Linkage

Rabbi Danya is fast becoming one of my favourite believers, and this story is just bonkers but also ultimately very, very serious:

Some of you may remember that back in Leviticus, we talked about how you had to be in a special kind of– oh, energetic/ spiritual state (?) – when you went to the Temple. Various things– like contracting certain diseases, emitting semen, menstruating, experiencing pregnancy endings, coming in contact with a corpse, etc. – put you in the "everyday state" (that is, made you tameh). Depending on what it was that made you tameh, different things might need to happen to get you back into that Temple-ready "elevated state," (make you tahor). Some of these required waiting a certain amount of time (eg, waiting a week after the onset of menses), some required washing in water at the end of a prescribed time, some necessitated getting sign-off from a priest, and then there's this:

"God spoke to Moses and Aaron, saying: This is the ritual law that God has commanded: Instruct the Israelite people to bring you a red cow without blemish, in which there is no defect and on which no yoke has been laid...." (Numbers 19:1-2)

[…]

So for the people who want to rebuild the Third Temple, this becomes an issue. 

You can't very well restart animal sacrifice in God's House if you're tameh, dig?

Needless to say, this issue is far from theoretical. 

There are various extremist Jewish and Christian (and Jewish and Christian, together) groups working to rebuild the Third Temple, each for their own aims; an unholy alliance between extremist far-right members of the Israeli government and those with powerful American political sway.

On the Christian side, well, here's how Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell, sometimes called sometimes the father of contemporary Christian Zionism, once put it:

“I am one of those who believe that the next event on God’s calendar is the rapture of the Church—the coming of Christ to take the Church to itself. I believe there will be a seven-year tribulation period. It is during that time that the new Temple will be built. And I believe that, at the end of the seven years of tribulation, the battle of Armageddon will transpire and the establishment of the one-thousand-year reign of Christ on Earth will begin.”

[…]

In September, 2022, five unblemished Red Heifers were shipped (First Class!) from Texas to, ultimately, the West Bank Israeli settlement of Shiloh.

This year’s edition of the annual Institute for Policy Studies Executive Excess report finds that the 100 S&P 500 firms with the lowest median wages, a group we’ve dubbed the “Low-Wage 100,” blew $522 billion over the past five years on stock buybacks. Nearly half of these companies spent more on this once-illegal financial maneuver than they spent on capital investment vital to long-term competitiveness.

Why the fixation on buybacks? This is a CEO pay-inflating financial scam, pure and simple. When companies repurchase their own shares, they artificially boost share prices and the value of the stock-based compensation that makes up about 80 percent of CEO pay. An SEC investigation confirmed that CEOs regularly time the sale of their personal stock holdings to cash in on the price surge that typically follows a buyback announcement.

If you think NIMBYs are hard, it’s astronomically worse when the NIMBYs are right. So you should do everything you can to avoid helping the NIMBYs be right.

I’ll often point to existing buildings and say, “If I thought that’s what I was going to get as a community, I’d be against it too.” The city has to be able to virtually guarantee the quality of the outcome from the urban design, livability, multimodal perspective. And a lot of cities have not set up the culture, the structure, the capacity, the training, or the tools to deliver quality. So when NIMBYs express a fear of change over density, they’re often right.

Don’t let them be right, is what I’m saying. Vancouver has a track record of delivering density in a pretty good way, so we can have a different conversation about change and density and height.

In May, Victoria’s Housing Justice Project released a report that supported what low-income folks have been telling us directly: when you’re low-income, you cannot afford to rent most new social housing. 

Single mother of two Toni Love spoke at the project’s May 9 news conference at the legislature, pointing out that housing rules require her to rent a three-bedroom unit and make $85,000 a year to qualify for that unit.

When most people hear the words “social housing,” they imagine housing for low-income people.

But now the province — and many municipalities — don’t mandate affordability in social housing. 

B.C.’s current definition of social housing is “a housing development that government subsidizes and that either government or a non-profit housing partner owns and/or operates.”

In Vancouver, before 2015, social housing was defined as “residential units bought by the government or a non-profit using government funding in order to house seniors, disabled people and low-income families or individuals.”

Now, it’s defined as housing owned by a government or non-profit that has 30 per cent of the units with rent below BC Housing’s housing income limits, or HILs, meaning your income should be between about $40,000 and $58,000 if you rent a one-bedroom or bachelor apartment, and more for bigger units.

The other 70 per cent of social housing units are generally rented at what’s called “low end of market” — about 10 per cent below market rents. Average market for a two-bedroom apartment in purpose-built rental housing in Vancouver in 2023, according to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp., was $2,181 a month.

Low end of market is around $2,000 a month for a one-bedroom apartment, which is more than the total monthly income of a person on social assistance, disability or basic pension, about 74 per cent of the total income of a person earning minimum wage and 57 per cent of the income of a single person earning the median Vancouver income.

As a result, many social housing buildings in Vancouver actually exclude low-income people.

Most climate advocates have, I think rightfully, moved away from anything that is focused on this type of personal sacrifice. Land use changes mistakenly get lumped in with this strain of environmentalism. People think that we are going to have to force people to live in places they don’t want to live and that will be unpopular.

The reality is the opposite. We are currently forcing many Americans to live in auto-dependent, low-density places where they don’t want to live. Many of these folks would choose to live in walkable, urban neighborhoods if they could. This dynamic is most easily seen in the long history of surveys that ask Americans if they would rather live in a smaller home that is in a walkable neighborhood close to amenities and jobs or a larger home where you have to drive to get to those same things. While it’s true that a majority of Americans pick the bigger home, a large minority, 42% in Pew Research’s 2023 survey, choose the smaller home near amenities. The problem is that, today, very little of the US fits the preferences of that 42%.

In Smart Growth America’s 2023 Foot Traffic Ahead report, only 1.2% of neighborhoods in the 35 largest metropolitan areas met these criteria. This huge disparity in supply and demand has also contributed to big price premiums for more compact walkable neighborhoods. Many millions of Americans want to choose the smaller home that is close to things, but single-family zoning, large lot-size requirements, and a thicket of other regulations severely limit our ability to build new walkable neighborhoods and also make it hard to add homes in these existing neighborhoods. To get more climate-friendly land use patterns, we don’t need to force people against their will: we just need to remove those limitations so the 40% of Americans who are locked out of these neighborhoods can live where they want. 

Part 1 here. Parts 3 and 4 still to come, apparently.

In a 2015 survey of more than 27,000 trans adults, nearly 1 in 7 said that a professional, such as a therapist, doctor, or religious adviser, had tried to make them not transgender; about half of respondents said they were minors at the time. By applying this rate to population estimates, the Williams Institute at UCLA projects that more than 135,000 trans adults nationwide have experienced some form of conversion therapy.

Despite the data, lawmakers frequently don’t believe that conversion therapy is still happening in their community, says Casey Pick, director of law and policy at the Trevor Project, the LGBTQ suicide prevention group. “We’re constantly running up against this misconception that this is an artifact of the past,” she says. So, five years ago, the Trevor Project began scouring psychologists’ websites and books, records of public testimony, and known conversion therapy referral services, looking for counselors who said they could alter someone’s gender identity or sexual orientation.

As the research stretched on, Pick noticed webpages being revised to reflect changing times. “We saw many folks who seemed to leave the industry entirely,” she says. “But others changed their website, changed their keywords, [from] talking about creating ex-gays to talking about ex-trans.”

[…]

And in Las Vegas, Cretella drew a direct connection between the old work of the Alliance and the new work of gender-exploratory therapists. “It truly is very similar to how the Alliance has always approached unwanted SSA [same-sex attraction],” she told the assembled therapists. “You approach it as ‘change therapy’—or, even less triggering, ‘exploratory therapy.’”

It starts with asking yourself: Do you want families downtown and in urban places? A number of cities say they do, yet they’re not willing to do what’s necessary to make it happen, such as regulate. That’s particularly a problem in the United States, where regulation is a dirty word. It’s that ideology around regulation that can often keep cities from progressing.

[…]

Point two is, even if you have the homes, you need the services and amenities that support family living. Those start with daycare and schools.

[…]

Point three is, you design the public realm for kids and families, because that means it will work for everyone. You have to think about all age groups: the parents with their strollers, young kids and their need for playgrounds, and then teenagers and their distinctive needs, which are different than those of younger kids.

A University of Copenhagen study discovered a strange phenomenon: the decision to buy a breed which has lots of health issues may in fact be deliberate. These dogs require care, and this in turn produces feelings of love and satisfaction in their carers. We stunt and cripple them in order to nurse them, in order to feel good about ourselves. Can this really be true? Well, it makes a warped sort of sense. Cuteness is what we often look for in dogs, particularly since the advent of social media. But this also means we select for creatures who, with their big heads, short legs or awkward bodies, give every appearance of being unable to fend for themselves.

[…] 

But it’s not just their bodies we’ve bent out of shape. We’ve also messed up their minds. Studies of pet dogs find problems such as anxiety are rife. No wonder. The point of owning a dog is to make it emotionally dependent on you. […] But this dependence also subjects our pets to huge stress when left alone, or when they feel that you are displeased with them, or unhappy yourself.

[…]

In a personal essay on the website Love Fraud, a woman writes about her sociopathic ex, and how his treatment of his dog mirrored his treatment of people he tried to manipulate. He loved teaching it tricks, she writes; he loved punishing it for bad behaviour, and most of all he loved its submissive, forgiving, dependent love for him. The pattern is that of the psychopath.

The use of cars in cities has many negative impacts, including pollution, noise and the use of space. Yet, detecting factors that reduce the use of cars is a serious challenge, particularly across different regions. Here, we model the use of various modes of transport in a city by aggregating Active mobility (A), Public Transport (B) and Cars (C), expressing the modal share of a city by its ABC triplet. Data for nearly 800 cities across 61 countries is used to model car use and its relationship with city size and income. Our findings suggest that with longer distances and the congestion experienced in large cities, Active mobility and journeys by Car are less frequent, but Public Transport is more prominent. Further, income is strongly related to the use of cars. Results show that a city with twice the income has 37% more journeys by Car. Yet, there are significant differences across regions. For cities in Asia, Public Transport contributes to a substantial share of their journeys. For cities in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, most of their mobility depends on Cars, regardless of city size. In Europe, there are vast heterogeneities in their modal share, from cities with mostly Active mobility (like Utrecht) to cities where Public Transport is crucial (like Paris or London) and cities where more than two out of three of their journeys are by Car (like Rome and Manchester).

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