Nigerian Armed Forces Remembrance Day.

ISWAP’s rapid rise, defying the military of Nigeria, Niger, Chad and Cameroon is still poorly understood. Know why? Because it makes no sense. It defies logic. Boko Haram was on the verge of collapse. factions were killing each other. Fighters were surrendering en mass.

Suddenly we hear on TV ISIS now has a foothold in West Africa. How? In June 2014, when Abu Bakr al Baghdadi declared a caliphate in the Levant, jihadist camps in Nigeria were abuzz with the news. Abubakar Shekau declared his own caliphate two months later in August.

At first communications challenge. This was when the Nigeria media was not in the business of broadcasting terrorist propaganda. Boko Haram lacked a stable internet connection. At that point, ISIS began giving Shekau advice on how to manage its communications, suggesting that it

use the messaging app Telegram, popular among jihadists due to heavy encryption instead of WhatsApp. So Boko Haram and ISIS began exchanged audios, videos, photos and documents about recent battles, internal organisation on a daily basis.

The back andforth was probably monitored by the CIA, because it was reported that Information gleamed from this back and forth chatter allowed the US to track him down and kill him in 2016 in an air strike in Syria.

The people can always be brought to the bidding...tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the naysayers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.

Hermann Goring

We've seen reports of Yoruba leaders asking President Buhari to stop the war and sack service chiefs immediately as a way of beginning restructuring.Our country is sitting on a keg of gunpowder they claim. Once again partisan hacks want to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

You see, when you are fighting small limited wars there is a natural inclination , on the part of politicians not directly impacted by the war to want to blow things out of proportion. There is a basic disconnection now in this country between the population and the war

....and i find it quite frankly. Frightening. Compared to what was obtainable 2015, the security situation in Nigeria has vastly improved yet the media ..and partisan hacks portray a much more pessimistic narrative.

Consider that in 2015 over 21 Local government areas and 2.6 million Nigerians were cut off from the rest of the country, under the administration of a caliphate in Nigeria for 16 months. A huge chunk of the northeast was no mans country.

Nigeria's burgeoning defence industry is zooming ahead.

DICON has secured a contract to produce 152 MRAPs for the army. As well as six million rounds of small arms ammunition.

EZEGWU MRAP

DICONs R&D has been up and going. The army plans to test several technology demonstrators in the field. If they pass the field testing DICON will go into mass production of the equipments.

Anti drone jamming system made by DEMFAS aerospace systems Nigeria....Made in Nigeria Proudly Nigeria.
The mobile gun is an ideal anti-drone rifle that can be used when UAVs and drones are visually detected

The drone can be tracked even at long distances through a special binocular. When the UAV is located, the rifle and antennas with horizontal and vertical polarization are pointed towards the approaching drone and immediately block it....zap !! No this is not science fiction

PROFOCE ARA MRAP 2

Profoce Ara ''Thunder'' Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicle.

So just saw a clip with CNN pundits claiming Nigeria investing in rail transport with Chinese funding is nothing but a white elephant project. It would have been better spent to build schools. Since when did the media decide what Nigeria should and shouldn't do with its money?

Ive seen a Focus on Kenya Exclusive on CNN. They spent 4 minutes talking about Kenya's mobile banking system, which is the most sophisticated in the world, and spent an hour on Kenya's Kibera slums. When terrorist struck Nairobi mall CNN was unabash in showing images of blood

and gore of dead victims repeatedly all through the day. This will never happen in a similar style terror attack anywhere in the West. It’s time to take a hard look at the role of the liberal media in perpetuating a horribly simplistic and stereotypical portrayal of Africa

At what point do we stop being dormant?. At what point do we fight back to salvage our self esteem and integrity as Africans? They did not condemn the U.S invasion of Iraq that has forever changed the middle east.

The Christmas Day Truce.

On Christmas Eve 1914 soldiers hunkered down in trenches no further than 150 meters away from the enemy in a network of channels and human trough lines stretching across the north of France all the way to Switzerland.

Separating the warring sides was No Man’s Land, and it doesn’t matter what side initiated the ceasefire, what matters is it happened. The fighting stopped. The 1914 Christmas truce was not the first unofficial truce of this great conflict, but certainly one of the last.

The sound of the other side’s conversations, laughter, groaning and singing replaced the falling of shells and the rain of steel.

Most accounts say it was the Germans that started the Christmas celebration as their clocks would have indicated it was Christmas back home

one hour earlier than the British and French again, it really doesn’t matter. What does matter, at least for this writing, is soldiers looking across No Man’s Land and not seeing carnage, but rather seeing tiny Christmas trees with candles pop up on the German side

or Allied soldiers holding up cigarettes and waving their caps. The sound of music and laughter filled the lifeless void their world had become. Initially, both sides planned to deploy their burial and body retrieval squads before the next day’s fighting took place as that

Thread on Invisible China: Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell's illuminating and scary deep dive into rural China's ills and stark inequality. No matter how bad you think it is, it's worse there---more like a developing country than a global superpower. 1/n

2/Rozelle rolled up his sleeves to understand the CN most only see from plane or train windows. Issues in health and education, bringing down human capital of 300m rural Chinese, could trap it in middle income status.

Think future like Mexico/Turkey now, not Korea/Taiwan

3/Most focus on impressive elite universities and high schools topping int'l rankings, but CN average education levels are abysmal.

Only 30% of China's working age pop completed high school--last place for all middle income countries, worse than many poor countries!

4/TIL a startling fact: school in CN through grade 9 became free & mandatory only in 2006! Even today high school is not free in CN! Want to go through grade 12? Pay fees of 10-15x incomes for poor rural areas. Instead they drop out to work unskilled jobs. Xi has promised to fix

5/No country has escaped middle income trap below 50% HS grad rates, and avg for successful countries (now high income) is 76%. Why? HS skills not important for repetitive assembly jobs, but w/o ability to learn & basic skills in math and reading, can't do more productive jobs

Greece's new minister of interior, former far-right activist Makis Voridis. Not "allegedly" and without a hint of exaggeration.

His past is wikipedia-level stuff

Voridis was violently anti-Semitic amongst other things

He is closely connected to the French Front Nationale, but in 2017 he tried to distance himself from them. BY CLAIMING THEY ARE ACTUALLY SOCIALISTS

To paraphrase Phillip K. Dick: the Golden Dawn lost, but the Nazis won

THREAD: Toronto – OPSEU/SEFPO President Warren (Smokey) Thomas says proposed changes to the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) announced today would create chaos and uncertainty for many of the province’s most vulnerable people @OPSEU #Odsp

Thomas says the changes would force those with disabilities to navigate an entirely new support system, and he’s concerned such a proposal was put forward in the middle of a major public health crisis.

NS2 a response to Mr Wolfgang Munchau. Although I agree on a number of points with WM in his recent @spectator piece-I disagree with his central contention that NS2 is about more gas for Germany. There is no more gas & what gas there is not for Germany. Lengthy thread to follow.

1.WMs @EuroBriefing article has swallowed a huge dose of Russian (and indeed German) propaganda. Throughout the article WM refers to Nord Stream 2 as being vital to Germany because of the need for more Russian gas. This is

2.The key point about NS2 is that it is a diversionary pipeline. There is no new gas. This huge political effort by Russia and Germany to deliver NS2 will not bring a single extra molecule of gas to Germany.

3.What is more the gas destined to land on the German Baltic coast at Greifswald (in AM's constituency) will substantially go not to Germany. The connecting pipeline for NS2, called EUGAL has the same capacity as NS2 (55bcm) and heads eastward to the Czech Republic.

4.Our friendly gas propagandists may well say that in December 2019 Gazprom signed a gas transit contract with the Ukrainian state owned energy company Naftogaz for 40bcm a year from 2021-2024. So with NS2 there will be more gas. NS2 plus the gas transited via Ukraine.