The blog to end all blogs. Reviews and comments about all and everything. This blog is NOT affiliated with YouTube, Wikipedia, Microsoft Bing, Gemini, ChatGPT or any commercial vendor! Links don´t imply endorsement. Many posts and comments are ironic. The blogger is not responsible for comments made by others. The languages used are English and Swedish. Content warning: Essentially everything.
Styx says that it isn´t a great mystery why birth rates are falling. I disagree. Birth rates are falling all over the world. I assume #MeToo or feminism doesn´t exist in, say, Niger? The cause of the demographic crisis must be global. None of the factors he mentions fits the bill, not even overcrowding. Many "Third World" nations are clearly more overcrowded than the Western ones, yet their birth rates (while falling) are still above replacement level. Again: Niger.
I admit I have no idea why the birth rates are falling, including in areas where they "shouldn´t". It´s almost as if the Moon does eat people, or something.
Jag är som bekant inte särskilt ryssvänlig, men ibland blir kvällspressens propaganda lite...löjlig. Särskilt när rubrikerna dyker upp på samma sida! Den korrekta rubriken är den nedre: Nigers pro-ryska militärjunta tänker kasta ut de amerikanska trupperna, och 60 ryska soldater har därför inkvarterat sig i en annan del av den stora militärbas som tills helt nyligen kontrollerades av USA.
Has Niger won the power struggle in West Africa? The West African organization ECOWAS, which is presumably dominated by Nigeria, will lift its sanctions against Niger, where a pro-Russian military junta overthrew the pro-Western government last year. ECOWAS also calls on Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso to rejoin the organization. Mali and Burkina are allies of Niger. Finally, ECOWAS will lift its sanctions against Guinea, which is still an ECOWAS member.
Ostensibly, all these sanctions are about "restoring democracy", but I think it´s safe to say that it´s really an expression of geopolitics. Anti-Russian geopolitics, to be exact.
The sanctions did cripple Niger´s economy, but they have also hit back at Nigeria, apparently because the two nations have intertwined economies. So rather than continuing with the blockade, ECOWAS (which at one point even threatened military action against the Niger junta) have backed down. And yes, it´s a win for Russia. But apparently also for the civilian population, who didn´t get shit out of the shenanigans.
That being said, I couldn´t care less whether or not the nations in the Sahel are run by military regimes or not. I´m happy as long as they fight al-Qaeda and don´t conspire with the Wagner Group. Or ex-Wagner, in this case. If you have to bribe them to make them leave the Russian orbit, by all means, bribe them, then.
It seems the recent military coup in Niger was a very smart move from the Russians. In Swedish media, it´s being reported that the people of this extremely poor African country actually support the coup due to anti-colonialist and anti-French feelings. The French embassy has been stormed, crowds with Russian flags show up at mass rallies, and so on. The Wagner Group may already be moving in to Niger from Mali.
Why is this a master move from Putin´s side? Well, I suppose it´s possible that he was simply lucky - after all, there are always conflicts in Africa! Still...
France has the largest nuclear power industry in the world, with a substantial part of its electricity coming from nuclear power. And their nuclear power plants are dependent on uranium from...you guessed it...Niger. Could the coup be a way to put pressure on France to drop out of the Ukrainian war?
Note also that another huge producer of uranium is Kazakhstan, probably a Russian ally. Yet another is Russia itself...
We´re not sanctioning the Russians. They are sanctioning us. There is a pattern here: the Russians are hiking the world oil prices, they are bombing Ukrainian ports to stop grain exports (and hence hike food prices), and now a mysterious coup in a French neo-colony directed against uranium supplies.
And if France intervenes in Niger, only a swift victory followed by BAU will do the trick. A protracted war in Niger between the French and the Nigerien military (and peuple) is probably the last thing the West needs right now!
"Secrets of the Sahara" is a Dutch documentary series about various nations in or around the Sahara. In this episode, "Niger´s Rapid Growing Population" (the title used on YouTube), the team visits Agadez and some other places in the West African nation of Niger (not to be confused with its southern neighbor Nigeria). Niger is one of the poorest nations in Africa, perhaps the world, yet its population is projected to double within the next 15 years. Currently, it has 23 million inhabitants, so presumbly they will be 46 million by 2035! The average amount of children per woman is seven, and half of the population is under fifteen years of age.
The team visits a village where the traditional Muslim leaders are actively encouraging an even higher birth rate, with the simple argument that it´s "the will of Allah", and that´s that. The marabout claims to have 13 children himself. Something doesn´t ad up, since the traditionalists also prohibit modern medicine. So how can the birth rate be so high? The village marabout actually says he fathered a total of 26 children, but that half of them died! Are the women in these villages doing *anything* else than breeding, I wonder? The villagers even proudly display a 12-year old child bride! Or maybe polygamy is the answer, since the reporter then visits a very extended family...
Most of the documentary is about Agadez, a town that became notorious during the migrant crisis as a major transit point for West African migrants from nations outside Niger trying to reach North Africa and then Europe. In fact, it seems the town experienced something of an economic boom during the migrant crisis, a boom which ended the moment migration north became more difficult.
The reporter is explicitly on the side of the traffickers (he actually calls them "smugglers"!) and bemoans the fact that the EU somehow got Algeria and Libya to send many of the migrants back to Agadez. It seems EU even paid millions of euros to the Nigerien government, money ear-marked for the smugglers (!), in order to stop the migrant streams. Or so the smugglers claim. They also claim that corrupted local officials in Agadez confiscated most of the money for themselves, rather than giving it to the traffickers. The top bureaucrat in the town, in his turn, complains about high administration costs and what not. Apparently, *he* had to pay somebody to get the applications for EU money processed at all!
The documentary ends with somebody almost bragglingly informing the film crew that the smuggling of migrants in the direction of Libya is still on-going. Indeed it is, and quite openly, in broad day-light and in front of the cameras...
Personally, I can´t say I mind sending money to Niger, per se. I mean, just print the damn money and ship them off, it´s not like they will cause inflation in our back yard anyway. Or so I´ve been kindly informed by the Federal Reserve and US Congress, LOL.
The geopolitical struggle is heating up all over the world. As the United States is becoming less and less capable of holding its grand alliance together, the usual fault lines are coming back with a vengeance. For instance, the Turkish attempts to create a Neo-Ottoman sphere in the Middle East and Africa, creating tensions with the Arab nations. The link below is to an article which argues that the US should support the Turkish ambitions in West Africa...
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