Slog AM: Washington Doesn’t Have Enough Places to Live, Military Morale Is Collapsing, and a Madman Threatens to Detonate a Nuke in the Earth’s Core

Fire evacuations mean more Spokane residents lack housing than ever: Spokane never had enough shelter beds for all its needy citizens, but providing enough wasn’t a problem for city leaders as long as those citizens were homeless. But with tens of thousands of homeowners under evacuation order from fires, the lack of shelter space is more apparent than ever, with demand from refugees causing a full-blown housing crisis. Spokane’s mayor, Lisa Brown, said yesterday that short-term rentals are gone and hotels are almost fully booked, the Seattle Times reports.

Seattle isn’t exactly setting a good example at fixing a housing crisis: Hundreds of families used to live in enlisted housing at Fort Lawton in the heart of Discovery Park, and Magnolia’s apartment building cluster on nearby West Manor Place—built on military surplus land—is one of the most densely developed residential communities in the city. Yet some Magnolians still claim building public housing on decommissioned army land on the edge of Discovery Park is impossible. Opponents have delayed the project for years, so successfully, The Urbanist reports, that the current environmental impact study includes assessment of a completely different potential site out on Aurora. 

Yet there are even stupider barriers to progress in the United Kingdom: According to the BBC, a £430 million cable built to bring electricity to the people of Northern Ireland (good of the English to get around to it) had to be diverted due to the fantasies of transphobic children’s author J.K. Simmons*. It’s hard to parse the details of the story from the foreign language press, but apparently the cable was originally planned to cross a monument to a fictional evil child’s elfin slave named Dobby and was instead rerouted to pass closer to a documented Bronze Age burial site (“typically associated with human burial,” but it could be another elf) instead. Sorted then.

On the topic of British heroes: As part of their Cold War Summer programming, SIFF is showing Austin Powers on 35mm at The Uptown tomorrow. This is a rare chance to see the movie the way the director intended. 

Ape dies: The first chimpanzee ever rescued by Cle Elum’s Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest passed away late last month “surrounded by both her ‘human friends and her chimp family,’” reports Ellensburg’s Daily Record. Negra, “the Queen of the Cle Elum Seven,” was captured in the wild in the 1970s and survived decades of hepatitis C testing. I have also now been introduced to the term “surplus chimpanzees,” which is absurd. No chimpanzee is surplus. If anything, we have a shortage of apes.

Chinese firm begins regular Arctic shipping: With the United States starting a pointless war that has wrecked normal access to three of the world’s most important shipping lanes, there’s never been a better time to find a shortcut between Europe and Asia. Christopher Columbus faced a similar conundrum, but a Chinese shipping firm has actually solved the problem and has cut transport time from East Asia to the UK in half via a new Arctic route around Russia and Scandinavia, according to the Financial Times.

They’re not the only ones not letting a good crisis go to waste: As a columnist at the Toronto Star informs us, Canadian oil companies could double their profits this year as their competitors in the Middle East are blown apart and blockaded. “That’s great for shareholders. But the money has to come from somewhere. It comes from consumers,” Jim Stanford writes.

Morale is bad in the Navy: Thousands of US sailors and Marines have been on station for months in the Middle East without reprieve as the nation’s latest Forever War marches on. Conditions aboard ship are bad, and military families let the brass hear about it in San Diego last week. MS NOW reports:

“One parent said her daughter feels that she is never going to come home and believes she is going to die on the ship. Others asserted that the Navy had not done enough to take care of the sailors as they fight this war.

One woman questioned the mission and said she found it difficult to be proud of her sailor when she believed the military was ‘killing innocent civilians’ and her sailor expressed guilt about what he was doing. Her comment was met with applause from the audience.”

The weather report: It will be nice out today.

Mosfilm got my letter! If you’re a fan of old Soviet Osterns like me, you’ve likely been waiting decades for a proper release of Sergei Bondarchuk’s John Reed biopic Mexico in Flames. Well, as of six months ago, it’s here, and considering it’s free, one can’t complain too much that the English and Spanish dialogue is dubbed over Eastern Europe style by a sole Russian speaker. It’s also a bit frustrating to see Bondarchuk’s famous battlefield cinematography (War and Peace, Waterloo) boxed down to 4:3, but again, that’s the price of free. As one of Bondarchuk’s more obscure political films, it’s not likely to get the Criterion treatment.

*Editor’s note: We know his name is J.K. Rowling.

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