Actualize your personal power!

Editor's note: The following letter serves as a re-presentative example of the half-dozen letters, faxes and phone calls received by Mirror Contributing Editor Jacquie Charlton regarding her story about Amway ["Money bags and motivational tapes," Oct. 16], all inviting her to seek out new business opportunities and realize her true potential.

This is a letter to Mirror writer Jacquie Charlton about her Amway article. "How would you like it if you were living in Outremont and I came over and we picked up your daughter in your new Lincoln at her private school? How does driving up to the Mirror in a Miata sound to you?"

I'm quoting this paragraph from your article because it caught my attention and interest. It's not about the company or anything else. Rather, it's about attaining your dreams, reaching your goals and being financially stable. If you have a chance, try to contact [name and address withheld]. He helped me, I'm sure he can help you too!

More power!

­Clemente Azares

Bob Larson racist against aliens

Regarding your article on radio evangelist Bob Larson ["The Lord's man in black," Oct. 23]: This man, along with Howard Stern and some left-core Raëlians, are everything that is trite, traitorous and dangerous to the western world and all humanity. Two hundred years ago, the Christian puritans would have branded both Larson and the Raëlians as witches and barbecued them at the stake, regardless of their avowed "devotion to God."

Larson stated that "flying saucers are a tool for demonic forces." The way I understand it, Larson wishes to smear any potential aliens before they even get here or make contact--even if they prove to be religious and monotheistic. It appears that Mr. Larson does not want to share God's infinite universe with another species. There are overtones of racism here.

People like Bob Larson are openly foisting and flouting obvious contradictions. He claims that aliens, "spiritually in line" with big, bad Lucifer, are getting ready to invade the material plane! Since when do spiritualists like Larson concern themselves to this degree with affairs marginally material? Eventually, he will prove to be a snooty, deliberately over-pious hag to more powerful folks in larger religious organizations.

­Roger M. Hemsley

Save the Benny Farm!

Re: Your article on the Benny Farm ["Going, going, gone," Oct. 23]. Soon, City Hall will consider whether to allow the Canadian Government (through the CMHC) to demolish a memorial to two wars, the 50-year-old, soon-to-be-vacant Benny Farm. It is the first and best example of Canada's industrialized housing projects. It is a monument to Canada's commitment to its fighting men and women.

The Benny Farm combines mixed Art-Deco exterior detailing with innovative modern floor plans in 64 traditional six-plexes. In 1946, local opposition in N.D.G. forced the project to have qualities far superior to any like project in the country. It has since been maintained and retrofitted in exemplary fashion. Its construction is unusually solid, its architecture unusually fine. Well-lit rooms, commodious floor plans, heavy-duty luxury windows and heating equipment, large storage spaces and no basement apartments mark these buildings as ones that can and should go on serving us into the distant future.

The Benny Farm buildings cover nine per cent of the site, when 60 per cent is normal for such projects. Its enormous green spaces can be built up with point blocks at any time, to any density, for any occupancy--without demolishing a single existing building.

Parades of architectural students, experts and historians have attested to its present value and future potential to the neighbourhood and the nation. Thousands of locals and many veteran tenants have petitioned the CMHC to retain and rent or sell the buildings. Offers to buy await.

The government uses costly public relations efforts to promote the demolition of the properties, promising that empty land can be offered on the market for $30 per square foot. But there is simply neither a market nor builders to pay this price--or even a quarter thereof.

There are probably 50 schemes floating around the city and the region that promised one to five hundred million dollars each in construction, jobs and real-estate development. The Hippodrome, Overdale, Île Charron, Meadowbrook, Olympic Village, Angus Yards and all those "Faubourgs": St-Laurent, Québec, Récollets, Glen Yards, Outremont Yards, Windsor Station, and so on. None realized. No builders, only speculators. The realities of the market are vacancies, and banks trying to sell thousands of repossessed properties at ridiculously low prices.

Can we afford this bureaucrat's dream? Help stop this sham.

­Michael Fish, Architect