Linkage

“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.

Paul’s opinion column is far from the first Times piece to be cited in anti-trans legislation. In April 2023, Missouri announced an emergency order imposing new restrictions on gender-affirming care for people of all ages, citing a New York Times piece about gender-affirming care that was widely criticized as biased and inaccurate. (The emergency rule was later withdrawn.) Lawmakers in Texas and Alabama have also cited the Times’ coverage in support of proposed anti-trans legislation.

“There is such a direct pipeline from these New York Times pieces to the ways in which these laws are being defended in court and then ultimately upheld,” Strangio said in their video. “The risk of harm to trans people from these pieces is not theoretical.”

If you were still laboring under the delusion that it matters who the US president is, the fact that an actual, literal dementia patient has held that office for three years now should dispel that notion once and for all. The US empire has been marching along in exactly the same way it was before Biden took office, completely unhindered by the fact that the person who’s supposedly calling the shots is in a state of degenerative neurological free-fall.

Literally anyone could hold that office and it would make no meaningful difference in the way the US empire is run. A coma patient could be president. A jar of kalamata olives could be president. The position which Americans hold elections over in the belief that it could bring positive changes to their country and their world is nothing but a figurehead.

Which is a bit of a problem for Americans who would like to change certain aspects of their government’s behavior, like for example the backing of an active genocide in Gaza. Whose conscience do they work to appeal to if the person they were told is in charge actually isn’t? Who do they vote for if the people who really call the shots aren’t even on the ballot? 

Only two weeks ago Assigned Media shared a story originally reported by the Salt Lake Tribune about a junior varsity cisgender basketball player who’d been publicly accused by an enraged parent of being trans. Last night a new story in the Salt Lake Tribune, about an entirely different cisgender athlete, shows the escalating violence of the moral panic over transgender participation in sports.

A picture of this student was shared by a far-right state school board member, Natalie Cline, who insinuated she was transgender, which in turn incited threats against the girl from Cline’s follower base. She is now under police protection, and the post has been removed.
 

"Housing affordability is a significant problem in Canada but not one that can be fixed by raising or lowering interest rates," Macklem said during a speech in Montreal on Tuesday.

Macklem said the real issue is that housing supply has fallen short of housing demand for years.

"There are many reasons why: zoning restrictions, delays and uncertainties in the approval processes and shortages of skilled workers. None of these are things monetary policy can address," he said in his address to the Montreal Council on Foreign Relations.

Macklem admits the emergency low interest rates during the COVID-19 pandemic helped fuel the run-up in home prices during that time. And the central bank's own research shows that "shelter inflation" continues to drive inflation.