Luckily, it's only Florida

 

"Alligator Alcatraz" is a Concentration Camp

Never forget: the Holocaust began with deportations

Steven Beschloss

Alligator Alcatraz. Such an entertaining and amusing name for this new place in the reptile-infested Florida Everglades to send migrants. 

Speaking to reporters on the grounds of the White House, the Sadist-in-Chief was really enjoying himself when asked if the idea is for prisoners trying to escape to get eaten by alligators. “I guess that’s the concept,” he said before sharing his pleasure.

"Snakes are fast but alligators—we're going to teach them how to run away from an alligator. Don't run in a straight line, run like this," he said, making a zigzag with his hands. "You know what, your chances go up about one percent."

So funny. So much fun. But make no mistake: This 3,000-bed facility quickly built with cages and razor-wire by floundering Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis—who is trying to get back into the cruelty spotlight—should be seen for what it is.

Banality of evil: Florida Republican Party is already selling merchandise

In short, “Alligator Alcatraz”—a facility where undocumented immigrants who have not received due process will be sent— is a concentration camp. This is no mere hyperbole.

As Steve Schmidt has noted here on Substack, Brittanica offers a clear definition of what a concentration camp entails. It’s worth taking a moment to read:

An internment centre for political prisoners and members of national or minority groups who are confined for reasons of state security, exploitation or punishment, usually by executive decree or military order. Persons are placed in such camps often on the basis of identification with a particular ethnic or political group rather than as individuals and without benefit either of indictment or fair trial. Concentration camps are to be distinguished from prisons interning persons lawfully convicted of civil crimes and from prisoner-of-war camps in which captured military personnel are held under the laws of war. They are also to be distinguished from refugee camps or detention and relocation centres for the temporary accommodation of large numbers of displaced persons.

Trump says it will house “some of the most vicious people on the planet” and the “worst of the worst.” But we already know that this labeling has typically been a lie to justify masked men snatching people off the streets and taking them away in unmarked cars without due process.

Researchers confront new US and global challenges in vaccinations of adults

In places like Florida, anti-vaxx misinformation cost lives

Florida Atlantic University

Over the past decade, decreasing vaccination rates now threaten the huge beneficial impacts of vaccinations in the U.S. and globally. Researchers discuss the multifactorial barriers including increasing vaccine hesitancy and new clinical and public health challenges in vaccinations of U.S. adults.

Vaccines to prevent common and serious infectious diseases have had a greater impact on improving human health than any other medical advance of the 20th century, surpassing even sanitation and potable water. 

From the global eradication of smallpox in 1980 to the unprecedented development of effective and safe mRNA vaccines for COVID-19, vaccinations have played crucial roles in preventing millions of premature deaths and hospitalizations in adults and children.

These monumental efforts have involved coordinated local, regional, national and international organizations and dedicated clinical and public health professionals. Unfortunately, over the past decade, decreasing vaccination rates now threaten the huge beneficial impacts of vaccinations in the United States and globally.

The barriers are multifactorial and include increasing vaccine hesitancy in the U.S. In a review published online ahead of print in The American Journal of Medicine, researchers from Florida Atlantic University's Schmidt College of Medicine and colleagues discuss new clinical and public health challenges in vaccinations of U.S. adults.

Hold GOP Officials Accountable for Illegal Voter Intimidation

Zero tolerance for Republican voter intimidation

By Sonali Kolhatkar

EDITOR'S NOTE: The Rhode Island Republican Party recently sent out a recruiting e-mail for volunteers to act as their "ELECTION INTEGRITY OFFICE." Vigilantes by another name. Voter intimidation is a crime in Rhode Island. Be sure to document and report any incidents you experience or witness.  - Will Collette

A Florida resident named Isaac Menasche received a home visit this September from a police officer asking whether he’d signed a petition for a ballot measure.

The petition, which Menasche had indeed signed, was for a November initiative overturning a strict abortion ban that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed last year. Now the governor is attempting to discredit those signatures using state-funded cops. According to the Tampa Bay Times, state law enforcement officers have visited the homes of other signers as well.

DeSantis created an elections police unit in 2022 to investigate so-called election crimes. By that August, he’d arrested 20 “elections criminals” for allegedly voting improperly in the 2020 election.

A majority of those arrested — some at gunpoint — were Black. Most had been formerly incarcerated and thought they were eligible to vote, since Floridians had overwhelmingly passed a ballot measure restoring their voting rights. But DeSantis and his GOP allies in the state legislature used every maneuver they could to thwart that popular decision.

Florida’s RSV Season Has Started, and It’s Coming Soon to the Rest of US.

Here’s a Primer.

Sam Ogozalek, Tampa Bay Times 

Many people have gotten used to rolling up their sleeves for flu and covid-19 vaccines.

New immunizations are also available to combat respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, for those at high risk of illness. Although the one-time shots reached pharmacies last year, fewer than a quarter of those 60 or older nationally had been vaccinated as of May.

Even in Florida, not many older adults have gotten the shot yet. That’s telling for a place with a high concentration of seniors because, while the virus has traditionally been thought of as a childhood ailment that affects babies, older adults can suffer from it, too. And Florida, with its humid weather, is the nation’s ground zero for RSV. 

Each year, infections typically start in Florida and the Southeast before spreading to other parts of the United States, according to the University of Florida’s Emerging Pathogens Institute.

COVID-19 devastated teacher morale − and it hasn’t recovered

Maybe letting them carry guns in the classroom wasn't helpful 

Lesley Lavery, Macalester College and Steve Friess, University of Michigan

More than half of all teachers have thought about calling
 it quits. PenelopeB/iStock/Getty Images Plus

Kansas faces the worst teacher shortfall in its history. The 4,000 teaching vacancies Florida faces as the new school year approaches “is more than the population of teachers in 19 of Florida’s smallest counties combined,” the state’s teachers union says. In Vermont, there are days when whole grades of students are sent home because there’s no teacher or sub available.

The teaching profession faces a morale – and staffing – crisis. A National Education Association survey of members found that, as of late 2022, a staggering 55% of educators were thinking of calling it quits.

This is a legacy of COVID-19. Teachers were already unhappy before the pandemic, but the public’s reaction to the education their kids got during that crisis continues to haunt the profession. A Brown University study found teachers’ job satisfaction in 2022 hovered near its lowest level since the 1970s.

As a researcher focused on education policy, along with my colleague Sara Dahill-Brown, we spent the pandemic researching how teachers felt as events unfolded. Between 2020 and 2022, we interviewed 164 leaders of teachers unions and associations from 14 states and 45 schools. They represented urban, suburban and rural districts and an array of partisan leanings.

The results, published in our new study in Teaching and Teacher Education, show how damaging the pandemic was for K-12 teachers. Thousands subsequently left the profession.

Vaccination Efforts Saved Over 154 Million Lives

Let's save even more

GENEVA (Precision Vaccinations News)

Photo credit: Heather Hazzan, SELF (CC BY)

A study published by The Lancet has revealed that global immunization efforts have saved an estimated 154 million lives over the past 50 years.

Most lives saved were those of infants, with 101 million lives saved.

The study, led by the World Health Organization (WHO), found that vaccination against 14 diseases has reduced infant deaths by 40% globally.

The 14 diseases that the study found immunization to be effective against include diphtheria, Haemophilus influenzae type B, hepatitis B, Japanese encephalitis, meningitis A, pertussis, invasive pneumococcal disease, polio, rotavirus, rubella, tetanus, tuberculosis, and yellow fever.

The measles vaccination significantly reduced infant mortality, accounting for 60% of the lives saved due to immunization.

"Vaccines are among the most potent inventions in history, making once-feared diseases preventable," said WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in a press release on April 24, 2024.

On the other hand, you have these idiots

"Thanks to vaccines, smallpox has been eradicated, polio is on the brink, and with the more recent development of vaccines against diseases like malaria and cervical cancer, we are pushing back the frontiers of disease. With continued research, investment, and collaboration, we can save millions more lives today and in the next 50 years."

"The study found that for each life saved through immunization, an average of 66 years of total health were gained—10.2 billion full health years gained over the five decades.

As a result of vaccination against polio, more than 20 million people can walk today who would otherwise have been paralyzed, and the world is on the verge of eradicating polio, once and for all.

These gains in childhood survival highlight the importance of protecting immunization progress in every country and accelerating efforts to reach the 67 million children who missed out on one or more vaccines during the pandemic.

Additionally, the WHO, UNICEF, Gavi, and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) are unveiling the "Humanly Possible" campaign during the annual World Immunization Week 2024.

The worldwide communication campaign calls on world leaders to advocate for, support, and fund vaccines and the immunization programs that deliver these lifesaving products.

"It is inspiring to see what has been made possible over the last fifty years, thanks to the tireless efforts of governments, global partners, and health workers to make them more accessible to more people," said Dr. Chris Eias, president of Global Development at the BMGF.

"We cannot let this incredible progress falter. By continuing to invest in immunization, we can ensure that every child – and every person – has the chance to live a healthy and productive life."

We're awake, thank you very much

The end of anti-woke politics?

By Jim Hightower 

Well, well, well — look who’s waking up and raring to go: Mr. and Ms. Woke!

We so-called “woke” people have been the target of far-right politicos and front groups that are frantically trying to ban us and our ideas from America’s political discourse. 

In the past few years, such thuggish gubernatorial demagogues as Ron DeSantis have perverted the power of Big Government to attack teachers, librarians, public agencies, and even beer. Beer!

Why? Because such people and organizations make educational efforts to reduce bigotry, hatred, and exclusiveness in our society. “That’s woke,” screech the ultra-rightists, demanding that any talk about racism, sexism, gender discrimination, or other ugly realities in America must be suppressed.

Like the witch hunters of old, today’s pious puritans of ideological conformity have demonized such basic values as diversity and equity, calling them “toxic.” 

Measles is one of the deadliest and most contagious infectious diseases

It's also one of the most easily preventable

David Higgins, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus

Young children, pregnant people and the immunocompromised
are among the most vulnerable to measles.
 CHBD/E+ via Getty Images

“You don’t count your children until the measles has passed.” Dr. Samuel Katz, one of the pioneers of the first measles vaccine in the late 1950s to early 1960s, regularly heard this tragic statement from parents in countries where the measles vaccine was not yet available, because they were so accustomed to losing their children to measles.

I am a pediatrician and preventive medicine physician, and I have anxiously watched measles cases rise worldwide while vaccination rates have dropped since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic due to disruptions in vaccine access and the spread of vaccine misinformation.

In 2022 alone, there were over 9 million measles cases and 136,000 deaths worldwide, an 18% and 43% increase from the year before, respectively. The World Health Organization warned that over half the world’s countries are at high risk of measles outbreaks this year.

The U.S. is no exception. The country is on track to have one of the worst measles years since 2019, when Americans experienced the largest measles outbreak in 30 years. As of mid-February 2024, at least 15 states have reported measles cases and multiple ongoing, uncontained outbreaks.

EDITOR'S NOTE: In Rhode Island, the state Republican Party sent out an e-mail on February 27 heralding new legislation introduced by Rep. Robert Quattrocchi (District 41, Scituate, Cranston) that "prohibits mandates on vaccinations, masks and testing." Anti-vaxxer politicians ranging from disgraced former guy Donald Trump to local clowns like Rep. Quattrocchi caused the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans.  - Will Collette 

The Big Lie

Voting fraud is demonstrably a trivially small phenomenon

By Mitchell Zimmerman, frequent Progressive Charlestown contributor

Many of those few cases that were prosecuted led to
convictions against Republicans

This article originally appeared in the Washington Post and is reprinted here with permission of the author

The Dec. 21 front-page article “GOP fraud units fail to find a vast voter plot” devastated phony Republican claims of voter fraud by showing that the efforts of right-wingers to generate evidence of significant voting misconduct have failed. 

Voting fraud is demonstrably a trivially small phenomenon. But the article erred in calling these phony efforts a “crackdown on voter fraud” and in referring to the state agencies as “election integrity units.”

Because voter fraud is insignificant, there was nothing to crack down on. The actual purpose of these units is not election integrity but voter suppression. 

They seek to deter people of color, young people and likely Democrats from voting by raising the specter of prosecution for imaginary violations of election law. 

In Florida, for example, many felons whose voting rights have been restored are nonetheless afraid of exercising their constitutional rights because of threats from these units.

Republicans aren’t disappointed by the laughably small number of prosecutions for voting misconduct because the very existence of these units tends to support the “big lie” and because attacking voting rights is now the leading strategy of the Republican Party. I appreciated this article for revealing the emptiness of this excuse.

What will it take to change Republicans’ minds about the climate crisis?

Nothing.

By MAX TAVES

Cartoon by Tom Toles from the Washington Post

Rome is burning. Republicans are twiddling their thumbs.

Scientists are loathe to give too much significance to one event, but we’re not talking about one event anymore.

“This is climate change,” Michael Mann, a geophysicist and professor of environmental science at the University of Pennsylvania, put it bluntly. 

“We’re seeing it now in all of its forms in…the wildfires in Canada, what happened in Maui, the flooding rains that we’re now seeing in California, you see greater extremes at both ends of the spectrum.”

Just don’t expect these recent disasters — or, for that matter, a consistent cascade of future precedent-setting fires, floods, snowstorms, hurricanes or droughts — to move Republicans’ minds about the role of climate change.

Consider an August analysis from the Pew Research Center.

While the percentage of Democrats describing climate change as a major threat to the country’s well-being rose from 58 percent to 78 percent over the last decade, the share of Republicans who consider climate change a major threat barely budged over the same time period, rising from 22 percent to 23 percent, per Pew.

The fact that Republicans’ opinions haven’t changed over the last 10 years is startling when you take stock of the objective signs of a changing climate during this same period.

Stand by for an important message

 

Tell the truth about slavery

Why separating fact from fiction is critical in teaching US slavery

Eric Gable, University of Mary Washington and Richard Handler, University of Virginia

A Black actor in 1974 impersonating an enslaved man in
Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia.
 George Bryant/Toronto Star via Getty Images

Of all the debate over teaching U.S. slavery, it is one sentence of Florida’s revised academic standards that has provoked particular ire: “Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

Does this sentence constitute “propaganda,” as Vice President Kamala Harris proclaimed, “an attempt to gaslight us?”

Or is it a reasonable claim in a discussion of a difficult topic?

Whatever it is, the sentence is of a sort not unique to the teaching of enslavement in Florida. It is, instead, an example of how some Americans transform the racist history of this country into an uplifting – and sanitized – moral lesson.

Truth or fiction?

In our view as cultural anthropologists, the disputed sentence is true as historians define facts – tiny nuggets of truth one can find in archives, artifacts and diaries.

It is a fact that small numbers of the enslaved acquired skills that allowed them to earn money, to save it and to buy their freedom and the freedom of family members.

It is also a fact that freed Black people in the antebellum era helped other Black people to also acquire skills and became part of a segregated Black middle class in many Southern cities.

One might argue that such a sentence, because it is true, should not give rise to protest. But as scholars who have studied how history is taught in America, we learned that this particular nugget is neither trivial nor insignificant.

Instead, the one sentence in Florida’s new standards allows Americans to transform a story about what we today call structural racism into an apocryphal story about Horatio Alger and America’s rags-to-riches melting pot.

As this line of thinking goes, enslaved ancestors of contemporary African Americans labored just as most contemporary Americans’ ancestors labored: at the bottom, but able to climb up the social ladder with hard work and discipline.

And this is the problem: To portray enslaved people as laborers like free laborers is exactly how not to teach about slavery.

But it is a commonly used method that is called a “switching mechanism.” In this example, the story about the horrors of the slave system is transformed into a story about opportunity, success and the American dream.

COVID is climbing: guess where the hot spots are

 

Nazis and evangelicals - a long-standing relationship

Legacy of shame

Meghan Garrity, George Mason University and Melissa Jo Wilde, University of Pennsylvania

Thousands of people attend a pro-Nazi rally at Madison
Square Garden in New York in May 1934, with
counterprotestors outside. 
Anthony Potter Collection/Hulton Archive via Getty Images

Each September marks the anniversary of Nazi Germany’s Nuremberg Laws, whose passage in 1935 stripped Jews of their German citizenship and banned “race-mixing” between Jews and other Germans.

Eighty-eight years later, the United States is facing rising antisemitism and white supremacist ideology – including two neo-Nazi demonstrations in Florida in September 2023 alone.

The Nuremberg Laws were a critical juncture on the Third Reich’s path toward bringing about “the full-scale creation of a racist state … on the road to the Holocaust,” according to legal historian James Whitman. Yet across the Atlantic, many Americans were unconcerned, and even admiring – including some religious leaders.

As a political scientist and a sociologist, we wanted to examine what Americans thought about Hitler and the National Socialist Party before the U.S. entered World War II – and see what lessons those findings might hold for our country today. Our recent research, which focused on religious publications, suggests that Americans’ support for Nazi Germany is best explained by belief in white supremacy.

Thar she blows!

Manatee spotted in Quonnie

By Will Collette

Maybe Quonnie dwellers will forego their exodus to Florida this year, as Florida seems to be coming to us.

DEM spotted and photographed a manatee near a pier in Quonochontaug Pond, well over a thousand miles from its normal habitat.

DEM says they are monitoring the manatee, along with US Fish and Wildlife and the Mystic Aquarium in case it needs help.

Manatee have be spotted in RI waters in 2006 and 2016, according to DEM. They advise keeping 150 feet away and are warning boaters to use caution. In Florida, manatees are often killed or injured by boaters, not that Gov. Ron DeSantis's administration cares.

Speaking of matters aquatic, in one week, September 19, join us in celebrating international Talk Like a Pirate Day. It's a holy day on the Pastafarian calendar and a time for us all to practice talking like pirates.

Graphic by Sam Howard

How to teach about race in Florida

For more cartoons by Ruben Bolling, CLICK HERE

A tale of two districts

Spencer Dickinson of So. Kingstown the only outlier in CD-1 race - he doesn't live in the district

By Christopher Shea, Rhode Island Current

A map of Rhode Island’s split congressional districts.
Not pictured is Block Island, which is a part of the
Second Congressional District.
(Source: Federal Election Commission)

Looking at the border of Rhode Island’s 1st Congressional District, it’s shaped a bit like an upside down pirate hook. 

The base is configured around towns along the northern border with Massachusetts as it curves through Bristol and Newport counties, the bend starting in Providence — a city that shares both the 1st and 2nd congressional districts.

“It’s sort of just capturing the Eastern part of the state,” said John Marion, executive director for Common Cause Rhode Island. “There’s for sure some politics in play.”

Beginning in North Smithfield, the congressional line follows a mostly straight line south as it hits the Woonasquatucket River in North Providence.

In Rhode Island’s capital city, the dividing line snakes behind Providence College and through the Smith Hill neighborhood, bulging around the State House, and narrowing around the Providence River only to reopen around the Southeast part of the city at Roger Williams Park.

The Providence split exists for a reason, said Providence College political science Professor Adam Myers. 

“Congressional districts have to be exactly equal in population after a U.S. Census,” he said. “You can’t really do that without splitting Providence.”

Though Myers said the line “won’t matter after 2030 because, by that point, we surely won’t have two congressional districts. 

“These are artificial creations that exist for 10 years,” he said. (The state was within 14,000 people of losing a congressional seat heading into the 2020 census).

DeSantis’ ‘war on woke’ looks a lot like attempts by other countries to deny and rewrite history

You can deny history, but you can't make it go away

Rochelle Anne Davis, Georgetown University and Eileen Kane, Connecticut College

A Florida law that took effect on July 1, 2023, restricts how educators in the state’s public colleges and universities can teach about the racial oppression that African Americans have faced in the United States.

Specifically, SB 266 forbids professors to teach that systemic racism is “inherent in the institutions of the United States.” Similarly, they cannot teach that it was designed “to maintain social, political and economic inequities.”

We are professors who teach the modern history of the Middle East and Eastern Europe, and we know that even democratically elected governments suppress histories of their own nations that don’t fit their ideology. The goal is often to smother a shameful past by casting those who speak of it as unpatriotic. Another goal is to stoke so much fear and anger that citizens welcome state censorship.

We see this playing out in Florida, with SB 266 being the most extreme example in a series of recent U.S. state bills that critics call “educational gag orders.” The tactics that Gov. Ron DeSantis is using to censor the teaching of American history in Florida look a lot like those seen in the illiberal democracies of Israel, Turkey, Russia and Poland.

Here are four ways SB 266 relates to attempts used by modern governments to censor history.

Seaweed Farming May Help Tackle Global Food Insecurity

Significant income-boosting potential in the sustainable superfood

by Annie Young

To help solve hunger and malnutrition while also slowing climate change, some farmers could shift from land to sea, suggests a recent study from the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University. The study was published in the journal Global Food Security.

Producing and selling seaweed could boost incomes for farmers in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), particularly in coastal regions of Africa and Southeast Asia, said Patrick Webb, the Alexander McFarlane Professor of Nutrition at the Friedman School and senior author of the study.