The biggest threat of violence in the United States, and several countries in Europe are militarily trained White Nationalists. Young aggrieved fearful White men training for violence. This is a growing trend, as this article describes. This trend is going to get worse and needs much greater consideration. These White men have already tried to overthrow democracy once. The next iteration I think is going to be more violent.
A propaganda photo released by a French Active Club. They blurred their faces so they could not be identified. Credit: Telegram
Active Clubs—neo-Nazi clubs that focus on fitness and martial arts training—are growing at a rapid pace and not just in the United States.
From Denmark, to France, and Canada, semi-autonomous white supremacist groups have been popping up across the globe and recruiting young white men to come train. According to a new report by the Counter Extremism Project (CEP) that was shared with VICE News, “since the creation of the first Active Club in late 2020, at least 100 Active Clubs have been created in the U.S, Canada, and Europe.”
“This is an unprecedented growth. I’ve never seen a network in right-wing extremism grow so fast. Usually it takes years to build a transnational network,” Alexander Ritzmann, the report’s author and senior advisor to the CEP, told VICE News. “It’s concerning.”
Active clubs could best be described as localized neo-Nazi groups built around the idea of working out and training martial arts—typically boxing and Brazilian jiu-jitsu—together. The […]
Here is the latest on what is happening to religion in the United States, note the large difference between Republicans and Democrats, also the age differential.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Nearly half of Americans (47%) describe themselves as religious, another 33% say they are spiritual but not religious, and 2% volunteer they are “both.” Although the vast majority of U.S. adults have one of these orientations toward the nonphysical world, the 18% who say they are neither religious nor spiritual is twice the proportion Gallup measured when it first asked this question in 1999. Over the same period, the percentage identifying as religious has declined by seven percentage points.
These results are based on a July 2023 Gallup poll, which updated a question that had been asked previously in 1999 and 2002. All told, 82% of Americans have some type of spiritual belief system. This proportion is down from 90% in 1999 and 87% in 2002.
Jeffrey Goldberg, Editor-in-Chief - The Atlantic Magazine
Stephan:
I wonder how many Americans realize how close we came to a military supported coup designed to keep criminal Trump in power. We owe a deep vote of thanks to General Mark Milley for saving our democracy.
General Mark Milley at Fort Myer, September 2023. Credit: Ashley Gilbertson
The missiles that comprise the land component of America’s nuclear triad are scattered across thousands of square miles of prairie and farmland, mainly in North Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming. About 150 of the roughly 400 Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles currently on alert are dispersed in a wide circle around Minot Air Force Base, in the upper reaches of North Dakota. From Minot, it would take an ICBM about 25 minutes to reach Moscow.
These nuclear weapons are under the control of the 91st Missile Wing of the Air Force Global Strike Command, and it was to the 91st—the “Rough Riders”—that General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, paid a visit in March 2021. I accompanied him on the trip. A little more than two months had passed since the January 6 attack on the Capitol, and America’s nuclear arsenal was on Milley’s mind.
In normal times, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the principal military adviser to the president, is supposed to focus his attention on America’s national-security challenges, and on the readiness and lethality […]
Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware, Shelby Cullom and Kathryn W. Davis Senior Fellow for Counterterrorism and Homeland Security at the Council on Foreign Relations | Research Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations - Foreign Affairs
Stephan:
How do you feel about people all over the world seeing the United States, as a bully, a source of violence, and a spreader of hate? Frankly, it makes me quite angry that criminal Trump and the MAGAt world he has created has trashed our reputation throughout the world.
Members of the Proud Boys at a rally in Portland, Oregon. Credit: The Atlantic
In its decades-long fight against terrorism, the United States regularly criticized countries such as Iran, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia for exporting extremist ideologies and violence. Ironically, today the United States stands accused of doing the same. The spread of homegrown American conspiracy theories, beliefs in racial superiority, antigovernment extremism, and other manifestations of hate and intolerance has become such a problem that some of the United States’ closest allies—Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom—have designated both American groups and citizens as foreign terrorists.
Although little reported by the U.S. press, the October 2022 killing of two people at a gay bar in Bratislava, Slovakia, by a man espousing racist and homophobic views is an example of the pernicious effects of this “made in America” ideology. In a now all-too-common pattern, the gunman posted a manifesto explaining his intent just before the attack. Written in English, the document displayed all the racist, anti-Semitic, and homophobic justifications that have become de rigueur for this […]
Yet another warning that we humans simply are not taking the damage we are doing to the earth’s wellbeing seriously enough. We are literally destroying the environment our children and their children, and their children will have to live in. We are destroying the earth’s matrix of life out of stupidity and greed.
The passenger pigeon genus went extinct in 1914. Credit: Jim, the photographer / flickr
In what researchers call a “biological annihilation,” human activities are driving entire groupings of vertebrate species to extinction at a rate 35 times what it would have been without human interference.
The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Monday, found that 73 genera—the next thickest branch from species on tree of life—had been lost since A.D. 1500. Without the mass exploitation of the natural world that took off around that date with European colonization, the number lost in the past 500 years would have been only two, and it would have taken 18,000 years to reach 73 extinctions.
“Such mutilation of the tree of life and the resulting loss of ecosystem services provided by biodiversity to humanity is a serious threat to the stability of civilization,” study co-authors Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University and Gerardo Ceballos of the National Autonomous University of Mexico wrote in the abstract.
Or, as Ehrlich summarized it in all caps on social media, […]
