Linkage

Heartbreaking and terrifying.

“An amendment to the Schools Bill is being discussed in Parliament tomorrow,” read the post on an online forum run by the Bayswater Support Group, which describes itself as the UK’s only support organisation run by and for parents of trans children and young people.

“If passed it will allow greater transparency about what is being taught in schools. We have been contacted for a short piece of evidence,” the mother said. “Does anyone have the experience of their autistic child identifying as trans following learning about it at school? Ideally a situation where the school went onto transition the child.”

The following day, on 30 June 2022, during a parliamentary debate about relationships, sex and health education (RSHE), the Conservative MP Miriam Cates argued that learning about trans identities was damaging to children.

“One parent of a 15-year-old with a diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome said she discovered that without her knowledge, her [child’s] school had started the process of socially transitioning her child, and has continued to do so despite the mother’s objections,” said Cates, who is standing again for her seat Penistone and Stockbridge, in South Yorkshire, in the upcoming election.

The story Cates told the House of Commons closely mirrored the request posted on Bayswater’s private channel on Discord, an online message board. She even named the group during the debate, saying it had reported “a surge” of parents contacting Bayswater after their children learned about trans people at school.

[…]

Bayswater’s public concern about children’s safety strikes a marked contrast to posts on its Discord channel, where parents wrote of being reported to social services over “restraining” their child and called a shelter for LGBTQ+ abuse survivors “a church for the gender faithful”. A post on the forum recommended blocking children’s access to the website for Childline, the NSPCC’s counselling service.

But the only long-term solution is that Europe needs to phase out fossil fuels and increase renewable energy production. And to do this fast enough to meet existing climate commitments it is necessary to reduce excess energy demand. Achieving this in a just and equitable way requires two things: first, reducing the purchasing power of the rich (who use extremely high levels of energy), and second, ensuring that everyone has guaranteed access to the essential goods and services they need to live a good life. 

This forces us to confront a paradox at the heart of our economic system. Wealthy economies have high levels of production, with resource and energy use vastly exceeding sustainable boundaries, but they still fail to meet many basic human needs. This occurs because, under capitalism, the goal of production is not to improve well-being or achieve social progress, but to maximise and accumulate corporate profit. So we get plenty of SUVs, fast fashion and planned obsolescence, but chronic shortages of essential goods and services like public transit, affordable housing and universal healthcare.

Ecological economists argue that one of the best ways to deal with this problem is to establish universal public services. Public services mobilise production around human needs and well-being, and can deliver strong social outcomes with lower levels of resource and energy use. It also enables a more rapid, coordinated shift to more sustainable systems. By decommodifying and democratising key sectors such as food, mobility and housing, we can solve the cost-of-living crisis – by directly reducing prices – and help solve the climate crisis at the same time. This requires reversing the current tendency of neoliberal governments to defund and dismantle public services, which has led to the extraordinary crisis that is presently engulfing the NHS and the railways in the UK.

Counting the existing empty homes in the UK is not a simple task.

There are many reasons why a home might not have a permanent occupier: it could be a second home or it could be that the owner is carrying out renovation work on the property before moving in, for example.

Generally speaking, a home that is unoccupied for six months or more is considered long-term empty. The length of time a home is left empty is often determined by council tax records.

The most recent government statistics, released in November 2023, showed there were 261,189 long-term empty properties in England. That figure represents a rise of 12,556 homes compared to 2022, up 5% annually and 16% since before the pandemic in 2019.

[…]

Overall, taking into account the number of short-term empty homes, second homes, empty homes paying a council tax premium and unoccupied homes that are exempt from council tax, more than one million dwellings are empty in England. That’s an increase of 60,000 since 2018.

The Local Government Association and Empty Homes Network’s (EHN) research found 4% of the country’s homes are empty.

A rep for Paramount told IndieWire: “As part of broader website changes across Paramount, we have introduced more streamlined versions of our sites, driving fans to Paramount+ to watch their favorite shows.”

For now though, many of these series are not currently available on Paramount+, such as “The Colbert Report” or “The Nightly Show.” Even “The Daily Show” has only two of the most recent seasons, encompassing 2024 and 2023, available, despite decades of the show’s history. “South Park” clips used to be hosted on Comedy Central’s website, but the only place to watch full episodes of those are via Max, not Paramount+.

The likely reason for this? Cost cutting. In a town hall this week, Paramount’s “Office of the CEO” including co-chiefs George Cheeks, Chris McCarthy, and Brian Robbins, expressed plans to save $500 million in order to stave off profit drops and one day make Paramount+ profitable.

Speaking at the McCain Institute on Friday alongside Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Romney lamented Israel’s inability to control the flow of information out of and about Gaza, despite its best efforts to restrict press access. 

“I mean, typically the Israelis are good at P.R. What’s happened here? How have they—how have they, and we, been so ineffective at communicating the realities there and our point of view?” Romney asked Blinken, seemingly in disbelief that images of Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of Gaza have prompted outrage in the United States.

Then Romney explained that the TikTok ban overwhelmingly passed both chambers of Congress because of the widespread Palestinian advocacy on the app.

“Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media sites, it’s overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts. So I’d note that’s of real interest, and the President will get the chance to make action in that regard,” Romney said.

Clearly co-written by the gas sector, the document even freely admits world destroying temperature increases of 2.5 degrees are on the cards. Which, to be fair, is important because that’s what the policy is entirely consistent with.

The strategy runs to more than 230 pages, but the upshot is the handful of mostly foreign fossil fuel giants that have for decades been robbing our nation blind have been given the official greenlight to continue doing so indefinitely — “to 2050 and beyond”, no less.

Released under resources minister Madeleine King it opens the nation up to wholesale new gas fields. That’s despite the International Energy Agency (and many others) repeatedly warning new oil and gas projects are incompatible with keeping global temperature increases to 1.5 degrees.

At this juncture it’s worth remembering that every single resources minister of the past 20 years has gone on to work for fossil fuels companies. 

Wow; this guy knows the US Right. His argument that what unites them is a powerful shared vision of what (indeed who) they do not like is utterly sound. By the time they have worked their way through this list, there will be very little satisfaction to be had from watching them turn on each other.

As the broader public turns its attention to these plans, and most people rightfully react with a mixture of horror and concern, a lot of skepticism remains. What is the role of Trump in all of this: Isn’t it more likely that he is going to mess things up, as he has never shown any interest in meticulous planning nor the necessary discipline to enact an ambitious agenda? The Right may try to present a unified front now, but there are so many groups and factions here, and they don’t all share the same ideas about what America should look like: Shouldn’t we expect a lot of infighting and self-sabotage rather than a well-oiled regime? And most importantly, perhaps, haven’t we been through this once before: Isn’t it more likely we get a repeat of the kind of chaos that was so characteristic of the first Trump presidency?

These questions are important. But too strong a focus on Trump’s erratic nature and the many rivalries on the Right obscures the fact that reactionaries are actually united by the desire to punish their enemies, “take back” the country, and restore the “natural order” of unquestioned white Christian patriarchal rule – a unity that is indicative of a broader realignment on the Right towards an aggressive embrace of state authoritarianism. And those who expect merely more of the same chaos that defined Trump’s presidency tend to overlook the fact that the Right would be operating under much more favorable conditions this time: With a fully Trumpified GOP, a reactionary super-majority on the Supreme Court, and with the omnipresent threat of escalating political violence intimidating anyone who dares to dissent.

Trump world wasn’t ready in 2016. The American Right more generally wasn’t ready – they didn’t have the know-how, the plans, or the personnel to get anywhere close to remaking the nation in accordance with their reactionary vision.

They are determined to not make that mistake again. “Project 2025” is evidence that the Right has concrete plans to take over and transform American government into a machine that serves only two purposes: Exacting revenge on the “woke” enemy – and imposing a minoritarian reactionary vision on society. 

To me, the lynchpin that enables the other problems listed here is that "LGBTIQ+ rights are [being] wedged into existing ‘culture-war’ narratives":

Media and political campaigns have positioned the rights of LGBTIQ+ people as negotiable and debatable. Some try to frame the human rights of transgender people as being at odds with women’s rights, even asserting that trans women do not face gender-based discrimination or that they pose a threat to the rights, spaces, and safety of cisgender women.

While they vary by cultural context, these campaigns often portray the push for LGBTIQ+ people’s rights as merely a generational dispute, part of a so-called “culture war”, or in some cases an imperialist agenda. 

Many such narratives position trans and non-binary gender identities as new or Western concepts, ignoring the rich history of diverse sexual orientations, gender identities, gender expressions, and sex characteristics across cultures and within the global South in particular.  

Falsely portraying the rights of LGBTIQ+ people, and particularly of trans people, as competing with women’s rights only widens divisions in the broader gender equality movement. This has given anti-rights actors space to advance rollbacks on sexual and reproductive health and rights, comprehensive sexuality education, and other critical issues.
 

A handsome new library branch in Inwood, at the northern tip of Manhattan, had its soft opening Thursday. It’s the second library in town during the past year or so to try something clever and innovative: partnering with a 100 percent affordable housing development. New subsidized apartments occupy a 12-floor tower above the library.

These days, NIMBYs are always fighting affordable housing projects. Communities are increasingly desperate for libraries. One obvious solution is the twofer — building housing and a library together — because there’s strength in numbers.

[…]

But that’s only half the Inwood project. In addition to the library and apartment tower, which has its own entrance and name, The Eliza, the development also includes a pre-K, a STEM study center, a teaching kitchen and community spaces.