Linkage

A report soon to be released by architects at Melbourne University spells out the environmental damage of demolishing the towers — including the thousands of tonnes of concrete sent into landfill and carbon released in producing replacement concrete — and details the benefits of retrofit as a tried and tested alternative. Work from the architectural practice OFFICE on estates in Ascot Vale and Port Melbourne demonstrates that refurbishment and infill can take place without relocating existing residents, at significantly lower social, environmental and economic costs.

The big housing demolition is not only costing the state a great deal; in the short term it massively reduces the affordable housing stock. In the middle of a housing crisis, this is bizarre. Contrary to Keane’s argument that our object is to keep public housing tenants in substandard housing, it is to ensure they remain close to home while more public housing is built. Those towers that can be refitted can be done so with minimal disruption to tenants, who move within the blocks while the work is done. Most public housing estates have expansive grounds. New public housing should be under construction on those estates now, so that when it comes time to demolish the unsalvageable towers, tenants can move into new housing next door. In what way is this a difficult idea?

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said Guilbeault's a "radical" who seems intent on banning federal funds from road projects. 

Conservative MP Mark Strahl, the party's transport critic, said Guilbeault's talk about no more new funding for "large" roads is "outrageous" and an affront to the people who rely on cars to get to and from work.

"This isn't something many Canadians do without. To simply say we're not going to allow any federal money to go into that is extreme, it's divisive and it's right in line with what this government does," Strahl said.

[…]

Guilbeault's comments put into question the future of Ford's promised Highway 413 project, a new highway in the northwest part of the Greater Toronto Area that will connect two major arteries in the area and ease travel between booming areas like Vaughan and Brampton.

Ontario has argued that the project should be fast-tracked because the population growth in these Toronto suburbs demands more infrastructure to ease congestion.

Environmentalists and some local groups have vigorously opposed the 60-kilometre highway because it will cut through farmland and waterways and pave over parts of the province's protected greenbelt.

[…]

As for the government's push to ban single-use plastics by deeming them "toxic," the Federal Court ruled last year that the policy is "unreasonable and unconstitutional."

The project’s star success story was a young man named Kirk Andrew Murphy, who had been caught by his father posing in the kitchen in a long T-shirt saying, “Isn’t my dress pretty?” In a 1974 paper research assistant George Rekers and Lovaas described Kirk at age five as “‘swishing’ around the home and clinic, fully dressed as a woman with a long dress, wig, nail polish, high screechy voice, [and] slovenly seductive eyes.” At home, Kirk’s father exchanged his son’s red tokens for beatings with a belt, with Rekers’s approval. Eventually, Kirk’s brother Mark started hiding the red tokens to save Kirk from the abuse.

After 60 sessions in the lab, Kirk was declared cured of sissy-boy syndrome. The psychologists noted that after the treatment, the little boy was no longer upset when his hair was mussed and was eager to go on camping trips with his father. Rekers eventually published nearly 20 papers on his client’s alleged metamorphosis, becoming one of the world’s leading proponents of conversion therapy in the process.

Then in 2003, at age 38, after a series of unsuccessful relationships with women, Kirk died by suicide. His sister Maris told Anderson Cooper on CNN that his treatment at U.C.L.A. “left Kirk just totally stricken with the belief that he was broken, that he was different from everybody else.”

Their starting premise (and desired conclusion) is: There must be a strict binary because that would define trans people out of existence. When we discuss how gender identity and gender expression vary in the population, they claim that “gender” is somehow completely divorced from “biological sex” (it isn’t, see video). When they insist that genitals are the primary determinant of sex, we point to trans and intersex people who fall outside of those expectations. When they shift from genitals to sex chromosomes, or the SRY gene, we point to even more exceptions there. So now they’re championing gametes, but once again, there are always exceptions. Because human beings, like all animals, display some degree of sexual variation.

Speaking of all animals, the second reason why gender-critical activists have embraced gametes is that they believe they have stumbled upon a universal definition of sex that overrides all other conceptualizations (and we know how much they love their definitions). Their argument goes something like this: “In organisms that sexually reproduce, scientists categorize the sex that makes the larger gametes as ‘female’ and the sex that makes the smaller gametes as ‘male.’ Therefore, we must use this same standard when [checks notes] deciding which human beings can use which restrooms or play in which chess tournaments. Because science!”

“Genocide becomes ambient to their lives”: that is how Glazer has described the atmosphere he attempted to capture in his film, in which his characters attend to their daily dramas – sleepless kids, a hard-to-please mother, casual infidelities – in the shadow of smokestacks belching out human remains. It’s not that these people don’t know that an industrial-scale killing machine whirs just beyond their garden wall. They have simply learned to lead contented lives with ambient genocide.

It is this that feels most contemporary, most of this terrible moment, about Glazer’s staggering film. More than five months into the daily slaughter in Gaza, and with Israel brazenly ignoring the orders of the international court of justice, and western governments gently scolding Israel while shipping it more arms, genocide is becoming ambient once more – at least for those of us fortunate enough to live on the safe sides of the many walls that carve up our world. We face the risk of it grinding on, becoming the soundtrack of modern life. Not even the main event.

Glazer has repeatedly stressed that his film’s subject is not the Holocaust, with its well-known horrors and historical particularities, but something more enduring and pervasive: the human capacity to live with holocausts and other atrocities, to make peace with them, draw benefit from them.

Four years ago, the U.S. entered the Covid-19 pandemic. Forbes published its 34th annual billionaire survey shortly after with data keyed to March 18, 2020. On that day, the U.S. had 614 billionaires who owned a combined wealth of $2.947 trillion.

Four years later, March 18, 2024, the US has 737 billionaires with a combined wealth of $5.529 trillion, an 87.6 percent increase of $2.58 trillion, according to IPS calculations of Forbes Real Time Billionaire Data. (Thank you, Forbes!)

As set out in JRF's recent report Making a house a home, the shifting balance of tenure has played a key role in myriad housing problems, from unaffordability and poor conditions to insecurity, and a plan for building a more equitable housing market must reckon with who owns our housing stock (Baxter et al, 2022).

This should take the form of efforts to shift tenure over time, and doing that directly through socialisation could play an important role. However, there are criticisms of this approach, and there needs to be a consideration of how acquisition may be best used within the housing system.

This briefing explores these criticisms, how they may be best overcome, and proposes the best way of deploying socialisation, arguing for a focus on:

• reducing the cost of providing temporary accommodation (TA), while supporting efforts to drive up standards in the sector
• growing a community rented sector in lower-cost housing markets that are otherwise plagued by poor conditions, poor management, and where rental payments are not benefiting local communities
• a wider plan to reform the Right to Buy scheme to arrest the decline of social housing and to keep subsidies in the system.

“The biggest news media companies are privately owned and operate without direct government control, in contrast to the state-controlled media landscape in Russia,” writes Politico’s Sergey Goryashko. “Russian state TV and the primary news agencies there are the property of the government, and the Kremlin controls other media or destroys those not willing to collaborate.”

At the bottom of the article is a line which reads as follows: “Sergey Goryashko is hosted at POLITICO under the EU-funded EU4FreeMedia residency program.”

EU4FreeMedia is a European Union narrative management operation set up to help integrate “Russian journalists in exile” into leading European publications, ie to provide maximum media amplification to Russian expats who have a bone to pick with the current government in Moscow. It is run with participation from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a US government-funded media op under the umbrella of the US propaganda services umbrella USAGM.

I really couldn’t have come up with a more perfect illustration of what I’m talking about here than the US government and its European lackeys running a complex and elaborate project to further slant European media against the Russian Federation, which then manifests as a Politico article calling Putin a liar and claiming propaganda does not exist in the west.

In some cities, parking takes up most of the space in the city’s downtown core. In Regina, for example, nearly half of private land in the city’s downtown core is parking lots.

In the city of Toronto, a bylaw dictates that a parking spot should be 5.6 metres in length, 2.6 metres in width and have a vertical clearance of two metres. This comes to around 156 square feet for a single vehicle, while according to Canadian Real Estate Magazine, the size of the average Toronto condo is just under 650 square feet – around the same as the four parking spots Richardson cited.

“It encourages sprawl,” Richardson said. “It’s not being turned into housing and it helps lead to our housing shortage.”

[…] 

Rebecca Clements, a researcher at the University of Sydney in Sydney, Australia, told Global News that Minimum Parking Regulations (MPRs) have had a devastating impact on housing affordability in many industrialized nations including Canada and the United States.

“This forces developers to include parking everywhere, greatly contributing to building costs,” she said. “MPRs also reduce the diversity of housing and non-residential land uses, by effectively prohibiting zero-parking buildings which might otherwise be excellent designs.”

This is a disturbing but largely invisible national crisis, with Guardian Australia’s investigation revealing an average age of death of a mere 44 years after examining 10 years’ worth of coronial death notifications where homelessness was documented. These deaths are the tip of an iceberg as they only include those notified to a coroner and where homelessness or itinerant living was mentioned. From our tracking of deaths among people who have experienced homelessness in Perth, we know the true death toll is much higher. Since 2017 our research team based at the University of Notre Dame has recorded and verified more than 600 deaths in Perth alone, with an average age of 49 years.