“The summer often brings severe wildfires to western Canada, especially as climate change continues to dry out vegetation and heat up the atmosphere. 2021 was a particularly devastating year, with blazes destroying entire towns.
Provinces in the east — including Quebec and Nova Scotia — are somewhat more safeguarded from fires, or at least devastating ones. Air coming off the North Atlantic Ocean typically keeps the region humid and cooler, making it less likely to burn, per Reuters.
The forests out east also tend to be less flammable, Reuters notes. Unlike western forests, which are dominated by fire-prone evergreens, eastern forests also have broadleaf deciduous trees, which are less flammable (their branches start higher off the ground and their leaves contain more moisture).
But under the right conditions, even eastern forests can burn.
This spring brought the right conditions across parts of the east — namely, low humidity and rainfall, and lots of heat. By the end of April, large parts of eastern Canada were abnormally dry, according to the country’s drought monitor. Some places, such as Sydney, Nova Scotia, recorded their driest April on record. When forests are dry, they ignite more easily.
“What’s unique about this year is that the forests are so dry that the fires are many times larger than they normally are,” Matthew Hurteau, a biology professor at the University of New Mexico, told Vox’s Rachel DuRose.
Still, there needs to be a source of ignition. And for the fires out east, it was likely a combination of lightning strikes, people (who might, say, toss a cigarette butt out their window), and human infrastructure (such as trains, which can create sparks).”
“Five years ago, a federal court issued a crucial ruling. People experiencing homelessness, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals said, can’t be punished for sleeping outside on public property if there are no adequate alternatives available.
The 2018 decision in Martin v. Boise did not create the homelessness crisis, which researchers attribute primarily to the lack of affordable housing. The number of people experiencing unsheltered homelessness — meaning those sleeping on the streets, in parks, in abandoned buildings or train stations, or anywhere not meant for humans to live — was rising before the decision.
But as the number of unsheltered homeless people continued to grow over the past half-decade, the Martin decision has become a pivotal factor in shaping how cities respond to the very visible problem of tent encampments, particularly on the West Coast. While the case never gained huge name recognition, it undergirds the policy and politics of homelessness in 2023. So much of the fight about how to address homelessness today is, at this point, a fight about Martin.”
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“Martin’s impact can be seen most clearly out West. Just before Christmas 2022, for example, a district judge cited Martin when she ruled that San Francisco can no longer enforce encampment sweeps — meaning clear out homeless individuals and their property from an outdoor area — since the city lacks enough shelter beds for those experiencing homelessness to move into. San Francisco appealed the decision, arguing it’s “unnecessarily broad and has put the City in an impossible situation.”
In Phoenix, Arizona, residents and business owners filed a lawsuit last summer against the city for allowing a downtown homeless encampment to grow with nearly 1,000 people, but a federal judge — echoing Martin — barred Phoenix in December from conducting sweeps if there are more homeless people than shelter beds available. A competing decision issued in March by a state judge ordered Phoenix officials to clean up the “public nuisance” at the encampment by July 10, arguing the city has “erroneously” applied Martin to date.
In Portland, Oregon, meanwhile, officials have scrambled to revise their local camping ordinance to be a “daytime” camping ban from 8 am to 8 pm instead, in recognition that any total camping ban is likely illegal under Martin.
Supporters of a more “get tough” approach to encampments say the social and political costs of allowing tent cities to proliferate are too high, and that waiting for cities to build enough new housing before acting is untenable, both morally and politically. Some think officials are getting complacent in relying on Martin as an excuse to maintain the status quo.”
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“Unsheltered homelessness has risen sharply over the last seven years, and at a faster rate than homelessness overall. Unsheltered homeless people now account for 40 percent of all homeless people in the country, up from 31 percent in 2015.
Political pressure has mounted to respond to this growing problem of people sleeping in alleys, parks, and train stations. While it’s not clear this would be legal under Martin, a number of cities have turned to the idea of so-called sanctioned encampments, or legalized campsites. These are effectively designated areas where unhoused individuals can live outside, and some come with varying degrees of public services, like bathrooms, power outlets, medical care, and on-site case management.
In Portland, Oregon, lawmakers voted in November to create several large sanctioned campsites for homeless individuals, and ban the more than 700 other encampments spread across the city. Austin, Texas, has operated one sanctioned encampment of so-called “tiny homes” since 2019, on a seven-acre plot of asphalt near the airport. Denver, Colorado, is also moving to make its so-called “managed campsites” from the pandemic a permanent homelessness response tool.
The trade-off for legalized campsites, however, is that sleeping outside anywhere else in a city would then be illegal.”
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“Some advocates have taken a firm stance against the idea; they see sanctioned encampments as a means to segregate and criminalize unhoused people and effectively kick the can down the road by not finding them permanent housing.”
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“other cities with fewer available housing options say sanctioned encampments represent a decent interim solution, and maybe even better for unhoused residents compared to scattered campsites if cities can more effectively target social services to those corralled together.
Legalized campsites can also have a lower barrier to entry than many existing shelters, so supporters are framing them as a harm-reduction approach to homelessness.”
“As of 2021, about 11 million Americans had their driver’s licenses suspended due to nonpayment of fines and fees. It took Moseley-Sayles nearly a decade — by which time she’d paid off her initial ticket plus an additional $5,000 in warrant fees and other fines — to get her license reinstated. In the interim, she faced a conundrum that millions who have suspended licenses must contend with each year: Taking away a license doesn’t take away a person’s need to drive. Moseley-Sayles had to keep using her car and hope that she wasn’t pulled over and arrested for it.”
“Every year, more than 600,000 people leave US state and federal prisons. Then they need to find a place to live.
Researchers have found that formerly incarcerated individuals are far more likely to be homeless than the general public. Many landlords simply reject renting to applicants who’ve been to jail or prison — and given that one in three US adults has a criminal record, this creates a significant housing crisis.
But those released with stable housing are more likely to reintegrate into their communities and less likely to end up back in prison than their formerly incarcerated peers in more precarious housing situations.
Enter “fair chance” laws: legislation that limits how landlords can use criminal records when screening prospective tenants. While the ordinances vary from place to place — some cover all rental housing while others just apply to subsidized housing — the goal is to limit how criminal histories can be used and ensure due process for prospective tenants when applying.”
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“For now, the only rigorous study on fair chance housing ordinances comes from a working paper series at the Minneapolis Federal Reserve, where two economists looked at the effects of a law the Minneapolis city council passed in 2019.
The local law caps security deposits at one month’s rent, bans the use of credit scores in rental applications, and restricts landlords’ ability to reject people based on evictions that occurred more than three years prior. For criminal records, landlords can no longer reject applicants due to misdemeanors older than three years, felonies older than seven years, and certain more serious convictions older than 10 years.
The economists submitted fake email inquiries to publicly listed rental ads using names chosen to sound like Black, white, and Somali people. (Minnesota has the largest Somali population in the US.)
The researchers found that after Minneapolis’s fair chance ordinance took effect, discrimination against Black and Somali applicants increased by over 10 percentage points for both groups, relative to those in neighboring St. Paul, which did not have such a law. Differences were largest for emails sent from Black and Somali male-sounding names, for apartments that were at least two bedrooms, and for units in historically Black neighborhoods. (The researchers couldn’t identify individual companies that discriminated, but could observe discrimination based on overall contact rates to randomized emails sent to large groups of properties.)”
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“it’s impossible to tell which aspect of the law — be it limiting eviction history, credit history, or criminal records — might be causing the effect.”
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“In 2021, New Jersey passed a statewide fair chance housing law with bipartisan support, and with backing from landlord groups. It doesn’t go as far as Seattle’s ordinance in restricting how criminal histories can ultimately be used, but it comes with a strong enforcement mechanism.”
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” With the exception of convictions related to producing methamphetamine and being listed on a sex offender registry, landlords can never ask about an applicant’s criminal history in the first round of applications, and they can only evaluate a criminal record after a conditional housing offer has been made. If a landlord finds a serious crime committed relatively recently, they can withdraw the offer, explaining to the applicant in detail why, and the applicant has the right to appeal it or file a complaint with the state. A housing provider can never rely on arrests that didn’t result in convictions to reject an applicant.”
“US troops are fighting ISIS in Syria. But Congress hasn’t approved it, the public hardly knows about it, and it’s not clear under what conditions the US would leave.
Americans tend to only be reminded of the 900 US troops and hundreds of contractors stationed there when they came under attack, often from militants who have Iran’s support, or when there is a mishap”
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“The US is in Syria to curb the terrorist group Islamic State or ISIS, in a region that is semi-autonomous and run by the Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurdish group.
Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said that troops are needed because “if you completely ignore and turn your back, then you’re setting the conditions for a resurgence.”
But experts say that the US troops there are not building toward a sustainable outcome, and that resisting ISIS has become the pretext for a perpetual US presence.”
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“Ford explains that the American mission to secure the outright defeat of ISIS is impossible. The 900 troops in the northeast of Syria and the US garrison at al-Tanf cannot stop a low level of recruitment into ISIS ranks. “So we can bomb some and we can kill some, but they’ll always replace the people that they lose,” he told me. “This is a classic forever war.””
“Later this year, the federal government is supposed to start a serious attempt to rein in drug prices: For the first time, Medicare will negotiate with pharmaceutical companies over the prices it’s willing to pay for a short list of drugs. It’s a long-awaited change that is supposed to save the government and patients billions of dollars over time.
But the drug industry is now launching a legal fight aimed at stopping Medicare’s negotiations over prescription drug prices before they begin. The stakes are higher than just a drug price reform: The case could set an important precedent for the government’s authority to try to constrain health care prices.”
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“The Merck lawsuit focuses on the Constitution’s takings (or compensation) clause in the Fifth Amendment, which protects private owners from having property taken without “just compensation” by the government. It also raises First Amendment claims centered on the law’s requirements that drugmakers not disclose information they receive from the government as part of the negotiations. The Chamber of Commerce’s case rests on a constitutional right to due process, arguing that, because the Medicare negotiations are exempt from review by the courts under the IRA, drugmakers are being denied due process.
Taken together, the lawsuits give any judges predisposed to side with private industry over the federal government a few options for a legal foundation upon which to base a decision in pharma’s favor.
A number of legal experts say they are skeptical of these arguments. Merck’s takings clause case turns on defining a patent — an issuance from the government — as private property subject to the just compensation clause, said Robin Feldman, a law professor at UCSF, a difficult assertion. She also said the premise present in both cases — that the federal government as a health care purchaser through Medicare can’t say no to the companies it purchases drugs from and can’t dictate prices as the consumer — is “problematic.”
“It can’t be that the government as a buyer has to pay whatever a seller wants to charge,” she said. “That the government could be forced to spend itself into bankruptcy.”
Regarding the chamber’s due process claim, several legal experts have pointed out that Medicare’s various contracts with health care providers are already often generally exempted from judicial review. It is understood that this is necessary to allow the program to function; the government, as the administrator of the program, needs that authority without each of its decisions being subject to litigation.”
“it’s not just the Atlantic; oceans all around the world are seeing stunningly high average temperatures right now. On the other side of the globe, the Pacific Ocean surface is also heating up as it enters the El Niño phase of its cycle. Together, these phenomena are poised to push the planet’s temperature to new highs.”
“most of his anti-liberal broadside is at once underbaked and overheated.
The critique is underbaked in the sense that it’s not clear from his account how exactly this rather large “elite” is responsible for the destruction of conservative norms and small-town America. How can we hold a graphic designer in Chicago or a Whole Foods supply chain specialist in Austin responsible for the decline of Christian morals and the hollowing out of small towns?
It’s overheated in the sense that Deneen turns his rivals into cartoon villains, arguing that “the current ruling class is uniquely ill-equipped for reform, having become one of the worst of its kind produced in history.”
Roman nobles were legally permitted to rape their slaves. The military elites of the Mongol Empire were constantly murdering civilians and each other. In France after the Black Plague, the impoverished aristocracy stole from their already-suffering peasants to continue funding their lavish lifestyles. The elite of the early American South centered their entire society around the racist brutality of chattel slavery.
Is the American elite out of touch with the working class in ways that have tangible and negative consequences for the country? Sure. But it’s not remotely comparable to the bad elites of previous centuries.
This loss of perspective tarnishes Deneen’s argument throughout the book — a problem most vividly on display in his treatment of the divide between “the many” and “the few.”
In Deneen’s thinking, it is axiomatic that the central divide in Western politics is between the villainous liberal elite (the “few”) and the culturally conservative mass public (“the many”). The liberal elites wish to impose their cultural vision on society and attack the customs and traditions of ordinary people; the many, who are instinctively culturally conservative, have risen under the banner of leaders like Trump to oppose them.
Except how do we know that liberals really are “the few?”
Deneen doesn’t cite election or polling data to support his theory of a natural conservative majority. Trump has never won the popular vote while on the ballot; his party performed historically poorly in two midterm elections since his rise to power. Polling on the cultural issues Deneen so cares about, like same-sex marriage, often finds majority support for liberal positions.”