Stephan: Here is something you very rarely even see be mentioned. Whoever talks about West Africa as a major force in the future. This article raises that subject, and I run it less because I agree with what it says, and more because it describes a trend that we ought to be thinking about.
By the end of the century, Africa will be home to 40% of the world’s population – and nowhere is this breakneck-pace development happening faster than this 600-mile stretch between Abidjan and Lagos.
t has long been said that no one knows with any certainty the population of Lagos, Nigeria. When I spent time there a decade ago, the United Nations conservatively put the number at 11.5 million, but other estimates ranged as high as 18 million. The one thing everyone agreed was that Lagos was growing very fast. The population was already 40 times bigger than it had been in 1960, when Nigeria gained independence. One local demographer told me that 5,000 people were migrating to Lagos every day, mostly from the Nigerian countryside. Since then, the city has continued to swell. By 2035, the UN projects that Lagos will be home to 24.5 million people.
What is happening in Lagos is happening across the continent. Today, Africa has 1.4 billion people. By the middle of the century, experts such as Edward Paice, author of Youthquake: Why Africa’s Demography […]
Stephan: One of the central lies of MAGAt world is that America was founded as a Christian nation. Sorry, that is a pernicious lie.
Credit: Screengrab.
Former Vice President Mike Pence claimed during a Wednesday appearance on Fox Business that the First Amendment to the United States Constitution does not protect Americans from having other people’s faiths forced upon them.
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances,” it states.
The concept of separation of church and state was sacrosanct to men like President Thomas Jefferson, who wrote in his 1776 Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom that “setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavoring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained […]
SONNER KEHRT, Investigative Reporter - The War Horse
Stephan: I have been following this trend for several years now (see SR archive). Infiltrating into the military, law enforcement, and military vets are completely predictable fascist moves, and sure enough it is happening big time in the United States, as this article describes. we need to face the fact that as the country becomes a racial majority-minority nation, about a third of White men are totally freaked out and have joined MAGAt world. This is a growing trend and problem that is not being properly addressed, so it is going to cause increasing problems.
The report, which summarizes testimony from two committee hearings in the past year, finds that, while no single pathway leads to or predicts radicalization, military service and the transition to civilian life include stressors that can make some veterans vulnerable to recruitment tactics used by extremist groups.
The committee recommends prevention and intervention programs for both service members and veterans. The committee also called for the government to collaborate with veterans organizations to better understand the threat and to provide peer support to service members as they leave the military.
“Ideologically motivated violence must be rejected by everyone in public office—and it must be a bipartisan concern,” Rep. Mark Takano, the committee chairman, says. “Acknowledging the small but growing threat of violent extremism among the veteran population […]
Stephan: The hysterical fear and anger of White people in America about their place in American society, in my view, is one of the biggest problems America faces. It is the cause of an endless list of problems and until it is properly faced and changed it is going to continue to create one crisis after another.
This centuries-long, whites-first framework for immigration policy was most recently articulated by Donald Trump when he asked, “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?”’ Credit: José Luis Magaña / AP
The current social contract in America is not an expression of our deepest values, greatest hopes and highest ideals. Quite the contrary, it is the result of a centuries-long series of compromises with white supremacists.
In his original draft of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson included a forceful denunciation of slavery and the slave trade, condemning the “execrable commerce” as “cruel war against human nature itself”. The leaders of the states engaged in the buying and selling of Black bodies balked at the offending passage, and Jefferson explained the decision to compromise, writing, “The clause … was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina & Georgia who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who on the contrary still wished to continue it. Our northern brethren also I believe felt a little tender under those censures; for tho’ […]
Stephan: Reading the stories about hundreds of thousands of men fleeing Russia rather than be conscripted into the army, I suspected this was happening and finally found a report on this issue. Russia is becoming a deeply dysfunctional society, and I am going to start covering this trend because I believe it has global geopolitical implications.
Women walk past posters honoring Russian service members, including those participating in the ongoing military action in Ukraine, at the Muzeon park in Moscow on Wednesday. Credit: Natalia Kolesnikova/AFP via Getty
Last month, for the first time since World War II, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a partial mobilization of army reservists to bolster Russia’s forces in Ukraine. That meant 300,000 reservists—all men—will be going to the front lines. And, more than 700,000 people have since fled the country to avoid such a fate, according to Forbes Russia. This estimate cannot be independently verified, and has been disputed by the Kremlin. But if accurate, it suggests that nearly 0.5 percent of the population left Russia in just three weeks.
Even conservative projections from border control agencies paint a picture of a nation in flight. During the two weeks following Putin’s mobilization announcement, 119,000 Russians entered the EU and an independent review of Russia’s Federal Customs Service data for the same period showed 200,000 going to Kazakhstan and another 49,000 entering Georgia. In total, because precise figures are hard to come by […]
