitcoin are now all in the top 10 largest assets in the world.

These are all typically viewed as safe haven assets which rise when stocks fall.

But, take a look at equity markets.

@DPJHodges I will try to remember to remind you of this tweet in a year's time when the majority of the Arab population of Gaza has been relocated, the West Bank has been annexed, Israeli settlements cover the whole region and the two state solution is nothing but a memory.

@DPJHodges @threadreaderapp please unroll for posterity

🔥He tried to freeze Ukraine — but Russia may freeze first. A nationwide fuel crisis and looming blackouts in 5 regions show how Putin’s energy war is blowing back. 👇

🧵1/25

🔥With over a third of Russia’s refining capacity disabled, fuel shortages across the country, and rising internal dissent — Ukraine’s energy war may be the most effective campaign yet.

21 Russian oil refineries hit since January — already 48% more than in all 2024.

2/25

🔥Ukraine’s drone campaign has forced 38% of Russian refineries offline, slashing gasoline output by 1 million tons in September alone and creating a 20% fuel deficit. With Western sanctions limiting equipment imports, repairs could take months.

3/25

Meu problema com o Jones Manoel não é pessoal. Eu não o xingo nem nada assim. Nem uso apelidos indecorosos, mesmo ele dizendo "eh, você é muito esperto, ministro..." para um ministro que lhe respondeu com toda a cordialidade do mundo.

Minha questão são os fatos.

Ele pode ter a opinião que ele quiser sobre o plano de parceria público-privada com financiamento do BNDES para resolver a precariedade do metrô do Recife. Ele pode propor outras soluções, sem a iniciativa privada. Tudo isso é debate.

Ele não pode dizer que @Haddad_Fernando é responsável pela infraestrutura de transporte, quando o responsável é o ministro dos Transportes @RenanFilho_ .

Ele não pode dizer que o ministro não respondeu à longa pergunta dele cheia de micro-perguntas quando ele respondeu.

Trump tried to end-run a federal judge's ruling blocking the deployment of the Oregon National Guard by sending the *California* National Guard to Portland.

A hearing is about to start for a judge to decide whether to block him again.

Background allrisenews.com/p/constitution…

FYI:

The public dial-in line has not been operative since the start time of the hearing: 7 p.m. PT / 10 p.m. ET.

It's unclear whether the proceedings were delayed or the remote access system is down.

We're about to begin.

Judge Immergut is presiding.

x.com/mazemoore/stat… Columbia University prof. Mahmood Mamdani wrote: “Does not the suicide bomber join both aspects of our humanity…in that we are willing to subordinate life-both our own and that of others—to objectives we consider higher than life?” in his 2004 book Good Muslim, Bad Muslim.

Western analysts consistently fail to recognize the co-morbidity between academic and political critique and violent jihad, precisely because they do not grasp the morphological continuity linking Shia and Sunni revolutionaries—nor the deeper homology between post-colonial radical critique and totalizing armed confrontation. Islamist jihadism and decolonial radicalism share a common teleology: both sacralize resistance itself as the path to redemption, subordinating life to the metaphysics of justice.

Political and violent jihad are two faces on the same coin of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Muqawama Doctrine; when Sunni Islamist Fathi Shaqaqi escalated Qutb’s gradualist da’wa to form Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) between 1980-81, it was not a break from the Brotherhood, but rather the acceleration from political to violent jihad against the Shirk of secular western and PanArab governance modalities which Qutb labelled Taghut (false sovereignty).

Hassan Al Banna and Sayyid Qutb both viewed the spectrum of political struggle (jihad siyasi) to violent struggle (jihad musallah) as a smooth fabric rather than a categorical rupture. For al Banna political action and violent jihad are sequential expressions of one divine duty to re-establish the hakimiyyah of Allah—the divine sovereignty or the exclusive right of God to legislate, govern, and define moral order.

Qutb’s contribution was merely to re-metaphysicize it without abrogation—instead, casting it as an ontological confrontation between Tawhid (Divine Unity) or the absolute oneness of God and the integration of all reality under His sovereignty and Jahiliyyah (Age of Ignorance)—the state of moral and metaphysical disorder resulting from rebellion against Divine guidance.

Likewise, when Mamdani Sr., on a 2022 panel, is seen equating post-WWII Allied ethnic policies in Europe to Nazi aims, crediting U.S. Indian reservations under Lincoln for inspiring Hitler's genocide, and framing America as the origin of settler-colonialism—all while praising BLM as a progressive force—he is merely accelerating along the same siyasi-musallah rails.

What is most important to understand; what is so dangerously missed: Mamdani senior is outing himself. Although a Twelver Shi’i, his worldview reproduces the same revolutionary logic first articulated in the Sunni Islamist tradition of the Brotherhood and later hybridized by Black Flag groups such as Fathi Shaqaqi’s PIJ. Shaqaqi was himself the reverse phenomenon: a Sunni who after absorbing Qutb’s ideas blended them with the Iranian Shi’i model of “resistance.” The result in both is an ideology that collapses the distance between political struggle and divine mandate, granting every believer license to act as a soldier of God. That is the politicization of revelation—the high-grade indicator of dangerous theocratic revolutionaries.

Today’s post-2017 Gulf security doctrine in the UAE, and increasingly in Saudi Arabia under the Council of Senior Scholars, explicitly rejects the Brotherhood’s “individual jihad” ethos. Legitimate armed struggle (jihad musallah) belongs to the wali al-amr or the recognized authority, not to self-appointed actors. Personal piety (tazkiyah) and social reform (islah) are the only forms of jihad open to individuals. This position isn’t “secularist”but it is classically Sunni, re-anchoring jihad in nizam (order) and fiqh al-ta’ah (the jurisprudence of obedience to authority), not in the ideological voluntarism Mamdani advances when he masquerades modern revolutionary politics in the skin of religion and politics. By contrast, his own weaker ideological guardrails must be understood within Najaf’s Quietism and Twelver Islam…

x.com/michelletandle… Analytic Defense. First, Mamdani’s own material exposes these risks; there is no need to descend into personal attack to flag them—this is a warning about ideas, not the man. Mamdani’s Twelver Shiʿi background from his family’s Khoja roots is publicly disclosed, and his writings and statements map onto broader streams of revolutionary Islamist thought, without exaggeration or ad hominem. If anything, this underscores why post-2017 Gulf doctrines, rejecting “individual jihad” in favor of state authority (walī al-amr), offer a necessary counterweight.

First, the suicide bombing quote from Good Muslim, Bad Muslim (2004) is verbatim and critical: "Does not the suicide bomber join both aspects of our humanity…in that we are willing to subordinate life—both our own and that of others—to objectives we consider higher than life?" This is Mamdani framing the act not as aberrant barbarism but as a universal human impulse toward self-sacrifice for transcendent ideals.

It directly mirrors the voluntarism in Brotherhood ideology, where individual believers are empowered as soldiers in service of a higher calling: “soldiers of God”. This is directly found in al-Banna’s framework throughhis construction of the believer as al-jundi al-rabbani (“God’s soldier”) and a jihad continuum that moves step by step—from tarbiyah (spiritual and moral training), to dawah (calling and persuasion), to tanzim(collective organization and disciplined obedience), and finally to qital (armed struggle). In both Brotherhood traditions, establishing hakimiyyah—God’s sovereignty in law and order—is cast as the summit of worship, with each member of the Ummah imagined as an agent of divine justice, subordinating life, their own and others’, to that higher mandate. Qutbism merely inhabits al-Banna’s jihad continuum at the dawah stage through his call to an ontological confrontation between Tawhid vs. Jahiliyyah framework and the denunciation of taghut(false sovereignty).

Mamdani accelerates this very scaffolding, although thinly cloaked in secularism and youth grievance politics:

“The failure of the older generation to find a humane alternative in Palestine in part explains the desperation of the younger generation, resorting to violence in politics. Even then, we need to recognize that the term suicide bomber is a misnomer. The suicide bomber is a category of soldier whose objective is to kill - even if he or she must die to kill.” (cit. loc. asiasociety.org/mahmood-mamdan…)

It is therefore both wholly uncontroversial and unsurprising that critics have long flagged Mamdani’s language as relativizing or humanizing tactics of civilian-targeted terrorism, especially in the post-9/11 context where his 2004 book positioned U.S. policies as the root of such "blowback." Both Al-Banna’s believer as al-jundī al-rabbani “God’s soldier” and Qutb’s denunciation of taghut (false sovereignty) are merely secularized by Mamdani—concurrent instances of conceptual ‘plagiarism’, dawah (calling and persuasion) and Taqiyya (dissimulation) filched in broad daylight from the Brotherhood’s manuscripts. Critical to note: many Twelver scholars reject outright the revolutionary activism Mamdani secularizes and universalizes; his strain of ‘academic’ extremism is his to own.

Finally, what remains critically misunderstood is that all are seated neatly in al-Banna’s jihad continuum. Qutb’s project is dawah, Qaradawi builds upon it and accelerates to tanzim, and scholars like Mamdani straddle and bridge across to qital. Each position occupies a rung on the same ladder that al-Banna built: spiritual formation leads to ideological proclamation, to collective organization, and finally to the legitimation of armed confrontation. This is important to unpack…

Al-Banna designed a closed moral-political circuit in which spiritual training (tarbiyah) produces conviction; conviction demands public proclamation (dawah); proclamation requires disciplined organization (tanzim); and organization, when sufficiently matured and opposed, culminates in armed struggle (qital). Each later thinker operates somewhere that escalation ladder.

Sayyid Qutb’s project concentrates on the dawah stage. He re-metaphysicizes al-Banna’s call into an ontological confrontation between the divine order of tawhid and the age of ignorance embodied in jahiliyyah, rejecting the legal scaffolding of sovereign states and positing the preacher as a divine vanguard whose witness alone can re-create the community of faith through calling and persuasion (dawah).

Yusuf al-Qaradawi builds directly on that foundation and accelerates toward tanzim, insisting that the modern age demands organized vehicles for the call: parties, unions, and transnational networks that institutionalize dawah and prepare the community for eventual power. His “moderation” lies not in rejecting al-Banna’s continuum but in bureaucratizing it—placing organization between the moral and the military.

Mahmood Mamdani, though speaking in secular and academic idiom, extends the same logic upward toward qital. By treating violent resistance as a universal human expression of moral transcendence—what Mamdani frames as the willingness to subordinate life to higher ideals—he translates the Brotherhood’s moral voluntarism into intellectual justification. His argument functions as the mirror image of Qutb’s: where Qutb spiritualizes politics, Mamdani politicizes the spiritual, both converging on the same anthropology of the self-authorized believer, merely flipping a switch that through this inversion accelerates the call to decentralized violence.

In the 2022 panel footage above, Mamdani's words demonstrates his method of operationalizing Qutb’s dawah, institutionalized through western academia (Qaradawi’s tanzim) all in service of al-Banna’s final goal of armed resistance (qital): He argues the Nazis and Allies shared a project of creating "pure nations" through ethnic cleansing, in the Allied case by moving Germans out of Eastern Europe post-WWII; he credits U.S. Native American policies under Lincoln—genocide followed by reservations—as inspiring Hitler to realize genocide was "doable" and that citizenship could be racially differentiated and claims Nuremberg Laws were patterned after American ones; and he positions America as the "genesis" of settler-colonialism. Mamdani contrasts the "perpetually fragmented" Native Americans in reservations, which he ties to the Palestinian struggle by labeling it as a "two-state solution" model, with African Americans whose integration (despite oppression) enabled alliances leading to his framing of BLM as the "forefront of progressive struggles."

This isn't just historical revisionism; it's an "acceleration" that sacralizes resistance against perceived systemic shirk (false sovereignty), mirroring the muqawama continuum where political critique slides into armed confrontation. By praising BLM in this frame—while downplaying or equating Western actions to Nazi ones—it tacitly licenses the voluntarist ethos, where individuals or groups act as "soldiers of God" (or justice) against jahiliyyah-like oppression.

Mamadani isn't an incidental apologist; his subterfuge is the fabric of a thought system providing plausible deniability for political jihad across Sunni (Brotherhood/PIJ) and Twelver streams. Mamdani's Twelver lens, which emphasizes eschatological justice against tyranny, adds a layer where redemptive struggle isn't just political but potentially divine, even as he couches it publicly in academic terms. Western analysts' failure to spot this stems from treating these as siloed: decolonial critique here, radical Islam there, without seeing the shared teleology that subordinates individual life to metaphysical redemption. It's dangerous precisely because it can mutate from seminar discourse to real-world acceleration, as seen in how Qutb's ideas jumped sects and inspired Black Flag groups like PIJ.

This is, in fact, exactly how Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad emerged from the Muslim Brotherhood’s academic networks in the 80s. The Egyptian Brotherhood’s al-Mujamaʿ al-Islamiya (Islamic Center) established in 1973 in Gaza was their Trojan horse to Israel after the Six Day War …. (tbc)

#SupremeCourt to hear a habeas corpus petition filed by @GitanjaliAngmo seeking the release of Ladakh social activist and education reformer Sonam Wangchuk, reportedly in a jail in Jodhpur. He was arrested under the National Security Act following violent clashes in Ladakh.

Bench: Justices Aravind Kumar and NV Anjaria

Senior Adv Kapil Sibakl : Grounds of detention not supplied.

SG Tushar Mehta : All supplied.

Sibal : Family members have to be supplied.

SG : We will place everything on record. The petitioner (Wife) is being permitted to meet him...

SG : Let us not create a hype. Nobody is being prevented.

#SonamWangchuk

The Economist:

About 60% of the deep strikes on Russian territory are carried out by Ukrainian Fire Point FP-1 drones, which with a smaller payload can reach targets 1,500km within Russia and have sophisticated software that has proved resistant to EW jamming.
🧵Thread:

2/ Olena Kryzhanivska, an expert on Ukrainian weapons systems, notes that the FP-1s cost only about $55,000 each and are now being churned out at a rate more than 100 a day. Ukraine is also using the heavier and more expensive Lyutyi drone, which has a range of 2,000km

3/ There are also reports that FP-5 “Flamingo” cruise missiles have begun to be used. They are much faster than the drones, flying just 50 metres above the ground, with a range of over 3,000km and packing a huge punch thanks to a 1,150kg warhead

⚡️⚡️⚡️Впервые! Публикуем российскую статистику потерь вооруженных сил РФ в 2025 году!

К нам в руки попали данные о потерях российской армии за 8 месяцев 2025 года и цифры выглядят ошеломляюще. За 243 дня Россия потеряла 281 550 человек убитыми, ранеными и пропавшими без вести!

86 744 погибших, в том числе 1 583 офицера и 8 633 зэков;
33 966 пропавших без вести, в том числе 11 427 зэков;
158 529 раненых, в том числе 6 356 офицеров и 16 489 зэков;
2 311 попавших в плен.

Потери военной техники 13 145 единиц безвозвратно, а 48 458 можно восстановить

Средние ежемесячные потери составляют 35 193 человек и 7 700 единиц техники, из которых 1 643 единицы безвозвратно.

Ежедневно российская армия теряет в среднем один батальон (!) убитыми и пропавшими без вести — 496 человек. Ежемесячно 7 бригады ВС РФ гибнет полным составом.

1/ Propaganda botnet alert! About 50 accounts, tweeting in English & Arabic, have pushed out thousands of posts about #Sudan’s war over the past few months. Almost all certainly using genAI, all pushing a pro-UAE, anti-SAF & anti Muslim (Brotherhood) narrative. #disinformation

2/ They all follow the same script:

> Blame Burhan, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Muslim Brotherhood for Sudan’s suffering.
> Praise the UAE for “stability” and “humanitarian aid.”
> Wrap it all in moral language about peace, tolerance, and unity.

3/ Much of the phrasing is synthetic: with odd, weird idioms, and em dashes. Classic traces of Chat GPT or another LLM agent. The slogans repeat across accounts:

e.g. “Brotherhood’s Butler”, “Brotherhood in Uniform”, “Ministry of Brotherhood Enforcement”, "Sudan bleeds"