🚨🚨WORLD PREMIERE!! 🚨🚨 Tomiwa, some W. African funk for my people. And now, let me tell you the story of my own personal theme song. First, some background: I'm a huge fan of West African music. In my early 20s I was introduced to Fela Kuti & quickly became hooked (even more so after watching the documentary, "Music Is the Weapon"). My OG followers may recall my original Twitter avatar was Fela. As an obsessive collector, I amassed not only every Fela recording I could get my hands on, but also similarly funky music from Ghana, Mali, Senegal, Cameroon, etc. During this time I started imagining traveling around West Africa & experiencing the music live, on the ground, surrounded by the people who make it. Fast forward to 2022; I’m living in Spain & have become friends with a Nigerian musician named Akinsola Onasanya. He’s the founder of a band called Ogun Afrobeat Orchestra. As a teenager, Akin found his way into Fela’s community of musicians at The Shrine, their temple of Afrobeat. Members of Fela’s band, the Egypt 80, helped Akin learn to hold down Afrobeat rhythms on the drums. Eventually he joined a band that made its way to Greece. Over two decades, Akin’s journey took him from Greece to Italy & then finally Madrid. Almost as soon as we became friends I start telling him we were going to travel to his native land. In November 2022, we finally made it happen. That trip was like a journey to another world. In my mind I’d imagined seeing live music in various venues from one night to the next. What I experienced instead was the most extreme poverty of anywhere I’ve ever been. It’s hard to host concerts when the country lacks electricity (or running water). We made it to the Shrine (Nigerian police burned the original Shrine after Fela had become too popular in the 1970s), but rather than seeing Afrobeat being performed live, instead saw homeless people sleeping everywhere. The good news was that Akin knew some of the musicians living there, so we were at least treated well. My full story from Nigeria will have to wait for another day, but the main point for our current purposes is that soon after arriving, Akin’s brother, Kayode, blessed me with a Nigerian name, Tomiwa. From that day on everyone called me Tomiwa. We did finally see some music, incidentally. After a chaotic week around Lagos & the Ogun State, we arrived at an old British fort called Freedom Park, ostensibly to see a Nigerian juju band. However the music itself was basically impossible to hear, due to ancient speakers that broadcast hissing sounds rather than the musicians’ instruments. This night was also the first time I’d seen a fellow white person since landing in Nigeria. And even though it's not relevant to the story, I can't emphasize enough how brutally hot it was everywhere we went. Our last night went better. Fela’s oldest son, Femi Kuti, performed on Victoria Beach. The scene was looking pretty good — there were enough upper-class Nigerians to actually fill out a well-dressed audience. Yet on the way back, due to Nigeria lacking working infrastructure, street lights, road signs, or reliable GPS, we ended up in one of the worst slums probably anywhere in the world, & had a very harrowing journey trying to make it out. Just when I was starting to have hope for Nigeria I was quickly reminded of what a failed country it is. But again I digress. Soon after returning safely to Spain, my girlfriend & I attended a concert of Akin’s band. There, she evidently had the idea of Ogun recording a song called Tomiwa. Fast forward to a week before Christmas, & Carolina is telling me we need to go out to pick up my gift. She has me do weird things like wear warm socks — I presumed we were going to a farm so I could adopt some hens (something I’d been eager to do). Instead we arrived at a music studio & immediately ran into Akin. Carolina explains they’re recording a song, for me. Flabbergasted, the first thing I can think to say is: “Under no circumstances am I singing.” Turns out, Akin had already composed the whole arrangement. He wrote some backup vocals for me & Carolina. Despite my protestations, we ended up singing the part — goosed on by several hours of beers — which mercifully was limited to just one word. Soon the song was mastered & Carolina — amazing person that she is — had it pressed to vinyl. Last year we finally got it on Spotify. These days Ogun performs it regularly around Europe. It’s a proper dance floor banger. The last step before starting to share this story with the world was a music video that helped tell the whole story. My talented friend Josh Wright has just completed that video, which I’m extremely excited to share with you now. As you can see, this has been a labor of love. And it’s taken a long time because the song is incredible & I wanted to ensure each step was completed to my usual standard of excellence. Anyway, I’m eternally grateful to my amazing girlfriend @cperezrioja for blessing me with this incredible gift (which keeps on giving every time I listen to it). Definitely not many people can say they have their own theme song! I hope you all love it as much as we do.

If any country wants to become extremely wealthy extremely quickly, the process is simple: Introduce sound money & Dubai-style economic freedom. Hong Kong, Singapore & Dubai all show you don’t even need natural resources to create a prosperous society (although those certainly help). These countries learned about free markets from the United States, which has sadly forgotten all about them.

Happy 16th to my sweet Simone

Christine Lagarde will step down as ECB President on 7 February 2027. Measured in gold, the euro has lost 62% of its purchasing power since she took office in November 2019. Against euro-area consumer prices, the loss is 21%.

REUTERS: Average price of gasoline during Trump's term now exceeds Biden's, as midterms loom

NEW YORK POST: Americans are putting groceries and gas on credit, and the debt is piling up

The DoJ Inspector General just dropped a report on federal agencies’ use of confidential informants, aka the people the govt authorizes to commit crimes on its behalf. Spoiler: It’s bad. This report focuses on agencies’ policies regarding the use of CIs. It seems the ATF, DEA, & Federal Marshals follow the same rulebook, which was last updated in 2002, & operate w/ little oversight. Turns out, only the FBI has to tell DOJ how much “otherwise illegal activity” its informants commit each year. The other three agencies report nothing, so DoJ, in the IG's words, “lacks consistent and complete oversight” of the crimes it sanctions. The Marshals pay informants by wiring cash into deputies' personal bank accounts. And @ATFHQ — the scandal-plagued firearms agency — isn't required to consider the risks of informants handling firearms. The report also noted how the @FBI gets a 60-day free pass to run high-level sources (mob-adjacent, media, lawyers) before any committee sign-off; other agencies have to get approval first. Unsurprisingly when the govt hands out licenses to break the law & declines to count how often they're used, things go south. An appendix notes some choice examples: •2024: DEA executive assistant took gifts from & kept a prohibited relationship w/ a former confidential source. •2019: DEA group supervisor approved informant payments w/o justification while in an improper personal relationship with the source; his ASAC failed to supervise. •2018: FBI SAC and ASAC let an agent's contact with a known drug trafficker go unhandled as a source & suppressed misconduct reporting. •2017: FBI agent took gifts from a deactivated source, kept using him, protected his illegal business, misused Bureau assets. •2016: DEA paid Amtrak employees & a TSA screener to snitch on travelers. •2024: DEA's transportation interdiction program suspended outright after OIG flagged it. ATF's response to the IG comically insists it's “fully compliant in practice,” just not on paper, so we should just trust them. Of course, this is just the stuff supervisors ended up finding out about. As stated above, most of the these agencies aren’t even required to report their CIs’ illegal acts. So the actual scale of criminality being conducted thanks to our tax dollars will never be known.

Democrat @jahimes praises paper ballots as the best protection against @elonmusk & @DonaldTrump using AI companies to alter vote totals. "Those paper ballots give us some reason to believe that even if there is meddling, we can go back and rebuild what happened.”

Damn, Burt just busted the Coach Letterman case wide open

The Bulwark's @SarahAMatthews1 says we should prepare for an "insurrection" if Republicans lose. "The last time we saw Donald Trump lose an election, we saw an insurrection at our nation’s Capitol ... It is a very real scenario that we have to prepare for"

Vivek has the wrong race to win? MSNBC's @DrJasonJohnson: "@VivekGRamaswamy is not Ohio ... Culturally, racially, & attitudinally, he’s not Ohio."

Thanks for the s/o @MichaelBerrySho!

Thanks for the s/o, @caseythehost!

To sign into my @PayPal just now, I entered my username/password. PayPal then sent a code to my phone. Entered that. Then it said it had to send another code to my email. As this account was created decades ago, it went to a @Yahoo email. Entered my username/password. Yahoo then demanded a "passkey," which I did. Upon signing in, it seems Yahoo won't let me receive new emails since I have too many. So, now I'm locked out of PayPal until I delete 5 GBs of random crap from Yahoo (or pay Yahoo to "upgrade," which of course I won't be doing). I hate the internet.

CRUCIAL FACTS ON THE FLAVIO BOLSONARO MATTER: It's not just Flavio Bolsonaro who fled Brazil to escape the tyrannical persecution of Alexandre de Moraes and the pro-Lula wing of the Supreme Court. There are dozens of Brazilian exiles who have done the same: dissident journalists, activists, bloggers, and politicians who all fled to avoid certain prison for political opposition. In most of these cases, Moraes has demanded the extradition of those who fled and whom he wants to imprison back in Brazil. But Moraes' extradition requests have been repeatedly denied by multiple countries and institutions on the grounds that these prosecutions are politically motivated or otherwise corrupted. Among those concluing this: Spain, Italy, INTERPOL, and even the US under Biden. Just today, Italy refused Brazil's demand to extradite a person named @edutagli, who was once a top aide to Moraes, but then fled to Italy after Moraes accused him of having been my source in a huge leak from Moraes' office that I obtained for reporting I did with @Folha in 2024. That massive leak enabled us to publish roughly 20 articles proving systemic abuses of power by Moraes against his political enemies: exactly the reason so many Brazilians, including Bolsonaro, know they can't get a fair trial in Brazil. Italy today refused to extradite the person accused of being our source on the grounds that the proceedings would be a farce because Moraes — as he so often does — wants to act as the supposed victim, investigator, and judge, and thus his demand falls well outside of Italy's extradition standards. Again, multiple countries have concluded the same, showing what a farce Brazil's once-respected judicial system has become under the Lula/Moraes regime. Moraes has overseen a system of political persecution masquerading as criminal justice that has been recognized as a sham by multiple countries that are not exactly Bolsonaro allies. Nobody in their right mind who is a political enemy of Moraes would remain in Brazil once if it is clear that he intends to imprison you, since he has proven that guilt is a foregone conclusion and he operates with no legal or constitutional limits of any kind. That is why asylum under international law exists: to protect those who cannot obtain justice in their own country because the justice system has been corrupted and commandeered for political persecution. Many people, such as Julian Assange, have needed that protection (which Lula cheered). Now people need it from Moraes in Brazil. That is sadly one of the main legacies of both Lula and Moraes over the last six years.

I really, really want Democrats to lose. OTOH, I don't want Speaker Spineless to take any non-humiliating defeat as validation they're doing a good job. Everyone deserves to lose. If only we could vote for an AI bot programmed to defend the Constitution.

In 2021, Cloobeck sued an ex-girlfriend, an OnlyFans model, for fraud & extortion after a relationship involving $1.3 million in gifts. Birds of a feather ...

CNN: FBI raids Stephen Cloobeck's Beverly Hills mansion as part of @ericswalwell probe. (Cloobeck was arrested earlier this year & charged with three felony counts related to witness intimidation & one misdemeanor harassment count, in a case related to his fiancée, Adva Lavie, who is charged with a string of burglaries described as a long-running romance scheme involving older men.)

Former AG @EricHolder, who has called for a national ban on gerrymandering, defends Democrats trying to gerrymander Maryland: "We have to take necessary steps, on a temporary basis, to save our democracy, & then ultimately heal it."