RSN: Andy Borowitz | Trump Puts Nation on Alert for Terrorists Posing as Peaceful Seventy-Five-Year-Olds

11 June 20

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10 June 20

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Andy Borowitz | Trump Puts Nation on Alert for Terrorists Posing as Peaceful Seventy-Five-Year-Olds

Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
Borowitz writes: "Announcing that he was putting the nation on a 'double-red threat level,' Donald J. Trump warned the American people on Tuesday to be on the lookout for terrorists posing as peaceful seventy-five-year-olds."
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Voters wait in line. (photo: Getty)

Georgia's Elections Just Melted Down Again - and Could Get Worse Come November
Cameron Joseph, VICE
Joseph writes: "Four-hour lines to vote. Closed polling locations. Widespread problems with new technology. Missing voting machines. Georgia's elections are melting down - again. And things might get even worse come November."
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An officer tries to put out a fire at a police kiosk at The Grove shopping center in Los Angeles during a protest last month over the death of George Floyd. (photo: Mark J. Terrill/AP)

No Sign of Antifa So Far in Justice Department Cases Brought Over Unrest
Ryan Lucas, NPR
Lucas writes: "U.S. Attorney General William Barr has repeatedly blamed anti-fascist activists for the violence that has erupted during demonstrations over George Floyd's death, but federal court records show no sign of so-called antifa links so far in cases brought by the Justice Department."
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Martin Gugino, who was pushed to the ground by Buffalo police, is seen in 2017. (photo: Justin Norman/Shrieking Tree)

Buffalo Police Assaulted a 75-Year-Old Longtime Peace Activist, Now Trump Is Attacking Him Too
Democracy Now!
Excerpt: "Martin Gugino was hospitalized after being pushed to the ground by a police officer in Buffalo last week - an attack captured on video that has been viewed millions of times. On Tuesday, President Trump attacked the 75-year-old activist on Twitter, suggesting he staged his fall and was 'an ANTIFA provocateur,' echoing baseless claims from a segment on the far-right channel One America News Network."

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to Martin in his own words. Martin Gugino recently submitted a video statement to a judge in Georgia presiding over the case of the Kings Bay Plowshares, the seven peace activists who broke into a nuclear submarine base in 2018. Martin quoted from the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.

MARTIN GUGINO: It really starts with this quote of Matin Luther King that “The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” What he doesn’t say there is that it doesn’t bend itself. We have to bend it. We have to go out into the culture and act justly, act morally, do good. And little by little, it will bend, will bend the culture towards justice. And some of the times, the culture doesn’t want to be bent, and so there’d be a conflict. And that’s just part of it. And Martin Luther King knew very well the possibilities.

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The La Palma Correctional Center in Eloy, Ariz., on May 11, 2010. (photo: Joshua Lott/Getty)

Detained Migrants Say They Were Forced to Clean COVID-Infected ICE Facility
Jacob Soboroff and Julia Ainsley, NBC News
Excerpt: "Asylum-seeking migrants locked up inside an Arizona Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center with one of the highest number of confirmed COVID-19 cases say they were forced to clean the facility and are 'begging' for protection from the virus."

EXCERPT:

"This is a life or death situation," said a translation of their message, dated May 18, and sent to the Florence Immigrants & Refugees Rights Project, a legal advocacy group that has filed a lawsuit on behalf of migrants in the facility.

The migrants appealed for help to the advocacy group from inside one of 24 "tanks," which hold 120 men each, in the La Palma Correctional Center outside of Phoenix, which is operated for ICE by the for-profit company CoreCivic.

ICE's official count says that as of June 7, 78 detainees have tested positive at La Palma, with 14 cases currently under monitoring and zero deaths.

The migrants say the facility forced detainees in inadequate personal protective equipment to clean and work in the facility's kitchen despite their fear it was a prime point for spreading the virus inside the center due to crowding at meal times. When some migrants protested, the letter says, they were punished with verbal threats and indefinite lock-ins. On one day when migrants resisted working in the kitchen, some were "sent to the hole," otherwise known as solitary confinement.

Two migrants described being asked to clean the trash from the nurses' office, where sick patients were treated. One said he was asked to clean the feces-covered cell of a mentally ill detainee without gloves.

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Pierre Nkurunziza was due to stand down as president in August following elections last month. (photo: Evrard Ngendakumana/Reuters)

Burundi President Dies of Illness Suspected to Be Coronavirus
Jason Burke, Guardian UK
Burke writes: "The outgoing president of Burundi has died of a sudden illness, suspected by many to be Covid-19."
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London police officers arrest climate activists in 2018. (photo: Getty)

This Is How Climate Change Will Increase Human Conflict
James Greig, VICE
Greig writes: "Whether or not climate change will exacerbate conflict is no longer a hypothetical question: according to the Red Cross, it's already happening."

Water wars, state repression, an Arctic 'Gold Rush' and other ways humans will be tearing each other apart as the planet heats up.

hether or not climate change will exacerbate conflict is no longer a hypothetical question: according to the Red Cross, it’s already happening. As long ago as 2018, Peter Maurer, the head of the organisation’s International Committee, told the Guardian: “When I think about our engagement in sub-Saharan Africa, in Somalia, in other places of the world, I see that climate change has already had a massive impact on population movement, on fertility of land. It’s very obvious that some of the violence that we are observing… is directly linked to the impact of climate change and changing rainfall patterns.” 

A recent article in the Washington Post agreed with this gloomy analysis: “Climate and climate change have had modest effects on past conflicts, but these effects are expected to get much larger in the future.” A 2013 study, published in Science, confirmed the clear link between climate events and human conflicts. 

All of this points to an increase in hostility as the world heats up. But why is it the case that global warming should have such a dramatic effect? And just how bad can we expect things to get?

MIGRATION

Global warming will increase migration for a number of reasons: there will be droughts, crop failures, water scarcity and a rise in sea levels to an extent that makes many coastal areas uninhabitable. Discussing the threat posed to the US coastline, climate change scientist Orrin Pilkey told VICE: “We should be planning and executing the beginning of a retreat from the shoreline in response to sea level rise and increased storm severity.” 

This situation is not limited to the US. In many cases, rising sea levels will affect nations in the Global South that are far less-equipped to deal with the impact. A 2016 study showed that, in countries reliant on agriculture, a 1C temperature increase correlates with a 5 percent increase in outward migration. All of this means that in the years ahead, we can expect to see migration on a scale unparalleled in human history. 

Unfortunately, migration almost invariably causes tension; although not in the way you might expect (if you're a xenophobe, anyway). The problem is not migrant communities causing trouble or committing crimes but rather the treatment they receive. For instance, the only type of terrorism that increases with immigration is the domestic, right-wing kind. To find out more about how climate change might affect conflict, I spoke with Nate Bethea, a writer and US army veteran who runs What a Hell of a Way to Die – a leftist podcast about military and veteran issues. 

“I was never in Iraq,” Bethea says, “but there were a number of people who I met who were very disillusioned by their experiences there. They felt that what was done to the Iraqi people would be done to Americans sooner rather than later. It was the idea that, 'It won't be long before they have an Abu Ghraib for Americans.' I think what we're seeing in the US now, with the reactionary right basically getting top cover to run concentration camps for immigrants – and even their US citizen children – is, in some ways, a confirmation of that. I can only see that rhetoric, and the militarisation that comes along with it, getting more and more severe.”

And what does this have to do with climate change? “Global warming is going to drive huge numbers of people to flee into more temperate climates. The US and UK are pretty similar in terms of their hostility to immigration, and you're seeing this militarised response even now when immigration rates aren't particularly high.

“If it's this bad already,” he continues, “with the US letting toddlers die of influenza in concentration camps for minors, and the UK aggressively deporting elderly children of 1940s immigrants – who are very clearly British citizens – what is it going to look like when climate change worsens?"

SCARCITY

Climate change is expected to cause a disastrous scarcity of resources, which we may start to feel the bite of sooner – and closer to home – that we had previously anticipated. The head of the Environmental Agency recently warned that the UK could run out of water in as little as 25 years. This would, obviously, be a disaster: an armageddon of troops on the street, evacuations, outbreaks of disease and a lot of portaloos. We could, however, conceivably get a three-day week in which basically everything is shut except the pub – so there is some silver lining for the lazy pissheads among us.

It makes sense that a scarcity of resources will increase tensions internally; people may find themselves forced to fight for food or water simply to survive. But it’s also likely to happen at an international level. Bethea says, “I absolutely think you will see regional conflicts due to water scarcity, but I think a prelude to that will be significant disorder and violence within affected countries.”

But for all the catastrophes that climate change will undoubtedly cause, there will be opportunities too. We could be at the beginning of a new gold rush. Take the Arctic, where the melting ice caps are expected to reveal a wealth of resources; chiefly fossil fuels but also diamonds and platinum. One government source, who wished to remain anonymous, told me, “Everything changes as a result of higher temperatures in the Arctic, from mass fish migration to fights over fossil fuels.

“As fish move in search of colder waters,” he continues, “fights between fishermen over increasingly sparse catches will become commonplace. On the international stage, there will be a scramble for the Arctic from both regional and international actors in pursuit of the fossil fuels to which that melting ice gives easier access. This same melting ice also allows easier transport of these fossils fuels once they are extracted; the first cargo ship in history sailed through Russia’s Arctic north in August last year and many more look to follow in its wake.”

Already, the US, China and Russia are jostling for dominance over the region, with the UK changing its defence policy accordingly. With so many spoils to be won, and so many Arctic territories already being contested, it wouldn't be surprising if the region becomes a major source of conflict. 

THE HEAT

There is plenty of evidence to suggest that hot weather increases violence. Given that heat has been proven to make people more aggressive on an individual level, it's not too much of a stretch to imagine this may affect foreign policy, something that is ultimately decided by individuals. Ideally, we don’t want the people in charge of military decisions to be suffering from heat stroke.

But the impact is more likely to be felt at an intra-state level. Hot weather has served as the backdrop to a number of riots in the UK, from Brixton in 1981 to the disorder in 2011 that began in Tottenham before spreading throughout the country. Admittedly, there were no riots during the heatwave last year. But when England beat Sweden at the World Cup, a group of people did storm and trash a branch of IKEA – which is a pretty odd thing to do.

There are a number of factors at play, but if temperatures increase worldwide (as they’re predicted to) we could well see an attendant increase in civil disturbance and violent crime.

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