Haven’t seen anything on here about it so let me write a quick summary.
Grenfell Tower is a high rise block of flats in Kensington – which is a super rich borough. Grenfell Tower is a social housing complex. In other words, poor people live there.
At 1am this morning, Grenfell Tower caught fire. The fire started on the 2nd floor, and spread via the building’s cladding all the way up to the top, the 24th. The fire was still going long into the morning.
6 people are dead. 50 more are in hospital, 18 critical.
For years, residents in Grenfell Tower had been trying to get their landlord to make sure their homes weren’t a fire hazard. In a series of blog posts, they detail their struggle to get the landlord to acknowledge that the building was a fire hazard. Grenfell Tower had no internal fire alarms, no sprinklers, and only one exit. The landlord insisted this was adequate. The residents asked for an independent surveyor – they were refused. Their counsellor made 19 separate complaints – the landlord tried to have her removed from her post. The building had been refurbished, but none of the residents’ concerns were addressed. Instead, the building was covered in new plastic cladding. The contractors said that the cladding would make the 70s social housing block look more attractive from the neighbouring luxury flats. The new cladding also happened to be extremely cheap. And flammable.
Jeremy Corbyn tried to pass a bill that would force landlords to make their properties safe. The tories voted it down. The fire committee told Boris Johnson, the then-mayor of London, that they were worried about fire risks in housing – he told them to get stuffed. Literally. Theresa May’s aide sat in on a meeting about unsafe housing – nothing was done.
In one of their blog posts, the residents of Grenfell Tower say that they’re afraid that their concerns will be dismissed by their landlord until it’s too late. Until something terrible happens. Only then will their landlord think that maybe, MAYBE, the building was unsafe.
The company that built Grenfell Tower has deleted their webpage on the building.
12 people are now confirmed dead and that number is expected to rise.
Just to clarify: Kensington is a super-rich Borough, yes but it also has – and this is where things get really frightening – some of the largest social housing estates and buildings. Some people in Kensington are very rich – and that makes private renting in the borough virtually impossible for all but the richest. However, there are large numbers of people who are very, very not rich in the area and that’s who you need to be outraged for right now.
I used to live right near Grenfell tower, in an illegally sublet room in some social housing because I was as dirt poor as it is possible to be in London without actually ending up on the street. I know that area really well and the people in it and – because shitty architecture is my other interest – how close to this so many of the other blocks are. There are multiple blocks that are halfway to condemnation even after the council has spent millions on “renovations” that are backhanders to building companies.
The plastic cladding put on? Supposedly cost £10m – whereas it would have been £300k to put in fucking sprinklers that would have literally prevented this.
The sick thing is when they clear the rubble they will build luxury flats with an ‘affordable percentage’ which will mysteriously disappear during construction, as with the Heywood estate in Elephant.
Funnily enough, the area where Grenfell is is where social housing began, pretty much. And Notting Hill is where residents first hit back at slum landlords like Rachman, after incidents frankly uncannily like this, and forced housing law change.
It is very important to not just be shocked and grieve this – please pressure your MPs, in writing, to ensure that legal changes are made so that a disaster like Grenfell is not repeated. This was not only a man-made disaster but one that was willingly created because they thought no one would care or that it didn’t matter. Don’t say you’re happy for that to be the case with anyone’s life and home, let alone millions of people across the UK.
Unlike the Gladiator-loving Romans, the Byzantines were more into chariot racing (mostly because they were Christian and had banned Gladiatorial battles). Like, ridiculously into it. So into it that the fanclubs for the various racing teams became so huge, powerful, and intense in their rivalry that they could easily put any modern sport rivalry to shame. Young fans were also known to adopt trendy hairstyles (which often involved shaving a lot of the head except for bangs and side-braids, or just shaving the whole front half) based on the major nomadic cultures the Byzantines encountered, especially the Huns and Avars. These clubs became so intense in their rivalries, that they spilled over from sports into other issues, mostly politics and religion (different clubs tended to support different theological teachings and would argue about them even while cheering on their teams in the Hippodrome). All of this exploded into a giant riot in 532 CE, when a brawl between the two biggest fan clubs (The Blues and The Greens, named for the teams they supported) spiralled completely out of control and turned into a city wide riot that burned down a huge amount of Constantinople (including the original Hagia Sophia). Some political rivals of Emperor Justinian used this as an opportunity to try to launch a coup and use the riot to help them. After being persuaded to stay and face the rioters head on by his awesome wife Theodora, Justinian ordered his best general Belisarius to bring an end to the riots. Which he did. Brutally. An estimated 30,000 people were killed by Belisarius’ soldiers (in a city of roughly 500-600,000 people). And that’s why fandom rivalries are really really bad and never end well.
I should note, all of this only applies to the Early Byzantines. I got nothing on the later Byzantines.
To really bring the point home on just how bad ass Theodora was, the story goes that just before Justinian was ready to flee, Theodora had insisted on staying and when Justinian pointed out she might be killed, Theodora replied, “Purple is a lovely color for a burial shroud.”
Context: purple was a heinously expensive dye legally only allowed to be worn by the emperor (& empress). She was saying she would rather die as empress than live and be deposed.
“Many of those carried away in cuffs during these raids were Chaldeans, bewildering people who thought of themselves as Americans. Arabo said sending these people back to Iraq is “like sending cattle to a slaughter.”“These are Christians that will be slaughtered as they arrive in Iraq. It’s inhuman, it’s unfathomable, it’s unbelievable and we will file a federal lawsuit asking for a stay,” he said.“The fact that Donald Trump could be sending Iraqi Christians to a genocide zone is beyond reason. It makes no sense,” Attisha said”
So this is what’s happening in my community today. We are all worried for each other and no one knows where to turn. We came here as refugees, we came here to escape imminent danger, and now we are being sent back to a place where there is an active genocide against us? Trump actively pandered to my community and used as political props to support his own islamaphobia, now we are feeling the impact of his violent, xenophobic policies
UPDATES: The raids in my community are non-stop. Even though the US congress officially declared that what ISIS is doing to religious minorities in Iraq (inluding Chaldeans) is genocide. I’ve been hearing all week about how people were being ripped out of their homes, a lot of them were taken while leaving mass on Sunday, one man was at the beach with his family when they came and took him right in front of his kids. Another man was in the hospital, he even had a walker, and they ripped the walker out of his hands and cuffed him. What’s happening here is totally inhumane and despicable. The first Chaldeans have already been sent back to Iraq, we nee to stop them now before more are sent back!
BAMN Detroit attempted to physically stop the deportation buses; The Minority Humanitarian Foundation was set up to protect victims of ISIS, and they have filed a lawsuit to stop the deportations, you can donate to them here; The ACLU has also filed a lawsuit, you can donate to them here; The Chaldean Community Foundation is working tirelessly to help the victims, you can donate here. If I find anymore places to donate, I will update! Here are some articles to read up on the situation.
So it occurred to me that ‘grawlix’ is sort of an obscure and specialized word, but what I didn’t know until I was googling around just now is that it was actually invented by cartoonist Mort Walker in his 1980 book The Lexicon of Comicana, in which he categorizes (and invents terminology for) all kinds of visual cues and shorthand commonly used in comics
In other news, this is now right up there with The Meaning of Liff as ‘books of made up words I desperately need to own”
Big math news! It’s been thirty years since mathematicians last found a convex pentagon that could “tile the plane.” The latest discovery (by Jennifer McLoud-Mann, Casey Mann, and David Von Derau) was published earlier this month. Full story.
The board of directors at Mylan have rewarded former CEO Robert Coury with a $98m bonus as he steps into the executive chairman’s role, having overseen a price-gouging scandal over the Epipens used by people prone to life-threatening allergic reactions.
The company paid hundreds of millions in fines, but made billions from gouging, and its share price is up, which led the board to give Coury such a lavish happy ending after his tenure in office.
Multiple shareholder advocacy groups have condemned the handout, including Institutional Shareholder Services and Glass Lewis (who gave Mylan an “F” for compensation decisions).
A Middleground 