14 August 21
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13 August 21
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The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report." 
n a new health advisory, the nation’s leading epidemiologist, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said that it is “perfectly safe” for Americans to watch YouTube, following news that Senator Rand Paul had been suspended from the platform.
“In the past, I’ve warned about the health consequences of listening to Rand Paul,” he said. “People experience headaches and nausea. Sometimes, they feel like their brain cells are actually leaking straight out of their heads. That’s why I’ve consistently urged people to limit their exposure to this guy.”
Fauci said that, given Paul’s suspension from the site, previous health advisories regarding YouTube “no longer apply.”
“I think that this would be an excellent time for every American to enjoy YouTube,” he said. “Watch some funny cat videos, or maybe some kooky skateboard stunts that went awry. Rand Paul’s suspended for only seven days, so watch as much YouTube as you can while it’s still safe.”
A home burns Saturday as the Dixie Fire flares in Plumas County. Strong winds in coming days may increase fire danger. (photo: Noah Berger/Getty)
dmittedly, I hadn’t been there for 46 years, but old friends of mine still live (or at least lived) in the town of Greenville, California, and now… well, it’s more or less gone, though they survived. The Dixie Fire, one of those devastating West Coast blazes, had already “blackened” 504 square miles of Northern California in what was still essentially the (old) pre-fire season. It would soon become the second-largest wildfire in the state’s history. When it swept through Greenville, much of downtown, along with more than 100 homes, were left in ashes as the 1,000 residents of that Gold Rush-era town fled.
I remember Greenville as a wonderful little place that, all these years later, still brings back fond memories. I’m now on the other coast, but much of that small, historic community is no longer there. This season, California’s wildfires have already devastated three times the territory burned in the same period in 2020’s record fire season. And that makes a point that couldn’t be more salient to our moment and our future. A heating planet is a danger, not in some distant time, but right now — yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Don’t just ask the inhabitants of Greenville, ask those in the village of Monte Lake, British Columbia, the second town in that Canadian province to be gutted by flames in recent months in a region that normally — or perhaps I should just say once upon a time — was used to neither extreme heat and drought, nor the fires that accompany them.
In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re no longer just reading about the climate crisis; we’re living it in a startling fashion. At least for this old guy, that’s now a fact — not just of life but of all our lives — that simply couldn’t be more extreme and I don’t even need the latest harrowing report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to tell me so. Whether you’ve been sweating and swearing under the latest heat dome; fleeing fires somewhere in the West; broiling in a Siberia that’s releasing startling amounts of heat-producing methane into the atmosphere; being swept away by flood waters in Germany; sweltering in an unprecedented heat-and-fire season in Greece (where even the suburbs of Athens were being evacuated); baking in Turkey or on the island of Sardinia in a “disaster without precedent“; neck-deep in water in a Chinese subway car; or, after “extreme rains,” wading through the subway systems of New York City or London, you — all of us — are in a new world and we better damn well get used to it.
Floods, megadrought, the fiercest of forest fires, unprecedented storms — you name it and it seems to be happening not in 2100 or even 2031, but now. A recent study suggests that, in 2020 (not 2040 or 2080), more than a quarter of Americans had suffered in some fashion from the effects of extreme heat, already the greatest weather-based killer of Americans and, given this blazing summer, 2021 is only likely to be worse.
By the way, don’t imagine that it’s just us humans who are suffering. Consider, for instance, the estimated billion or more — yes, one billion! — mussels, barnacles, and other small sea creatures that were estimated to have died off the coast of Vancouver, Canada, during the unprecedented heat wave there earlier in the summer.
A few weeks ago, watching the setting sun, an eerie blaze of orange-red in a hazy sky here on the East Coast was an unsettling experience once I realized what I was actually seeing: a haze of smoke from the megadrought-stricken West’s disastrous early fire season. It had blown thousands of miles east for the second year in a row, managing to turn the air of New York and Philadelphia into danger zones.
In a way, right now it hardly matters where you look on this planet of ours. Take Greenland, where a “massive melting event,” occurring after the temperature there hit double the normal this summer, made enough ice vanish “in a single day last week to cover the whole of Florida in two inches of water.” But there was also that record brush fire torching more than 62 square miles of Hawaii’s Big Island. And while you’re at it, you can skip prime houseboat-vacation season at Lake Powell on the Arizona-Utah border, since that huge reservoir is now three-quarters empty (and, among Western reservoirs, anything but alone!).
It almost doesn’t matter which recent report you cite. When it comes to what the scientists are finding, it’s invariably worse than you (or often even they) had previously imagined. It’s true, for instance, of the Amazon rain forest, one of the great carbon sinks on the planet. Parts of it are now starting to release carbon into the atmosphere, as a study in the journal Nature reported recently, partially thanks to climate change and partially to more direct forms of human intervention.
It’s no less true of the Siberian permafrost in a region where, for the first time above the Arctic Circle, the temperature in one town reached more than 100 degrees Fahrenheit on a summer day in 2020. And yes, when Siberia heats up in such a fashion, methane (a far more powerful heat-trapping gas than CO2) is released into the atmosphere from that region’s melting permafrost wetlands, which had previously sealed it in. And recently, that’s not even the real news. What about the possibility, according to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that what’s being released now is actually a potential “methane bomb” not from that permafrost itself but from thawing rock formations within it?
In fact, when it comes to the climate crisis, as a recent study in the journal Bioscience found, “some 16 out of 31 tracked planetary vital signs, including greenhouse gas concentrations, ocean heat content, and ice mass, set worrying new records.” Similarly, carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide “have all set new year-to-date records for atmospheric concentrations in both 2020 and 2021.”
Mind you, just in case you hadn’t noticed, the last seven years have been the warmest in recorded history. And speaking of climate-change-style records in this era, last year, 22 natural disasters hit this country, including hurricanes, fires, and floods, each causing more than $1 billion in damage, another instant record with — the safest prediction around — many more to come.
“It Looked Like an Atomic Bomb”
Lest you think that all of this represents an anomaly of some sort, simply a bad year or two on a planet that historically has gone from heat to ice and back again, think twice. A recent report published in Nature Climate Change, for instance, suggests that heat waves that could put the recent ones in the U.S. West and British Columbia to shame are a certainty and especially likely for “highly populated regions in North America, Europe, and China.” (Keep in mind that, a few years ago, there was already a study suggesting that the North China plain with its 400 million inhabitants could essentially become uninhabitable by the end of this century due to heat waves too powerful for human beings to survive!) Or as another recent study suggested, reports the Guardian, “heatwaves that smash previous records… would become two to seven times more likely in the next three decades and three to 21 times more likely from 2051-2080, unless carbon emissions are immediately slashed.”
It turns out that, even to describe the new world we already live in, we may need a new vocabulary. I mean, honestly, until the West Coast broiled and burned from Los Angeles to British Columbia this summer, had you ever heard of, no less used, the phrase “heat dome” before? I hadn’t, I can tell you that.
And by the way, there’s no question that climate change in its ever more evident forms has finally made the mainstream news in a major way. It’s no longer left to 350.org or Greta Thunberg and the Sunrise Movement to highlight what’s happening to us on this planet. It’s taken years, but in 2021 it’s finally become genuine news, even if not always with the truly fierce emphasis it deserves. The New York Times, to give you an example, typically had a recent piece of reportage (not an op-ed) by Shawn Hubler headlined “Is This the End of Summer as We’ve Known It?” (“The season Americans thought we understood — of playtime and ease, of a sun we could trust, air we could breathe and a natural world that was, at worst, indifferent — has become something else, something ominous and immense. This is the summer we saw climate change merge from the abstract to the now, the summer we realized that every summer from now on will be more like this than any quaint memory of past summers.”) And the new IPCC report on how fast things are indeed proceeding was front-page and front-screen news everywhere, as well it should have been, given the research it was summing up.
My point here couldn’t be simpler: in heat and weather terms, our world is not just going to become extreme in 20 years or 50 years or as this century ends. It’s officially extreme right now. And here’s the sad thing: I have no doubt that, no matter what I write in this piece, no matter how up to date I am at this moment, by the time it appears it will already be missing key climate stories and revelations. Within months, it could look like ancient history.
Welcome, then, to our very own not-so-slow-motion apocalypse. A friend of mine recently commented to me that, for most of the first 30 years of his life, he always expected the world to go nuclear. That was, of course, at the height of the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. And then, like so many others, he stopped ducking and covering. How could he have known that, in those very years, the world was indeed beginning to get nuked, or rather carbon-dioxided, methaned, greenhouse-gassed, even if in a slow-motion fashion? As it happens, this time there’s going to be no pretense for any of us of truly ducking and covering.
It’s true, of course, that ducking and covering was a fantasy of the Cold War era. After all, no matter where you might have ducked and covered then — even the Air Force’s command center dug into the heart of Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado — you probably wouldn’t have been safe from a full-scale nuclear conflict between the two superpowers of that moment, or at least not from the world it would have left behind, a disaster barely avoided in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. (Today, we know that, thanks to the possibility of “nuclear winter,” even a regional nuclear conflict — say, between India and Pakistan — could kill billions of us, by starvation if nothing else.)
In that context, I wasn’t surprised when a home owner, facing his house, his possessions, and his car burned to a crisp in Oregon’s devastating Bootleg Fire, described the carnage this way: “It looked like an atomic bomb.”
And, of course, so much worse is yet to come. It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about a planet on which the Amazon rain forest has already turned into a carbon emitter or one in which the Gulf Stream collapses in a way that’s likely to deprive various parts of the planet of key rainfall necessary to grow crops for billions of people, while raising sea levels disastrously on the East Coast of this country. And that just begins to enumerate the dangers involved, including the bizarre possibility that much of Europe might be plunged into a — hold your hats (and earmuffs) for this one — new ice age!
World War III
If this were indeed the beginning of a world war (instead of a world warm), you know perfectly well that the United States like so many other nations would, in the style of World War II, instantly mobilize resources to fight it (or as a group of leading climate scientists put it recently, we would “go big on climate” now). And yet in this country (as in too many others), so little has indeed been mobilized. Worse yet, here one of the two major parties, only recently in control of the White House, supported the further exploitation of fossil fuels (and so the mass creation of greenhouse gases) big time, as well as further exploration for yet more of them. Many congressional Republicans are still in the equivalent of a state of staggering (not to say, stark raving mad) denial of what’s underway. They are ready to pay nothing and raise no money to shut down the production of greenhouse gases, no less create the genuinely green planet run on alternative energy sources that would actually rein in what’s happening.
And criminal as that may have been, Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, and crew were just aiding and abetting those that, years ago, I called “the biggest criminal enterprise in history.” I was speaking of the executives of major fossil-fuel companies who, as I said then, were and remain the true “terrarists” (and no, that’s not a misspelling) of history. After all, their goal in hijacking all our lives isn’t simply to destroy buildings like the World Trade Center, but to take down the Earth (Terra) as we’ve known it. And don’t leave out the leaders of countries like China still so disastrously intent on, for instance, producing yet more coal-fired power. Those CEOs and their enablers have been remarkably intent on quite literally committing terracide and, sadly enough, in that — as has been made oh-so-clear in this disastrous summer — they’ve already been remarkably successful.
Companies like ExxonMobil knew long before most of the rest of us the sort of damage and chaos their products would someday cause and couldn’t have given less of a damn as long as the mega-profits continued to flow in. (They would, in fact, invest some of those profits in funding organizations that were promoting climate-change denial.) Worse yet, as revealing comments by a senior Exxon lobbyist recently made clear, they’re still at it, working hard to undermine President Biden’s relatively modest green-energy plans in any way they can.
Thought about a certain way, even those of us who didn’t live in Greenville, California, are already in World War III. Many of us just don’t seem to know it yet. So welcome to my (and your) extreme world, not next month or next year or next decade or next century but right now. It’s a world of disaster worth mobilizing over if, that is, you care about the lives of all of us and particularly of the generations to come.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
Tom Engelhardt created and runs the website TomDispatch.com. He is also a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of a highly praised history of American triumphalism in the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. A fellow of the Type Media Center, his sixth and latest book is A Nation Unmade by War.
Jake Davison carried out the worst mass shooting in Britain since 2010. (photo: BBC)
he man suspected of killing five people before turning the gun on himself in a mass shooting in England on Thursday night was an incel Trump supporter who posted about “devil worshipers” in government.
The suspected shooter has been named by police as Jake Davison, a 22-year-old who is reported to have worked in construction. In a six-minute rampage, Davison killed his mom, Maxine Davison, a 3-year-old girl named Sophie Martyn, the girl’s father, Lee Martyn, as well as two bystanders who were identified as Stephen Washington and Kate Shepherd.
It was the worst mass shooting in Britain since 2010.
Davison’s mother disapproved of her son’s misogynistic views, and the two clashed frequently, an acquaintance told The Telegraph. Davison also “beat up his father a couple of months ago,” according to another source. Davison urgently needed mental health treatment, but wasn’t able to get help in time, a family friend reportedly wrote on Facebook.
“The NHS basically said they are short staffed and that was it,” the friend wrote. “The family even asked the police to come out to see him… they didn’t do a welfare check. And now six people are dead.”
Before the shooting, Davison expressed his admiration for Donald Trump on Facebook and posted multiple self-pitying YouTube videos in which he identified himself as part of the incel community. On his Facebook page, Davison claimed to be from Arizona, but his distinctive accent is typical of people from the south-west of England.
In one post from 2018, Davison shared a Trump quote and, when his friends ridiculed him in the comments, the suspect hit back: “You may not agree with his political views (I do) but he is different from the scum like Hillary or the people running our country like the neo-con sellout that is [then-British Prime Minister] Theresa May.”
Elsewhere in the comments, Davison wrote about conspiracy theories that sound similar to those pushed by QAnon believers. He wrote: “Scepticism of government is key and everyone should be ready and prepared for anything bad that could happen. I am aware much of the government is deeply flawed there are many paedophiles and even reported devil worshipers people that sell us out to foreign countries.”
Davison’s Facebook likes suggest he was obsessed with conservative U.S. politics. He followed the pages of Trump, all of his children, and several Trump businesses, as well as pages for the NRA, Fox News, Breitbart, Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, and one called “Ted Nugent for President.” In one comment, he said it was his dream to move to the States.
In disturbing YouTube videos posted just weeks before the shooting, Davison appears to be deeply unhappy about his life. Under the username “Professor Waffle,” he refers to people like him as “blackpillers,” incels who believe unattractive men will never be romantically successful regardless of how much effort they put into how they look. In one comment under his video, he wrote that he’d been “consuming the blackpill overdose.”
In one video, he grabs his belly fat and bemoans his lack of motivation to get fit, complains about women being “simple-minded,” and justifies sexual assault by saying women ignore “average men and below average.”
“When you’ve worked so fucking hard... and you see other fuckers that work nowhere near as hard as you, then you wake up and look at the wall and think ‘Nothing’s changed,’” he whines in one clip. “I’m still in the same position, same period in life, still a fucking this, that, virgin, fat, ugly, whatever you want to call it. What’s changed? Nothing.”
Another video sees Davison spending 14 minutes complaining that he missed out on experiencing teenage love because of his weight, and saying that he has no desire to get a relationship with an adult woman.
“Let’s say I get with a woman my age,” he says. “She’s had a million relationships. Likely been destroyed and broken and torn apart by a fucking chad. She’s probably completely incapable of loving anyone like she did when she was 16, 17, 15, when she first got with that fucking chad.”
At the end of his final video posted before the shooting, Davison compares himself to The Terminator, telling viewers: “I know it’s a movie, but I like to think sometimes that I’m The Terminator. Despite reaching almost total system failure, he keeps trying to accomplish his mission.”
A spokesperson for YouTube confirmed that Davison’s channel was removed from its site Friday morning and said in a statement: “Our hearts go out to those affected by this terrible incident. We have strict policies to ensure our platform is not used to incite violence.”
In a Friday morning press conference, police refused to comment on Davison’s social media posts, and said that they have not determined a motive for the shooting. Officers did confirm that Davison was a licensed gun-owner, and said witnesses saw him wielding a “pump-action shotgun.”
Chief constable Shaun Sawyer told reporters that multiple witnesses saw Sophie Martyn, 3, and her father being shot dead on the street, calling that specific part of the shooting spree a “truly shocking event.”
Britain has had some of the strictest gun laws in the world since the Dunblane massacre in 1996, when a gunman murdered 16 children and a teacher inside a Scottish primary school. Would-be gun owners must go through several stages of police checks before they can obtain a license, which then have to be renewed for approval every five years.
Britain hasn’t seen a mass shooting on the scale of what happened in Plymouth since 2010, when 52-year-old taxi driver Derrick Bird went on a rampage that saw him shoot 12 people dead in west Cumbria.
Safi Hilton, one of Davison’s Facebook friends, posted a tribute to the victims of the Plymouth shooting, writing: “In a world where you can be anything, be kind. Thoughts are with the families, friends and also witnesses of this incident tonight. Remember to reach out and talk.”
A person holds up signs during a voting rights rally at Liberty Plaza near the Georgia State Capitol on Tuesday, June 8, 2021, in Atlanta. (photo: Brynn Anderson/AP)
Democrats in Congress could tamp down on GOP gerrymandering, but they have to act quickly
n a matter of months, Democrats could be locked out of power in key states, and possibly the House of Representatives, for a decade. Unless Democrats in Congress find a way to act quickly and pass voting rights legislation to put a check on Republican gerrymandering.
Those are the stakes for the party as states across the country start redrawing their maps as soon as next week to decide which lawmakers represent different communities.
It’s a process known as redistricting. States do it every decade based on new census data, which just got released Thursday. The data showed that, nationally, White people are declining as a portion of the population for the first time in centuries. That can help boost Democrats’ strength in suburban swing districts because voters of color lean blue.
But most states hand the redistricting process to legislatures, and Republicans have spent the past decade engineering themselves into power in state legislatures across the country precisely for this purpose.
That means they get to carve up the 2020 Census’s population data in many battlegrounds to create new state legislative and congressional districts. And that means Republicans have an opportunity to gerrymander their way back into power at a national level and find ways to keep a hold of their power in states.
It’s possible that if Democrats lose control of the House of Representatives in next year’s elections, they could be locked out of power for another decade because Republicans successfully drew maps making it hard for Democrats to win in swing districts.
The whole process starts as soon as next week in some states and could be done in many by the end of the year.
“There is real urgency on redistricting,” said Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice, a public policy institute that advocates for fairer maps and voting rights. “There is real urgency on the voting laws. Some people say we can out-organize the voter suppression. You cannot out-organize a well-done gerrymander.”
What can Democrats do?
Well, they knew this was coming and tried to preempt some of it by regaining state legislatures and governorships in 2020. But they failed at that.
They’re fighting back in courts, which in many states is their only recourse to stop these maps from becoming law. They’ve already filed lawsuits in key states before the map-drawing has even begun, The Washington Post’s Colby Itkowitz reported.
But that’s a slow battle that may come too late for the 2022 midterms, when Democrats are trying to hang on to their slim majority. Republicans can conceivably win back the majority just by redrawing enough districts that make it difficult for a Democrat to stay in power.
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland has warned states that the Justice Department will challenge voting laws that it thinks run afoul of federal discrimination laws. But that’s also reactionary.
There’s one big swing Congress could take at this that would solve a lot of Democrats’ problems. And one major hurdle: It would require Senate Democrats and President Biden to all agree to get rid of the filibuster, and right now they don’t.
A voting rights bill passed by the Democratic-controlled House would ban redistricting to benefit one party over another.
It would make it illegal — and easier to challenge in court — the long-held practice of drawing maps for partisan gain. Lawmakers would have to make a good-faith effort at fair maps. And they’d have do it in a more open process rather than behind closed doors.
When put to the voters, such changes to the redistricting process have generally been popular. In 2020, Virginia voters approved an independent redistricting commission over the objection of Democrats in power. (Both sides gerrymander, though Democrats have become slightly more vocal in recent years about supporting independent commissions to draw fairer lines.)
But there is zero chance Republicans in Congress will change this, and other voting laws. They argue that states should get to set their own policies. Beneath the surface, of course, is a realization that ending partisan gerrymandering would take away much of the GOP’s power in key swing states.
For example: Before Pennsylvania was carved up in 2010 by Republican lawmakers, Democrats won 56 percent of the vote in a midterm election and 11 congressional seats. Today, they’d only win six in such a scenario, Michael Li with the Brennan Center wrote. That could get even worse in 2022 with a GOP legislature in charge of maps.
Ending the filibuster is probably Democrats’ best option to ending partisan gerrymandering before it’s too late for their party.
Democrats need to find a way to convince Sens. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) to end the filibuster. And they’re working on that, but it takes time.
“These things are hard,” Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) told the New York Times’s Ezra Klein in an April interview, speaking about voting rights and other Democratic priorities. “Passing big comprehensive legislation … is difficult. And, so, there’s no set path. But what’s key, in getting this done, is Democratic unity, us sticking together.”
Demonstrators near the Wisconsin State Capitol in Madison on Saturday showed their support for postponing Primary Day. (photo: Amber Arnold/AP)
Gerrymandering allows legislators to ignore what voters really want. And experts fear it’s about to get a lot worse
he United States is becoming a land filled with “democracy deserts”, where gerrymandering and voting restrictions are making voters powerless to make change. And this round of redistricting could make things even worse.
Since 2012, the Electoral Integrity Project at Harvard University has studied the quality of elections worldwide. It has also issued biannual reports that grade US states, on a scale of 1 through 100. In its most recent study of the 2020 elections, the integrity of Wisconsin’s electoral boundaries earned a 23 – worst in the nation, on par with Jordan, Bahrain and the Congo.
Why is Wisconsin so bad? Consider that, among other things, it’s a swing-state that helped decide the 2016 election. Control the outcome in Wisconsin, and you could control the nation. But Wisconsin isn’t the only democracy desert. Alabama (31), North Carolina (32), Michigan (37), Ohio (33), Texas (35), Florida (37) and Georgia (39) scored only marginally higher. Nations that join them in the 30s include Hungary, Turkey and Syria.
Representative democracy has been broken for the past decade in places like Wisconsin, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Florida. When Republican lawmakers redistricted these states after the 2010 census, with the benefit of precise, granular voting data and the most sophisticated mapping software ever, they gerrymandered themselves into advantages that have held firm for the last decade – even when Democratic candidates win hundreds of thousands more statewide votes.
In Wisconsin, for example, voters handed Democrats every statewide race in 2018 and 203,000 more votes for the state assembly – but the tilted Republican map handed Republicans 63 of the 99 seats nevertheless. Democratic candidates have won more or nearly the same number of votes for Michigan’s state house for the last decade – but never once captured a majority of seats.
Now redistricting is upon us again. This week, the US Census Bureau will release the first round of population data to the states, and the decennial gerrymandering Olympics will begin in state capitols nationwide. And while there has been much coverage of the national stakes – Republicans could win more than the five seats they need to control of Congress next fall through redrawing Texas, Georgia, North Carolina and Florida alone, and they’ve made clear that’s their plan – much less alarm has been raised about the long-term consequences of entrenched Republican minority rule in the states.
It’s time for them to ring. The situation is dangerous.
Our democratic crisis is not just the stuff of academic studies. Who controls our states is increasingly a matter of life and death. Recent history is riddled with examples. For instance, the Flint water crisis began after a gerrymandered Michigan legislature reinstated an emergency manager provision even after voters repealed it in a statewide referendum.
When lawmakers in Texas ban mask mandates, or Florida politicians take away the power of local officials to require masks in schools, that’s the consequence of gerrymandering. And its impact can be measured in actual lives. When state lawmakers enact draconian restrictions on reproductive rights in Ohio, Georgia, Alabama and Missouri that opinion polls show are out of step with their own residents, that’s the power of gerrymandering. When Republican legislators strip emergency powers from Democratic governors, that’s yet another insidious effect. Our health, safety and wellbeing – our very lives – are in the hands of our state legislators. It is imperative that our votes decide who they are.
We know that when gerrymandering “packs” and “cracks” voters into districts for partisan advantage, it results in fewer districts that are competitive. And when districts are uncompetitive, fewer candidates have incentive to run – and those who do have little incentive to pay attention to any voters’ preferences outside of those who participate in low-turnout, base-driven primaries. This district uncompetitiveness, and the lack of incentives for legislators to listen and govern, is why our state and federal legislatures are so polarized.
And it can still get worse. Republicans hold complete control over redistricting in Texas, Georgia, Ohio, Florida and North Carolina. Democratic governors will have veto power over at least some tilted maps in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and a new commission will draw lines in Michigan. That should force some compromise in those states. But it also means that if Democrats lose the governor’s office in any of those states in 2022, Republicans might try to force a mid-decade redraw of maps. These entrenched lawmakers continue to show us how extreme they are, and demonstrate their willingness to demolish any traditional guardrail. We have already seen how legislators in those states have pushed for new voting restrictions, for sham “audits” of the 2020 results, and have even called for changes in how electoral college votes are awarded and certified.
Let’s be clear: Donald Trump’s big lie was enabled by gerrymandering. Much of the success of the big lie is in its veneer of legitimacy, which has been perpetuated by Republican state legislators in places like Michigan, Georgia and Texas – whose very electoral successes were made possible by gerrymandering. And while the system held, barely, in 2020, there is no guarantee that the same thing happens next time, after another round of extreme redistricting and several more years of surgical laws designed to suppress the vote in closely contested states.
These are the stakes right now as redistricting begins anew. As we await the final census data this week, we must not allow redistricting to unfold quickly behind closed doors. We must keep this process transparent and mapmakers accountable. Find your state’s redistricting hearing schedule online, join the meetings (many will be held virtually) and consider submitting testimony about why fair maps matter. Tweet at journalists and your legislators. Mention it in every conversation you have with friends and family. Learn about and support organizations fighting for fair maps with people power on the ground.
The process is going to move fast, and the next several weeks are critical. The stakes are much higher than just Congress. This is a fight for the future of our states, too. If you think that legislators will always be accountable to the people, or that autocracy can’t happen here, you aren’t paying attention. It already is.
Ilhan Omar departs following a campaign event with Democratic 2020 US presidential candidate and Senator Bernie Sanders in Manchester, New Hampshire, December 13, 2019. (photo: Brian Snyder/Reuters)
he American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is facing accusations of Islamophobia and incitement after doubling down on attacks against Muslim-American congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.
AIPAC, a pro-Israel advocacy group that presents itself as bipartisan, has long been running attack ads against Israel’s critics in Congress who are mostly progressive Democrats.
On Wednesday, Jeremy Slevin, Omar’s communications director, slammed the group for a sponsored post claiming that the legislator sees “no difference between America and the Taliban”, “Israel and Hamas” and “democracies and terrorists”.
Slevin said the language used by AIPAC is “identical” to hate messages the congresswoman receives.
“Make no mistake: AIPAC is putting Rep. Omar’s life at risk with repeated Islamophobic attack ads,” he wrote.
“It shouldn’t have to be stated, but baselessly linking Muslim-Americans to terrorism is *the* textbook example of Islamophobia and is routinely used to silence advocacy for Palestinian human rights,” he continued.
Following Slevin’s post, the Council on American Islamic Relations, a Washington-based civil rights organisation, released a statement condemning AIPAC for what it called an “Islamophobic, dishonest and dangerous ad campaign” against Omar.
“AIPAC’s attempt to spread this vile, Islamophobic language to Facebook users could incite threats of violence against Representative Omar and other American Muslim leaders. Put simply, AIPAC’s bigotry is placing Ilhan Omar’s life at risk,” said CAIR Deputy Executive Director Edward Ahmed Mitchell.
“Facebook should immediately take down these vile ads and congressional leaders must condemn AIPAC for continuing to incite Islamophobic hatred against Representative Omar.”
The outrage did not prompt AIPAC to reverse course; in fact, the pro-Israel group reiterated its message linking Omar, a Minnesota Democrat, to terrorism.
“Your baseless attack on us can’t deflect from [Omar’s] attack on America and Israel,” AIPAC said in a tweet in response to Slevin.
“It is outrageous for Rep. Omar to put the U.S. and Israel on the same level as the Taliban and Hamas. There is no moral equivalence between democratic allies and the terrorists who target them.”
The pro-Israel group was referring to controversy in June when Omar questioned Secretary of State Antony Blinken about the US administration’s opposition investigations into alleged war crimes in Afghanistan and the Palestinian territories by the International Criminal Court (ICC).
“In both of these cases, if domestic courts can’t or won’t pursue justice – and we oppose the ICC – where do we think the victims of the supposed crimes can go for justice?” Omar asked Blinken at a congressional hearing.
She later posted a video of the questions that she raised during the hearing on social media with a caption that unleashed a flood of condemnation from both Republicans and Democrats.
“We must have the same level of accountability and justice for all victims of crimes against humanity,” Omar wrote. “We have seen unthinkable atrocities committed by the US, Hamas, Israel, Afghanistan, and the Taliban.”
She subsequently clarified that she was referring to the specific ICC cases, not likening the US and Israel to the Taliban and Hamas.
Democratic leaders in the House of Representatives then released the statement welcoming the congresswoman’s “clarification” in an apparent effort to move on from the episode.
But AIPAC is not dropping the issue. The group also attacked Tlaib, a Palestinian-American legislator and prominent supporter of Palestinian human rights, on Wednesday.
“I am so sick of this s**t,” Tlaib, of Michigan, had written in response to Slevin’s post. To which AIPAC retorted, “So are we, Congresswoman. Inciting hate by demonizing Israel and spreading vicious, dangerous lies about our democratic ally Israel doesn’t advance the prospects for peace.”
The group “pinned” the post against Tlaib on top of its Twitter account.
Abed Ayoub, legal director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), an advocacy group, accused AIPAC of repeatedly engaging in Islamophobic and anti-Arab attacks against Palestinian rights’ supporters.
“Time and time again they have shown that they are indeed bigots and racists,” Ayoub told Al Jazeera.
“The hypocrisy also comes from all lawmakers, particularly Democrats who claim to fight against Islamophobia, but continue to run to and seek the support of AIPAC. This organisation has done nothing to advance American interests, and continues to sow division and hate without any repercussions.”
AIPAC’s annual conferences often draw legislators and top officials, including presidential candidates, from both major parties in Washington.
On Wednesday, mainstream figures denounced the group for its attack on the Muslim congresswomen.
“Not only is AIPAC running false, vitriolic ads against progressive Congresswomen of color, it’s doubling down on them after being called out for dangerously spreading misinformation about lawmakers who are among the most frequent targets of rightwing extremists’ bigotry & threats,” wrote Dylan Williams, senior vice president at J Street, a liberal Jewish group that presents itself as pro-Israel and pro-peace.
AIPAC did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment by the time of publication.
This is far from the first time that AIPAC has sparred with lawmakers who criticise Israel.
Last year, the group ran social media ads likening Omar, Tlaib and their Democratic colleague Betty McCollum to ISIL (ISIS).
McCollum, who has been introducing legislation to ensure that US aid to Israel does not contribute to abusing the rights of Palestinian children, released a fierce response to AIPAC at the time.
“Hate speech is intentionally destructive and dehumanising, which is why it is used as a weapon by groups with a stake in profiting from oppression,” the congresswoman said in a statement in February 2020.
Marine Protected Areas are designed to relieve fishing pressures in highly productive and biodiverse areas. (photo: Cinzia Osele Bismarck/Ocean Image Bank)\
re Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) effective? Yes, but not as well as we thought, a new study finds.
Globally, illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing is known as one of the biggest threats to the health and future of the oceans. MPAs attempt to protect enough critical marine habitat to ensure survival of ocean life despite this. Unfortunately, illegal fishers intentionally target reserves because they know that fish are more abundant within those areas, Pew Charitable Trusts reported. Now, this study shows how detrimental illegal fishing is even to nearby protected areas, because of an "edge effect."
Recently, IUU fishing has taken the global spotlight. To shed more light and galvanize collaborative solutions, the United Nations declared June 5 the International Day for the Fight Against Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated Fishing.
For decades, marine policies have advocated for MPAs as a critical tool in the fight against illegal fishing, citing the "spillover effect" as the crucial benefit. The idea is that protecting certain areas from fishing and development will allow fish and invertebrate stocks to recover and migrate out (or spillover) to unprotected areas where fishing is allowed. Thus, overall fish populations should increase within MPAs and immediately outside.
For the most part, MPAs work. A new study, however, shows that fishing right outside of protected areas similarly has a negative spillover effect that moves backwards into MPAs. Human pressures have a detrimental effect on marine wildlife living close to the edges of such regions. Illegal fishing and overfishing are the main human actions causing this reverse spillover, the study showed. It was published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.
Because of this newfound effect, the study estimated that over half of the world's marine protected areas are failing to protect ocean biodiversity, The Times of Israel reported. The study, conducted by Tel Aviv University hopes to bolster the effectiveness of MPAs around the world by suggesting ways to buffer them from negative human impacts.
The study came to its conclusions by surveying the amount of fish in the "in between" areas of MPAs to measure their overall effectiveness. Thousands of studies have proven the efficacy of MPAs by sampling and comparing "inside" and "outside" fish populations. Little research has been done in the areas in between, however, reported The Times of Israel. The researchers compared estimates of fish and marine invertebrate populations from 27 MPAs from around the globe in which fishing is banned. They found that "there is a prominent and consistent edge effect that extends approximately 1 kilometer (0.62 miles) within the MPA, in which [fish] population sizes... are 60 percent smaller than those in the core area." Again, this is mainly because of fishing. What that means, alarmingly, is that "global effectiveness of existing no-take MPAs is far less than previously thought," especially for smaller MPAs, the study said.
Researchers found that protected areas smaller than 10 square kilometers account for 64% of all 'no-take' MPAs in the world, where fishing is totally banned. Some 40% of MPAs are just one square kilometer, which means that the entire area probably experiences this edge effect, they added.
Importantly, no edge effects were found in MPAs which had no-fishing buffer zones created around them. Edge effects were also less pronounced even without buffer zones as long as bans against fishing were enforced, the study found.
"MPAs with buffer zones did not display edge effects, suggesting that extending no-take areas beyond the target habitats and managing fishing activities around MPA borders are critical for boosting MPA performance," the researchers concluded.
They told the Times of Israel, "These findings are encouraging as they signify that by putting buffer zones in place, managing fishing activity around MPAs and improving enforcement, we can increase the effectiveness of the existing MPAs and most probably also increase the benefits they can provide through fish spillover."
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