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A concentration camp with heat, mosquitoes, and alligators
Rachel Treisman of NPR reported on Alligator Alcatraz – a new detention facility in the Florida Everglades on the site of an abandoned airport. The site was assembled quickly and the nasty guy visited it today to mark its “completion.” That it is on the grounds of an old airport is important because deportation flights can take off from there.
The site could be created quickly because no buildings were constructed. Instead it is made up of tents and FEMA trailers. It will have 5,000 beds. Proponents say it has the best security – no civilization nearby and lots of alligators and pythons beyond the perimeter. Trying to leave would be deadly.
Protests to the site also developed quickly. Protests are from conservationists who want to protect the Everglades and Indigenous groups who protest the use of their ancestral lands. There are also protests from immigration advocates worried about the lack of oversight and detainees being held in tents during high Florida heat and humidity with lots of mosquitoes and a big chance of hurricanes.
I heard about Alligator Alcatraz this morning as a voice of a government official described it on NPR. I didn’t get the name and it must have been during a news report, thus not part of NPR’s stories that get transcripts. So I went looking for it.
Meleah Lyden of WUSF wrote about what is known about the site. Officials declare the site to be temporary, so temporary they’re not building a sewer system. But “temporary” isn’t defined. That means there are no environmental safeguards and the waste runoff could pollute the Everglades. Between the sun, humidity, mosquitoes, and living in tents life there will be cruel. The money to create the site is coming from FEMA, meaning it will have less money when disaster strikes.
Lyden wrote about requirements of other new detention centers, such as for food and laundry, but the Department of Homeland Security could issue waivers. That doesn’t sound good.
I found out there is such a site as Know Your Meme, which explains memes that appear on the internet. It looks like their page for Alligator Alcatraz was updated between when I saw it this morning and when I am doing my evening writing.
In addition to explaining what Alligator Alcatraz is all about there are images that people have created, such as alligators and pythons in guard uniforms.
The page includes a tweet from Alt National Park Service (which I take to be someone other than the official NPS):
Starting the first week of July, when South Florida’s heat index regularly hits 100F, they plan to detain up to 5,000 people in tents. No A/C. No real shelter. Just suffocating heat, choking humidity, and swarms of mosquitoes.
The location? A remote airstrip deep in the Everglades, surrounded by marshes, alligators, and invasive pythons.
Florida officials are calling it a “detainment camp.” They say it’s fine because “We are swamp creatures,” and even brag that nature will “do us some favors.”
This isn’t policy. It’s cruelty plain and simple. And it’s happening on U.S. soil.
We are swamp creatures? Can’t say I’ve visited a swamp recently.
Dr. KevinYoung added:
You all understand that this is a Concentration Camp, right?
RIGHT?!
I also saw cartoons such as one posted here.
But I didn’t find the quote I had heard and I can’t reproduce it from memory. What I remember and thought about afterward was how the speaker described the place, each feature reinforcing how bad the place would be for anyone sent there. For me that translated into the speaker saying how important they were because they had the power to send the worst people to this horrible place. Alas, knowing the way the nasty guy and his minions operate many of the people who will be sent here are actually quite nice people.
In Monday’s pundit roundup for Daily Kos Greg Dworkin included a tweet by Neil Stone. The tweet includes a chart of the reported cases of measles in the US since 1921. The number fluctuated widely with over 800,000 cases in about 1940 and about 150,000 later that decade. The measles vaccine came out in 1963. Within four years the cases fell below 100,000 where they have stayed since, with most years at or close to zero. Stone added:
Yes I can see why people like RFK Jr are sceptical about vaccines and asking questions
I mean it's really hard to tell if they work or not
A real head scratcher
In the comments exlrrp posted a meme:
Now hiring ICE agents!
Aggressive?
Disregard for due process?
Enjoy targeting people of color?
Then congratulations – you’re everything we’re looking for.
ICE wants you!
(No morals? No problem!)
Laugh About It cartoons posted one by Crampton. A woman is speaking to rabbits hiding under the furniture:
Yeah, it could be World War III. But it might be just some dudes bombing people to make their weenies feel something.
Kos of Kos wrote about Hungary’s authoritarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán:
Orbán shares MAGA’s worldview down to the bone: a politics rooted in white nationalism, xenophobia, bigotry toward LGBTQ+ people, fearmongering about immigrants, and open contempt for liberal democratic institutions. He’s taken a sledgehammer to press freedom, and rewritten Hungary’s Constitution multiple times to attempt to entrench permanent one-party rule.
Who needs a think tank like the Heritage Foundation when MAGA can just follow the Orbán blueprint?
...
Orbán took what was once one of Europe’s rising post-Soviet democracies and ran it into the ground. Today, Hungary is the poorest country in the European Union, while the nation continues to suffer some of the highest inflation rates in the bloc. Ironically, Trump’s tariffs are compounding the country’s ills.
Furthermore, Hungary is hemorrhaging young people. Its economy is increasingly dependent on authoritarian allies, like China and Russia. It’s isolated from its neighbors, distrusted by democratic partners, and rapidly becoming a cautionary tale for the rest of Europe.
The opposition party Tisza holds a 15% lead in polling for next year’s Parliament elections, though no date has been set.
Authoritarianism produces poverty, political isolation, and moral rot. In America the nasty guy doesn’t care about how is working-class base is faring economically and MAGA fans ignore that Orbán has crashed Hungary’s economy. It’s enough they hate the right people.
At the 80th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations an Associated Press article posted on Kos discussed the current state of the institution.
The UN was founded on June 26, 1945. This was after Germany had surrendered, but before Japan did. There were 50 charter members with 193 members now. The first words of the Charter were “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” There has not been a WWIII, and we can thank the UN for that, but there has been war.
Right now there is war in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, Congo, Haiti, Myanmar, Israel-Iran, and smaller skirmishes around the world.
Diplomats at the UN are anxious because the nasty guy wants to review all the UN agencies. He’s also said the US will cut is contribution and other countries will as well, so the UN is facing 20% job cuts.
The UN still sends out peacekeeping missions and small states don’t worry about larger neighbors occupying them. There is wide praise for UN agencies, especially those dealing with hunger, refugees, and children. There is also praise for the International Atomic Energy Agency, the nuclear watchdog, and the International Telecommunications Union, which allocates global radio spectrum and satellite orbits, among other things. And it remains an essential place for diplomats from around the world to meet, even if there is no results.
Things not going well are: The gridlock in the Security Council’s permanent members of Russia, China, Britain, France, and the US. And a lot of the global issues, like climate change, aren’t getting addressed.
Ian Bremmer, who heads the Eurasia Group, a political risk and consulting firm, said the Trump administration’s attempts to undermine the United Nations — which the United States conceived in 1945 — will make China more important. With Trump exiting from the World Health Organization, the U.N. agency helping Palestinian refugees known as UNRWA and cutting humanitarian funding, he said, China will become “the most influential and the most deep-pocketed” in those agencies.
Bremmer, who calls himself a close adviser to Guterres, insisted the United Nations remains relevant — “with no caveats.”
“It’s a relatively poorly resourced organization. It has no military capabilities. It has no autonomous foreign policy,” Bremmer said. “But its legitimacy and its credibility in speaking for 8 billion people on this little planet of ours is unique."
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