Europe is in the downward footsteps of the Roman Empire by Christos Mouzeviris

Last weekend (17/10/2026), we all witnessed the horrible escalation of student and youth protests in France, that turned into violence, destruction and civil arrest. The country was in flames with numerous demonstrations ongoing in most of its cities, while sadly, looting of countless local businesses also took place.

However, these protests did not errupt over a weekend. They were ongoing since September even though the media were rarely extensively reporting on them or the reasons behind the student mobilization, not until things turned ugly; it is a well known technique of the European establishment and media, to avoid delving in uncomfortable truths about the state in their countries, or the European Union itself.

These protests were not confined in France alone, but they also occured in Italy, Albania, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Belgium and even Austria and Serbia. Young people marched to protest against the rising cost of living, poor school and economic conditions, teacher shortages, overcrowded classrooms, run-down buildings, and limited public investment in social programs and infrastructure.

Yet, the European elites are turning a blind eye to the fact that the continent's economies are failing, while they support the war in Ukraine, which has cost us billions over the past 4 years, plus more are needed to continue funding a lost war; Ukrainian President Zelensky has asked for further $78 billion in European aid for Ukraine, days before the riots in France turned ugly. Since the United States pulled back from funding Ukraine, Europe has become Kyiv’s chief backer. It has spent more than $255 billion so far, and Ukraine is seeking additional support.

Billions of euros are spent without our consent or opinion in a war, that only continues because of European tax payer's money. Billions that could fund all that the students need and require, or that European families and citizens need to cope with the rising fuel prices, however the EU under Ursula von der Leyen's leadership, opts to spend on supporting a non-EU member, Ukraine.

The result? Europe is burning while Mrs von der Leyen and her collaborators in EU, as well in our governments, continue to revel in the flames, just like the Roman Emperor Nero did, centuries ago. They refuse to listen to the European citizens, who they simply cannot live any longer with rising costs, the degradation of our living standards and all that because the European leadership decided to go to war against Russia and Vladimir Putin. And yet, it is Russia's economy that is failing according to our leaders, forcing the Russians to fight with washing machine parts!

This war was never about supporting Ukraine, rather securing the country's resources, plus counting on a potential Russian defeat, getting additional access to the Russian ones. Europe is getting poorer and is in desperate need of new resources, as the developing world is turning away from Western hegemony, it is forming BRICS and is seeking new ways of conducting business away from the dollar and Western market rules.

Initally the Americans and Europeans were on the same page and staunch in their support of Ukraine, however as we witness lately, USA under Donald Trump's Presidency is clearly moving on from its support for Ukraine, and focusing on America's interests first; something that Europe still hasn't managed to agree on.

Trump announced on October 9 that he had struck a deal to purchase diesel from Russia, pivoting away from a years-old Western policy that placed massive economic pressure on Moscow. The move is expected to strain Washington’s relationships with its European allies. So while the EU citizens are told that the high fuel and goods prices are necessary to support Ukraine, America goes and makes deals with Putin to secure Russian oil, that most likely will end up in Europe, but triple the price.

Consequently, not only we have to spend billions to arm Ukraine, we got to pay higher oil and gas prices, because in their wisdom our leaders decided to cut ties with Russia and apply 20+ rounds of sanctions to harm its economy and force it to wield to Western demands, but now thanks to Trump who went on and started a war on Iran which made the energy costs and shortage even worse, there is no end in sight to the spiraling upwards prices of almost everything!!

And to make matters even worse, the media and social media, focused mostly on the damage and looting that took place in France, but failed to discuss the root of the problem; wasting money on the war in Ukraine, rising fuel costs due to the embargo on Russian energy and the war in Iran, to the detriment of the European economy. The financial powerhouse of our continent- Germany, has been economically stangnant for some years now, since it relied on cheap Russian energy to fuel its growth. Now with the EU sanctions against Russia, persistently high energy prices, competition from China and excessive red tape which are adding to its structural crisis, Germany's export-led economic model faces unprecedented strain just as support for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party reaches a new peak.

Only in last September, the far-right political party AfD, won key German state election, only falling just short of majority. Alternative für Deutschland surged to victory in Saxony-Anhalt as Friedrich Merz’s CDU slumped to disastrous result. The far-right is rising across Europe for years now, since the economic crisis, the Covid pandemic, the war in Ukraine, the countless refugee crises and now the war in Iran, have eroded European economies and the continent's citizens' living standards for the past 15 years.

Just two days after the French riots, there were demonstrations and counter-demonstration in Copenhagen, Denmark. One of them was organized by the movement Det Danske Folk in central Copenhagen, with slogans supporting what it called “fair and realistic remigration” and opposing Islamization, Sharia law and social control. The counterprotesters gathered under the slogan “No to remigration.”

This comes to no suprise, as the images that were pouring in on social media, showed a dispoportionate number of French youths of immigrant background, notably African-North African, being on the forefront of the looting and violence in most French cities. With countless photographs of non-European rioters being published on social media, another sign of decline as a European society became evident.

Europe’s far right, but also US MAGA supporters, seized on protest violence to push authoritarian anti-immigration agenda across the Western world. Calls for re-migration are becoming more prominent, as they reveal a divided, unequal and toxic society. This is of course partially understandable, as Europe never had a viable solution and clear immigration policies to deal with an issue that has been going on for over a decade now, since the Syrian refugee crisis.

You see, Europeans are dealing with immigration based on ideological debates and divides, while the phenomenon should be approached pragmatically. Left wing leaning politicians, campaigners and followers support the opening of borders and a multiethnic society, believing that "a brotherhood of man" will prevail and a harmonious society will emerge miraculously. The nationalists and right wing suporters on the other hand, support a nation state and less or no immigration at all, something that is unrealistic in the modern world and with economies that rely on immigration for cheap labour.

I am sorry to say, but both are delusional. How many Europeans would aspire to work as kitchen porters and how would anyone expect some jobs to be filled without legal immigration? On the other hand, bringing countless migrants in your country without proper integration or housing and jobs to offer them, while you keep them as second class citizens who rely on benefits and free housing, create bitter angry youths that hate the society they were born in. They consequently are easily radicalized by the Far Left or Islamist organizations and thus in every opportunity they get, they show their discontent.

I am an immigrant myself and although not too often, I also had to face injustice, racism and discrimination in my adopted country, which of course led to temporary bitterness. If these conditions were ongoing for years or generations, when immigrants are cramped in ghettos with no equal opportunities to the rest of the native population, that bitterness becomes toxic, anger, and even hate. So why do European countries import more immigrants than they really want or need? Is it because of the colonial guilt, leftist ideology or a need to portray themselves with an image of an open society, for PR like purposes?

If European nations feel that they need to make up for the damage they did to their former colonies, they could instead repay or assist their former colonies to develop economically, so that their youths can have a future in their homeland. These aspiring migrant young people will have to realize that Europe is not a solution to their problems and only a handfull of them will be successful. Therefore, allowing thousands to settle for years in Europe, since the process of approving or rejecting someone's refugee status across the EU is a very slow process and in many cases like in Ireland, four-in-five asylum seekers issued with deportation orders in the last five years remain unaccounted for, is simply unsustainable.

New Freedom of information figures in Ireland, show that 4,631 deportation orders were issued to people whose application for asylum was rejected between 2018 and last year. The figures show that Gardaí enforced 314 of the orders – which makes up around 7%. The question is why are our governments so slow in applying the law and solving the immigration crisis, when they clearly see that the native population is having enough of paying, and the immigrants are getting frustrated and angry in the process, resulting in a dangerous toxic mix in our societies.

Only last September we saw another migrant crisis taking place, this time in Spain's African enclave, Ceuta. Tens of thousands of people demonstrated across Spain on 2 September over the government's handling of the migration crisis in Ceuta, following weeks of unrest in the Spanish enclave itself. Anger over the arrival of more than 70,000 migrants has developed into sustained mobilization involving residents and migrants, with violence becoming increasingly prominent in late August. Residents have protested against the central government's handling of the crisis and the accommodation of migrants, with some demonstrations escalating into direct attacks on migrants. Migrants, meanwhile, have protested over access to asylum and poor living conditions, with some also clashing with security forces.

The problem is why this continues to happen, why our governments unable to deal with it and potentially who is behind the weaponization of this problem and to what cause. Ultimately, perhaps the Hungarian and Polish approach in this issue is more honest and feasible. I have been recently in Budapest and although it has certainly become a more cosmopolitan multicultural city since I last visited, as you see migrants of all backgrounds working in hotel, tourism and hospitality industries, you notice the lack of refugees and unemployed migrants hanging around, waiting for the application to be approved.

They decline to accept scores of illegal immigrants and opt to control of how many people will get working permits, often clashing with EU institutions and other member states. You may dislike their approach, but it works much better than the pretentious messy reality that exists in Western European nations, which now are struggling to keep the Far Right at bay and from seizing power. The AfD in Germany is vowing to abolish the Schengen and Germany to leave the euro, while in France after the riots, the looting, and the images of young migrants destroying cities and burning historic buildings, the French Far Right leader Marine Le Pen is now widening her lead ahead of 2027 presidential vote, against both centre-right Édouard Philippe and hard-left Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

If both Germany and France move to right-wing, nationalist policies, we may as well forget Europe as we know it. A continent where rich nations vote either to leave EU (Brexit), or never to fully join as the recent rejection of full EU membership by Iceland last August shows us, opting to safeguard national interests against European ones in an increasingly changing and multipolar world. Additionally, we got plenty of poorer nations in Eastern Europe aspiring to become members in order to raise their living standards, but their aspirations are put on hold by the EU and could potentially be entirely derailed, should Le Pen and the AfD win the upcoming elections.

All the above are painting a very sad and bleak picture for Europe and its future, when even its closest ally USA, is turning away from it and seeks to engage with all rising players of a new multipolar world. Europe on the other hand, opts to hold on to outdated ideologies and morality that existed since the end of WW2, the collapse of Communism, the end of the colonization era, and instead of viewing things pragmatically and taking action, they thrive on chewing on old ideas and doctrines, in a never ending philosophical inner struggle.

The only positive occurence of the past 6 months, was when Canada was invited by the EU Commission to become the EU’s first-ever “associate member”, in order for both parties to deal with the increasingly hostile and unpredictable USA, their former close ally. That is a good move, especially if more countries like Australia follow, as is discussed. However, this won't be enough to save Europe from decline, or a social and economic blight. We need to push back against the Far Right in order to maintain what we have built over the past decades, and finally end the war in Ukraine and re-engage with Russia and all BRICS economies. We need cheap energy in order to re-industrialize our continent and catch up with giants such as China and USA in technological achievements, when Europe's amount close to nothing when compared with the two aforementioned competitors.

It is necessary to better the living conditions for Europeans, as is dealing with the migrant crisis effectively, to aspire security, law and order among our citizens, which in turn will stabilize our societies and in extend our economies. If we fail, there is no going back. Europe's future is a stake, but our leaders are proving to be short-sighted, corrupt and increasingly unequipped for this task, hence I fear more riots, instability and even a total collapse of the EU and Europe as a whole and that will be the greatest disaster we will have to live through in our generation.

First Published in The Eblana European Democratic Movement

Kill the cloud by Oli Chavez

There is something about modern warfare. You can destroy a city without occupying it, paralyse a government without arresting a minister, and cripple a country's economy without firing a bullet at a bank. Increasingly, you can do all this by destroying the machines that keep the digital world alive. Welcome to the age when a warehouse full of computers may become as strategically important as an ammunition depot, and considerably more dangerous than its innocent-looking walls suggest.

Data centres are the new infrastructure of power. They host the systems supporting hospitals, financial transactions, emergency communications, public administration, logistics and the artificial intelligence increasingly used by military forces. They are the physical foundations of our supposedly weightless digital civilisation. The cloud, it turns out, has a concrete address, a power supply, cooling systems and a very real vulnerability to missiles.

And somebody, somewhere, is already calculating what happens if those facilities disappear. The problem is not simply that data centres can become military targets. Under international humanitarian law, civilian objects may lose their protection against attack when, by their nature, location, purpose or use, they make an effective contribution to military action and their destruction offers a definite military advantage. But the existence of military data inside a facility does not automatically turn the entire building into a legitimate target. Distinction, proportionality and precautions still apply. The difficulty is that these principles were not designed for an infrastructure where a military algorithm, a hospital database and millions of ordinary people's financial records may depend on the same physical machinery.

A server farm supporting battlefield intelligence might also host civilian services. A network used for military logistics might share infrastructure with commercial systems. An attack intended to blind a military command centre could simultaneously disrupt hospital appointments, banking transactions, emergency services and the supply chains delivering food and medicine. The missile strikes the building. The consequences travel everywhere.

This is the new arithmetic of collateral damage, and it is frighteningly easy to manipulate. Military planners can calculate the immediate advantage of destroying a digital facility. Calculating the cascading civilian consequences is harder, politically inconvenient and sometimes deliberately neglected. Governments love technological sophistication when it promises precision. They become remarkably vague when precision requires them to account for the thousands of people who might suffer because a supposedly surgical operation has severed the invisible nerves of civilian life.

Artificial intelligence makes the problem even more urgent. As armed forces integrate AI into intelligence analysis, targeting support, surveillance and operational planning, the infrastructure sustaining these systems becomes increasingly valuable. Yet greater military dependence does not justify treating every computer, cable or electricity substation as an enemy combatant. If anything, dependence should demand greater restraint.

Nor should we accept the comforting fiction that private technology companies are merely neutral suppliers standing outside the battlefield. When their infrastructure directly supports military operations, their facilities, contracts and operational decisions become part of a much larger security debate. That does not make every technology company a military actor, nor does it erase civilian protection. It means responsibility can no longer end at the corporate reception desk.

The Geneva Conventions do not need fashionable amendments simply because technology has changed. Their fundamental protections already apply to contemporary warfare. What is urgently needed is clearer international agreement on how those protections operate when military and civilian digital infrastructure overlap: how military objectives are identified, how foreseeable cascading harm is assessed, what precautions are feasible, and how accountability is established when the consequences extend far beyond the point of impact.

Governments should develop explicit operational rules, publish meaningful standards where security permits, and investigate attacks that may violate existing law. Technology companies must provide realistic assessments of civilian dependencies rather than hiding behind technical complexity. States should also reduce dangerous concentrations of essential services, strengthen backups and build resilient alternatives before a crisis begins. Resilience is not glamorous. Neither is explaining to a patient why the hospital's systems have vanished.

And let us abandon another convenient illusion: that a digital war is somehow cleaner than a conventional one. A server does not bleed, but the people depending on it certainly can. A destroyed financial platform may leave families unable to pay for necessities. A disabled hospital system may delay treatment. A broken communications network may separate civilians from evacuation information. The absence of visible bodies in the server room does not make the consequences bloodless.

The next generation of war crimes will not necessarily look like the last. Some will still involve the familiar horrors of massacres, torture and deliberate attacks on civilians. Others may emerge from decisions made in command centres thousands of kilometres away, where an apparently technical calculation conceals a devastating human cost.

We should not wait for the first catastrophic attack on a shared civilian digital backbone to discover that our laws, institutions and infrastructure were unprepared. The cloud is not above the battlefield. It is inside it. And when the servers go dark, the people left in the darkness will not be algorithms.

The quiet office by Dai Eun Greer

The modern office has spent decades learning how to make noise look productive. Glass walls, ringing phones, open-plan desks, video calls, fluorescent lighting and the constant choreography of people moving around each other have become symbols of collaboration. Yet for some employees, this celebrated environment is less a workplace than an endurance test.

That is why the sensory decompression room deserves to be taken seriously. The idea sounds almost embarrassingly simple: create a room where overstimulated employees can retreat without being treated as though they have escaped from work. Remove blue light. Reduce sound. Use heavy, tactile materials. Lower the visual clutter. Give people somewhere quiet enough for the nervous system to stop behaving as if it has been asked to supervise an airport.

For neurodivergent employees, this is not necessarily a luxury. It can be the difference between functioning and shutting down. The conventional office assumes that concentration is largely a matter of discipline. If the employee is distracted, the employee should concentrate harder. This is one of those managerial assumptions that survives mainly because offices were designed around it. The problem is that human beings do not possess identical sensory thresholds. What one worker barely notices may become, for another, a relentless accumulation of competing signals.

The buzzing light. The conversation three desks away. The telephone ringing. The footsteps behind the chair. The bright computer screen. The colleague eating crisps. The meeting notification arriving while another notification is already waiting. None of these things is individually catastrophic. Together they can become a wall.

The sensory room offers an alternative to the old corporate philosophy of simply telling people to cope. And there is an important distinction here. Such rooms should not become miniature corporate confessionals where exhausted employees are quietly parked whenever the office becomes unbearable. Nor should they become another instrument of surveillance, with managers wondering why Susan spent seventeen minutes in the dark room at 10.42am.

Their purpose should be precisely the opposite: autonomy. A good decompression room should not announce that somebody is broken. It should acknowledge that workplaces can be badly designed. The obsession with open-plan offices has always contained a peculiar contradiction. Companies claim to value productivity while constructing environments full of interruptions. They celebrate teamwork while discovering, usually through expensive consultants, that uninterrupted concentration is valuable. They install sophisticated software to measure performance and then place employees beneath lights that make half the workforce look permanently jet-lagged.

Perhaps the future office should be less interested in forcing everybody into the same sensory mould. Zero-blue-light spaces, sound-dampening walls and heavy textures are not magic solutions. Nor will every neurodivergent employee want darkness, silence or weighted materials. The point is choice. A genuinely inclusive workplace should provide different environments for different neurological and sensory needs rather than pretending that one architectural formula fits everyone.

There is also something refreshingly old-fashioned about the idea. Humans have always understood the value of retreat: libraries, monasteries, gardens, quiet rooms, shaded porches. Modern offices somehow replaced this wisdom with a printer beside a coffee machine and called it innovation.

The decompression room is therefore more than an accommodation. It is a small rebellion against the belief that productivity must always look busy. Perhaps the smartest office is not the one where everyone can hear everyone else. Perhaps it is the one that knows when to shut up.

Me My Mind & I #26: Interference #Cartoon by Patrick McWade

 

A different way to check internal and external ...thoughts!
'Me My Mind & I' is a cartoon series by Patrick McWade.
For more 'Me My Mind & I' HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!

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Sceptic feathers #138 #Cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

Cynicism with feathers on thin wires.

For more Sceptic feathers, HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!

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The riot of broken promises by Emma Schneider

Across Europe, economic anger is becoming increasingly visible in the streets. Inflation, housing costs, energy bills and stagnant wages have turned ordinary life into an exercise in financial humiliation. For millions, the celebrated middle-class dream has become a cruel joke: work hard, pay your taxes, behave responsibly, and perhaps, if nothing goes wrong, you might afford a home before retirement.

And politicians wonder why people are furious. The modern middle class was sold a contract. Education would lead to employment, employment to security, and security to a modest prosperity that could be passed to the next generation. A house, a family, a holiday, a pension and the comforting belief that tomorrow would probably be better than today. Nothing extravagant. Just a life without permanent financial panic.

That contract is now being shredded, and the people holding the pieces are being told to remain patient. They are told inflation is falling, as if slower price increases magically restore the purchasing power already lost. They are told employment figures look healthy, even when working people cannot afford the homes they clean, the hospitals where they work or the cities whose economies depend on them. They are told growth is returning, while their bank accounts tell a different story.

Statistics are wonderful things. They can make almost any political failure look respectable if you choose the correct column. Meanwhile, rent devours salaries, supermarkets punish families, energy companies issue their demands, and landlords congratulate themselves on the market. Young people postpone independence. Parents calculate which expenses can be sacrificed. Pensioners choose between heating and eating. People with respectable jobs discover that respectability does not pay the electricity bill.

This is not merely poverty. It is the collapse of expectation. And expectation matters. People can endure hardship when they believe it is temporary, shared fairly and followed by something better. What they cannot endure indefinitely is watching sacrifice become permanent for them and optional for those at the top.

When frustration spills into the streets, governments reach instinctively for the familiar equipment: police lines, emergency restrictions, curfews, arrests and stern declarations about public order. Of course, violence must be contained. Businesses and innocent people should not become targets for somebody else's rage. But controlling a street is not the same as solving the problem that filled it.

A government that responds to economic desperation exclusively through policing is treating the smoke while protecting the fire. The deeper scandal is the political double standard. When financial markets panic, emergency meetings appear, billions are mobilised and ministers suddenly discover the vocabulary of urgency. When ordinary households panic, they receive advice about budgeting, resilience and making better choices. Apparently, a bank's distress is a systemic emergency, while a family's distress is a personal failure.

This is not economic policy. It is class politics wearing a respectable suit. Europe's leaders should understand that democratic stability cannot survive indefinitely on speeches about competitiveness while citizens experience insecurity. Affordable housing, reliable public services, wages that reflect living costs and fair taxation are not revolutionary luxuries. They are the foundations of a society that expects its citizens to respect its institutions.

Nor should governments imagine that every protester belongs to the same political camp. Economic desperation attracts legitimate grievances, opportunists, extremists and people who simply have nowhere else to turn. The far right understands this perfectly. It offers easy enemies, theatrical nationalism and the seductive promise that somebody else is responsible for everything. Mainstream politicians who ignore material suffering are practically writing its recruitment pamphlets.

The tragedy is that the middle-class dream is not disappearing because Europeans have suddenly become lazy or unreasonable. It is disappearing because the distance between effort and security has become absurd.

A society cannot endlessly demand patience from people who have run out of money, options and faith. Eventually, the question changes. It is no longer whether life will improve, but whether the system has any intention of allowing it to improve.

The flames in the streets may eventually be extinguished. The resentment will remain. And when the next election arrives, governments may discover that the most destructive fire was never burning in a rubbish bin. It was burning inside millions of people who did everything they were told to do, only to discover that the promised future had been sold to somebody else.

The spy in your pocket by Polly Hobbs

Your phone knows where you sleep, where you work, which hospital you visit, whom you meet, how long you stay, and which road you take when you do not want to be seen. It knows your routines better than your neighbours, sometimes better than your family, and occasionally better than you know yourself. Yet every morning, millions of people wake up, open a navigation app, and surrender another piece of their lives to a cheerful digital voice announcing that they should turn left.

Welcome to the wonderful world of modern espionage, where nobody needs to recruit a spy when an entire population willingly carries tracking equipment in its pockets. Governments are increasingly concerned about navigation applications and other consumer technologies collecting data that could expose sensitive locations, official movements, military installations, and the private habits of public servants. Directives telling civil servants to abandon certain applications reflect a growing recognition that digital convenience can become a security liability. The concern is not necessarily that every app is a foreign intelligence operation. It is that the data these services collect, retain, share, or expose can become intelligence material in the wrong hands.

And that is where the story becomes considerably uglier. For decades, espionage required patience, human contacts, expensive equipment, and considerable risk. Today, location data can reveal patterns of life on an extraordinary scale. Repeated visits to a particular building, unusual movements around a restricted facility, or the simultaneous disappearance of several officials from their usual routines may reveal information that no individual intended to disclose. Combine location histories with public records, social media posts, commercial databases, and a little analytical sophistication, and ordinary behaviour begins to resemble an intelligence report.

Nobody needs to photograph a secret meeting if the participants' phones have already documented their arrival. The disturbing part is that citizens have been trained to accept this arrangement as the price of convenience. We exchange privacy for traffic updates, discounts, restaurant recommendations, taxi bookings, and the reassuring blue line that tells us where we are going. The transaction is presented as voluntary, although the alternatives are increasingly inconvenient. Refuse the tracking, and some services become less useful. Ignore the permissions, and the application may still collect other forms of information.

Apparently, technological progress means becoming increasingly efficient at giving away things we never properly understood we possessed. But governments should resist the temptation to turn this legitimate security problem into an excuse for indiscriminate digital paranoia. Banning one navigation app while allowing dozens of other applications to collect comparable information is not a strategy. It is theatre. Replacing one foreign service with a domestic equivalent does not automatically solve anything, particularly when the replacement operates under weak safeguards, opaque commercial arrangements, or insufficient independent scrutiny.

The nationality of a company's headquarters matters less than the architecture of its data collection, the jurisdictions to which its information is exposed, its security practices, and the degree of control users actually possess. Foreign surveillance risks are real, but domestic surveillance is not magically harmless because the flag above the server room happens to be familiar.

Nor should we pretend that GPS itself is the villain. Satellite positioning, by itself, does not automatically report every movement to a foreign government. The danger often lies in the connected ecosystem: smartphones, application permissions, cloud storage, advertising identifiers, data brokers, and the companies capable of assembling scattered information into an astonishingly detailed picture of human behaviour.

That distinction matters. Otherwise, governments risk frightening the public about the wrong technology while leaving the commercial machinery of surveillance comfortably untouched.

Public institutions need clear rules. Sensitive personnel should use properly assessed devices and applications, location permissions should be restricted to genuine operational needs, and procurement decisions should include rigorous security reviews. Organisations must understand what data their software collects, where it travels, how long it remains available, and who can obtain it. Independent audits and enforceable privacy protections are not bureaucratic luxuries; they are basic defensive infrastructure.

Technology companies, meanwhile, should stop pretending that a dense privacy policy constitutes meaningful consent. If collecting location data creates a security risk, users deserve clear explanations, genuine choices, and limits on retention and onward sharing. Governments must also scrutinise the commercial trade in sensitive location information rather than treating it as an ordinary marketplace inconvenience.

There is a larger political question here. When states warn their employees that everyday applications may expose sensitive information, they are admitting that national security no longer ends at the border, the military base, or the locked office door. It extends into the infrastructure of daily life, where commercial platforms quietly accumulate information that can be repurposed far beyond the original service.

The answer cannot be to abandon technology and return to paper maps, although one suspects that certain intelligence agencies would appreciate the resulting reduction in public enthusiasm for oversharing. Nor can it be to demand blind trust in governments that collect data of their own.

We need something more difficult: digital convenience without automatic surrender, security without mass suspicion, and innovation without the assumption that every available piece of personal information is fair game.

Your navigation app may genuinely want to help you avoid a traffic jam. But the infrastructure behind that helpful blue arrow may also create a record of where you have been, whom you have visited, and what your movements reveal.

The road ahead is therefore not simply about choosing the correct route. It is about deciding who gets to follow us along it. Because the most successful spy in the modern world may not be hiding in a diplomatic pouch, carrying a camera beneath a trench coat, or whispering secrets in a dark car park. It may be sitting on your dashboard, asking whether you would like to share your location to improve your experience.

Yesterday’s beautiful prison Jennifer Stephenson

Welcome to the 2020s, the decade in which innovation increasingly means putting an old face under new lighting, selling yesterday’s dreams at tomorrow’s prices and pretending that repetition is a revolutionary act. Fashion has become particularly shameless in this game. When familiar supermodels return to the Victoria’s Secret runway, the internet erupts as though civilisation has rediscovered fire. The photographs circulate, the comments explode, the old names trend, and an industry that claims to celebrate beauty, youth and transformation congratulates itself for recycling personalities audiences already recognise. Apparently, the future of fashion is a reunion tour with better moisturiser.

Let us be clear: there is absolutely nothing wrong with older models returning to the runway. Their experience, confidence and enduring presence deserve recognition. The problem is not their age. It is an industry so frightened of genuine discovery that it repeatedly reaches for established names rather than investing seriously in unfamiliar talent. The veterans are not the villains. The system that makes them its safest commercial insurance policy is.

And fashion is hardly alone. Cinema resurrects familiar franchises until even fictional universes begin to resemble retirement homes. Television drags beloved characters through another season because executives fear the financial consequences of introducing someone new. Music celebrates reunion tours, anniversary performances and legacy acts while emerging artists fight for a few seconds of attention between advertisements, algorithmic recommendations and another celebrity scandal.

We have mistaken recognition for creativity. If we have seen something before, we know how to react to it. If we know how to react, we can share it. If we share it, somebody can monetise it. Somewhere in this depressingly efficient chain, the possibility of surprise quietly dies.

The algorithm is not necessarily intelligent, but it understands human weakness. Familiarity produces immediate emotional responses. An old photograph, a recognisable face, a familiar chorus: each offers a shortcut to a feeling we have already experienced. New talent, by contrast, requires patience. New ideas demand attention. New artistic voices may offend our expectations, challenge our tastes or simply fail before they succeed.

And failure is the one thing the modern entertainment industry appears determined to eliminate, preferably before the first rehearsal. Corporate culture has turned caution into a business philosophy. Executives demand originality in presentations and proven formulas in production. They want the next cultural revolution, provided it resembles the last one closely enough to satisfy shareholders. They want new stars with old audiences, fresh concepts with familiar branding, and daring artistic statements that will not frighten advertisers.

The result is a cultural merry-go-round spinning furiously while going nowhere. Meanwhile, an entire generation of artists is being asked to compete against nostalgia itself. Young designers must somehow be original without disturbing established commercial expectations. New musicians must develop distinctive identities while platforms reward instantly recognisable sounds. Young actors must prove themselves in stories whose emotional real estate is already occupied by characters created decades before they were born.

Imagine entering a profession where the most celebrated achievement is your ability to remind everyone of somebody else. This obsession also reveals something uncomfortable about audiences. We complain that popular culture lacks imagination, then click on the reunion photograph, buy the anniversary edition and demand another sequel. We criticise commercial repetition while rewarding it with our attention. Nostalgia becomes a trap partly because we willingly decorate its walls.

Of course, the past matters. Art does not emerge from a vacuum, and cultural memory deserves preservation. The problem begins when remembrance becomes a substitute for creation, when yesterday is no longer a foundation but a hiding place.

A healthy culture should honour its veterans while making room for strangers. It should allow established artists to return without requiring newcomers to imitate them. It should understand that creative renewal involves risk, awkward experiments, commercial failures and occasional masterpieces nobody initially knows how to sell.

The next cultural icon will not necessarily arrive with a famous surname, a familiar costume or a ready-made fan base. They may arrive looking strange, sounding unfamiliar and refusing to behave according to an algorithm's commercial expectations.

That is precisely why they need a chance. Otherwise, the 2020s will leave behind an extraordinary monument to cultural cowardice: a society with unprecedented technology, limitless distribution and supposedly infinite creative possibilities, endlessly applauding the same faces in slightly different clothes.

We do not need to abolish nostalgia. We need to stop treating it as a business model for the future. Yesterday had its stars. Tomorrow deserves its own. And if our cultural gatekeepers cannot tell the difference, perhaps it is time somebody stopped inviting them to the show.

The current political system cannot lead Nigeria to the promised land by Tunde Akande

I’m very excited now in my discoveries about the practical issues of the current Nigeria political system. I’m excited because I’m discovering every single day in practical terms why Nigeria has not developed and may never develop. If we continue with the current system we may just as well forget about development.

The last time I voted was during Muhammadu Buhari’s run with Pastor Tunde Bakare, my pastor, in 2011. I voted because my pastor assured us in our church, the Latter Rain Assembly in Lagos, that Buhari was divine will. Of course it had to be, because the way my pastor also became his running mate was nothing short of divine package. I particularly joined in and did what I called political evangelism. It was an application of our training in house to house evangelism in the church to political campaigns.

I campaigned vigorously despite my poor economic condition at that time because I felt it was a divine mandate and I had to apply the same zeal as I apply to the preaching of Jesus as the Saviour. Unfortunately, the Buhari/Bakare ticket taught me some practical lessons. And that is that not everything is “thus saith the Lord.” Practical sense has to come into everything we do as Christians. We have to work on both ends.

I did not vote during the popular MKO Abiola election in 1993 because I did not believe in Abiola and since the Buhari-Bakare ticket I have not voted. I simply refuse to take part in electing the next fool to rule Nigeria. Friday October 16, as I prepared to go on my usual evening walk a call from a strange number came into my phone. I normally don’t answer calls that are not registered in my contacts but I felt prompted to answer this one.

Hello, who am I speaking with? What I got was the voice of a lady who obviously must be very young, perhaps a recent university graduate was what I got. Why are you talking to me? She was doing a survey for the Hamzat Campaign organization. I shouldn’t be concerned about Lagos since I am in Ibadan. But eh I was in Lagos until recently and I will soon be back to that hectic city when I finish what I’m doing in Ibadan. What’s more, my son is still in that hell, living in a hole and paying a whooping 1 million naira for a one bedroom apartment that looks more like a hellhole.

Let me answer. “Please go on”, but I have little time to spare since I am almost ready to go on a walk. The young lady, one of the current generation that the Nigerian government has forgotten except they have fathers or mothers in high places. Call them the forgotten race and you wouldn’t be wrong. Her answer came effortlessly and with grace: “you won’t have to answer any questions you don’t want to and I will be very brief.”

“Do you have a voter’s card?” “Yes I do, but it is still with INEC. I went to check it as they invited me to in the first week of October but they told me to come again in November which made me lash out at them for inefficiency.“ The young lady must have calculated that I transferred my voter’s card from Lagos to Ibadan. She was correct and I answered in the affirmative. “ Would you vote in 2027?” was her next question. My response was unequivocal: “I will not because I have no candidate but I want my voter’s card for keeps.”

She didn’t stop there but fired the next question; “would you vote for President Bola Tinubu? I literally got mad and roared: I will be the last person to vote for President Bola Tinubu. He is my enemy. He has ruined Nigeria and has transferred money from the poor to the rich in his policies.

The lady was still not deterred. She fired the next question; “what about Dr. Obafemi Hamzat? Hamzat is the deputy governor of Lagos State. I also have a quarrel with him. Is he not the one reported to have asked youths to live with their parents even after they have reached age 18 because of the high rent in Lagos. “That was very insensitive of him to have said that. Didn’t he live in America before he came back to Nigeria? Was he living with his parents? That opinion could cost him the governorship of Lagos. It means he is not thinking about the youth demographic which is highest now in Nigeria.”

The well-trained young lady thanked me and let me leave after we concluded our conversation. But her demeanour and survey immediately made me remember my appreciation for Lagos State. Even though they are also corrupt, I rate Lagos above all states in the south in their approach to policies. Everything is studied. The survey also reminded me of a course I also took at the University of Lagos taught by Professor Idowu Sobowale, a very hard working and committed academic who died on October 7, 2026. The course, precision journalism which he handled and taught with dexterity became a vital tool with which the Lateef Jakande administration in Lagos State tackled the issue of free education. Professor Idowu Sobowale was brought into government by the late Alhaji Jakande.

When President Bola Tinubu, as governor of Lagos State, retained Professor Idowu Sobowale, his precision journalism was very useful to the Tinubu administration. I heard that Sobowale was also engaged to do a survey for President Muhammadu Buhari in his first tenure but that the almost illiterate leader did not use the findings of the survey on necessary policies for the nation. Buhari came in with a Fulani agenda and no survey will swing him to the contrary. Buhari failed and had to ask Nigerians to forgive him as he departed never to return again.

The excitement of my discussion with the smart Lagos lady coupled with my latest interaction with politicians from the level of community engagement and involvement with second level politicians heightened my excitement. I am getting an inner involvement with politicians. Why have they consistently failed Nigerians? First reason especially in Oyo State where I come from, was their archaic approach to policy formulation and implementation. They still think like the old politicians of the 1950s. Everything is by the rule of thumb.

I went straight to a middle level politician who had been a local government chairman and one of the respected strategists in a major political party. As they all do, he has been in virtually every political party. They are all migrants. I asked him if his current party has any research team for its gubernatorial candidate. Indeed, when they started meeting after their gubernatorial candidate was declared, they formed many committees, one of which was research, but he could not say for sure if it was functional. He would find out for me.

I told the story of my interview with the young lady and the questions I was asked. I told the story of my exposure to a course in precision journalism and how Professor Idowu Sobowale had used it to help Lateef Jakande and Bola Tinubu as Lagos State governor. I recommended it to help them in their work for their gubernatorial candidate so that they will not be boxing empty air but hitting issues straight on their heads. I recommended the Lagos approach to them.

My first practical findings as I got mixed in political groups was this archaic approach to issues. A typical Yoruba politician will prefer juju (traditional medicine) to research. Yet many of them are university products. President Bola Tinubu is out of that pack. Yet he also went to Umrah or lesser hajj to pray during the 2023 elections. He said he went to pray when the journey became very hot. Former President Olusegun Obasanjo has alleged that former Vice President Atiku Abubakar is a master at consulting the marabouts. I was in the house of a gubernatorial candidate on the day he was to travel to Mecca for Umrah in Saudi Arabia. He had about three Alfas to travel with him. They were going to the place to pray obviously for success in the election. He would not see the people he wanted to serve, but rather evade them. God will impose him on them, so I think he thinks.

Rather than concentrate on appropriate policy formulation to improve the society, they will rather go to hide in a place to pray. Christians go to the wailing wall in Jerusalem to pray while Muslims go to Mecca to pray so that God or Allah will win the election for them even when it is certain they had no programme for the people. They do not make adequate preparation for the office they seek to occupy.

Is God or Allah senseless? I don’t think so. God or Allah are the most logical persons you can think of. Yet Nigerian leaders treat them so. They kill and maim and plot evil and are lazy and yet hope to substitute false piety and prayer for hard thinking and hard work. They pray and yet in their mind they think of rigging the election. They think about God/Allah, yet they consult the occult. They may win by their means but they are never going to succeed unless they plan and decide to move the society in the right direction. We will continue in the second part.

First Published in METRO

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Tunde Akande is both a journalist and pastor. He earned a Master's degree in Mass Communication from the University of Lagos.

Ephemera #163 #Cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

Ephemera: a word with ancient Greek roots meaning:
‘something that is produced or created that
is never meant to last or be remembered’.

For more Ephemera, HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!

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The world is my ballot box by Mathew Walls

Diplomacy used to have at least one elementary rule: you could have opinions about another country's politics, but you were expected to exercise enough discretion not to behave like an unelected campaign manager for its next election. Those days are apparently dead, buried beneath a mountain of presidential social-media posts, televised insults and politicians who believe that every foreign crisis is an opportunity to collect domestic applause.

Welcome to the global political soap opera, where the borders remain on the maps but the culture wars have gone international. Emmanuel Macron has warned against foreign political interference in domestic unrest, highlighting a problem that Western governments increasingly struggle to confront without tripping over their own hypocrisy. Because while European leaders complain about outsiders meddling in their affairs, American political figures have become increasingly willing to comment on European policies, endorse ideological allies abroad and insert themselves into arguments that properly belong to other countries' democratic processes.

Apparently, sovereignty is sacred until somebody discovers a foreign audience that might enjoy hearing them denounce its government. The old diplomatic distinction between expressing an opinion and actively interfering has become blurred by the machinery of modern politics. A president criticises a foreign government, praises an opposition movement or presents another country's domestic conflict as evidence for his own ideological crusade. Within minutes, the statement is circulating across social media, translated into competing political narratives and weaponised by domestic factions thousands of kilometres away.

The foreign leader gets a headline. The domestic politician gets ammunition. The public gets another episode of a series nobody remembers commissioning. And somewhere beneath the noise, actual diplomacy is quietly suffocating. There is nothing inherently wrong with leaders discussing human rights, democratic standards or policies that have international consequences. Silence can become complicity when governments commit abuses, undermine democratic institutions or threaten international security. The principle of non-interference must never become a convenient shield behind which authoritarian governments hide their crimes.

But there is a difference between defending universal principles and treating another country's political divisions as raw material for your own electoral theatre. The first requires consistency, evidence and a willingness to apply the same standards to friends and adversaries. The second requires little more than a microphone and an audience already convinced that everyone on the other side is evil.

Consider the absurdity. A European government struggles with protests over immigration, pensions or economic hardship. Instead of allowing the argument to develop through its own democratic institutions, foreign politicians rush to frame the unrest as proof that their ideological opponents have failed. One side announces the death of liberal democracy; another declares the imminent triumph of authoritarianism. Every demonstration becomes a geopolitical referendum, every parliamentary dispute a battle for civilisation.

Apparently, millions of people cannot simply disagree about taxes, public services or the direction of their country. They must be recruited into somebody else's grand ideological war.

This is how domestic politics becomes an international export industry. Donald Trump's approach to foreign political disputes illustrates the problem particularly clearly. His public interventions in European political debates have frequently blurred the distinction between traditional diplomatic engagement and the promotion of political positions that align with his own domestic agenda. European leaders, in turn, face the temptation to answer every provocation publicly, transforming disagreements that might once have been handled through diplomatic channels into an endless contest of televised defiance.

Neither side emerges with much dignity. The spectacle rewards confrontation, not resolution. And the greatest losers are voters, whose political choices increasingly become props in arguments conducted by leaders who do not live with the consequences of those choices.

Foreign interference is not always a secret operation involving stolen data, covert funding or manipulated information. Sometimes it is an open attempt to legitimise one political faction while discrediting another. Such interventions do not automatically determine electoral outcomes, but they can intensify polarisation, undermine trust and encourage citizens to view domestic opponents as agents of foreign ideological enemies.

The irony is extraordinary. Leaders who loudly defend national sovereignty can simultaneously undermine the sovereignty of others by treating their political systems as extensions of their own campaigns. Europe should resist this temptation without pretending that it is innocent of it. European politicians also criticise foreign governments, court sympathetic political movements and use international controversies to strengthen domestic narratives. No continent possesses a monopoly on hypocrisy, and no leader should receive immunity simply because the interference comes wrapped in familiar democratic language.

The answer is not diplomatic silence. It is diplomatic discipline: distinguish legitimate criticism from partisan intervention, expose covert interference wherever it occurs, and demand consistent standards from allies as well as adversaries. Sovereignty does not mean governments are entitled to escape scrutiny. It means citizens must retain the freedom to determine their political future without powerful outsiders attempting to dictate the terms of their debate.

The world has become interconnected. Its politics will inevitably follow. But interconnectedness is not an invitation to turn every country's electorate into a foreign leader's campaign department. If presidents want to campaign, they should campaign at home. If they want to defend democracy abroad, they should do so through principles they are prepared to uphold consistently.

The world has enough problems without importing somebody else's election circus. And if every national crisis becomes an international campaign advertisement, perhaps the most endangered border is no longer the one separating countries. It is the border between diplomacy and propaganda.