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UN REQUESTS, MUGABE DELIVERS
Clean up your cities, the UN demands:
The United Nations has urged better “green” planning for burgeoning cities, as the annual World Environment Day was marked today by rallies, tree plantings and clean-ups from Australia to Zimbabwe.
Zimbabwe’s clean-up began ahead of schedule:
Thousands of police officers have spent the past two weeks on a rampage of destruction that officials call a campaign to clean up illegal housing and markets.
At least 22,000 street traders have been arrested, police said in government-owned newspapers, and tens of thousands of people have been left homeless. Though the full extent of the operation remains unknown, opposition leaders say as many as 1.5 million people in Harare alone may have lost their homes.
In Hatfield Extension, more than 6,000 people lost their homes on police order last Sunday. No houses or shops remain standing, and a community mosque was destroyed.
A whole mosque ... destroyed? Let’s hope no urine was involved. The UN also announced plans that will “include ensuring that residents would not have to walk more than 500 metres in 2015 to reach public transport or an open space.” Mugabe’s got that open space problem solved ten years before deadline.
(More on the UN’s insane plan here; it’s like Kyoto, except even less rational.)
So-called “green” planning has been a disaster wherever it has been tried, leading to housing shortages, spiraling rents, crowding, displacement of low income populations, and long commutes for working people. It benefits the elites in places like Portland, whose attitude is, “I’ve got mine; I don’t see what all the fuss is about.” Is it a surprise that its greatest proponents are the small set who benefit?
NEWSFLASH: The Zimbabwean government collapsed today when thousands of government employees, realizing they had just evicted all the people who paid their kickbacks, didn’t bother to show up for work…
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2005 06 05 at 06:59 PM • permalinkAnd some local insanity: South Australia will ban certain type of plastic bags. Start hoarding now, Crow Eaters! It’s here.
This is as ‘sensible’ as the SA 5c deposit on drink containers, the only state in Australia to retain deposits when other states abandoned them 35-odd years ago.
Posted by walterplinge on 2005 06 05 at 07:43 PM • permalinkBastards, people (like myself) have found other uses for those plastic bags and have in fact come to serve many functions in my daily life.
Posted by Aging Gamer on 2005 06 05 at 11:00 PM • permalinkBastards, people (like myself) have found other uses for those plastic bags and have in fact come to serve many functions in my daily life.
Yes indeedy… Great to help you put on your waterproof pants over your motorbike boots! Especially if it has rained and you are already wet. Just put your boot in the bag, and it slips right through. Also very handy (joke!) to help get a tight jade bangle over your hand, using the same method.
Ernie, I’m reminded of an incident of a “green” building that was built in Orlando back in the late ‘70s.
The building was structured so that it was cater-cornered on the city block it stands on, so if viewed from above, it looks like a diamond shape on the square city block. On reason for doing this was to align the building with the sun for passive heat, and the other was to save a 500-year-old live oak on the property.
Within a month of the building’s completion, it was found that the sun pouring into one side of the building ran the thermostats up to where they could cool that side, rendering the shade side way too cold for comfort.
But the BIG blow came when Hurricaine David arrived in the early ‘80s. One massive branch of that big live oak ended up falling and crashing down through 6 stories of that building! When they examined the tree after the storm, they discovered that the bole of the tree had long been eaten paper-thin by a colony of rats!
So much for that :(.
Posted by mamapajamas on 2005 06 06 at 05:16 PM • permalinkI wonder if Mugabe views Idi Amin and the movie “Soylent Green” as role models for his “urban clean up”. One does have to wonder.
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2005 06 06 at 08:46 PM • permalink
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include ensuring that residents would not have to walk more than 500 metres in 2015 to reach public transport or an open space
That’s called the covering problem : where do you put N pizza parlors on the moon so the worst-off person doesn’t have to walk far to reach one. The packing problem is the opposite : where do you put N pizza parlors on the moon so that each has its nearest competitors as distant as possible. Obviously the UN is taking the side of the consumers against businesses.