Editor of Trans Britain. #Author of Pressing Matters. Lifetime Achievement Award PrideOfManchester 2021. Drove an 8 year old #EV called Peggy and now drives Olga who is one year old.
Posts about #climate mitigation, #trans moral panic, #books. Was #retired. Checked out but unable to leave. She/Her.
On this first annual Trans History Week treat yourself or a friend to my ever popular book ‘Trans Britain: Our Journey from the Shadows’. There isn’t a better way to grasp what trans people came through for a century before the right set out to make a moral panic of our existence 6-7 years ago. It’s a history told in the many voices of eyewitnesses to our growth — the best and least stuffy way to learn history. Available in paperback or wherever you get ebooks.
One of the Fully Charged Show’s best assets is their China correspondent Elliott Richards, who is just back from the Beijing Motor Show. If you want to know what’s heading our way soon, undercutting the west’s manufacturers, this podcast is worth a listen.
A Boeing space capsule is heading for the ISS with two brave test pilots this week (after multiple setbacks including flammable insulation and a near disaster on the first crewless flight). I just hope the side hatch is fastened closed properly.
It’s a dreary overcast day but solar is producing more electricity (6.13GW) than wind (4.51GW) — 21.4% and 15.7% respectively. This led me to reflect that I give far less attention to solar than wind, and I had to interrogate my emotions to understand why. What it seems to boil down to, oddly, is that solar has no moving parts. Solar power is producing a fifth of Britain’s power but there’s no sound, no movement.
The tragedy is that if the Tories, starting with Cameron, hadn’t kneecapped the solar revolution eight years ago, solar would already be far surpassing everything else in daytime generation.
It’s unsettling to produce such vast power — more than all our nuclear power stations (5.37GW) — without appearing to break a sweat. We are conditioned to expect vast power to be accompanied by physical signs of work and solar doesn’t put on theatre like that. And yet I can cope with big batteries storing and releasing enough energy to hurl my car 250 miles so I guess I just need more time to adjust my worldview.
Lawrence O’Donnell reminds us of a bygone age in TV journalism with a monologue cutting through the nonsense out there about Trump enabler Hope Hicks. Other commentators are swayed by a pretty woman crying during compelled testimony that helps destroy her former boss — not Lawrence, who goes to the heart of what she was about when adjacent to power.
Rory Stewart says the world spends 2.4 Trillion on defence (Pounds? Dollars? Smarties?) but I’m unclear which invading planetary force we’re worried about (Romulans? Klingons? Kardashians?)
If that was the Reform candidate mouthing off behind the Labour winner at the result in Blackpool South then he’s exactly the type you’d expect Tice and friends to be signing up as candidates. A peevish little man, decked in part of a Union flag and unable to pause his grievance narrative for long enough to gracefully let the winner speak. I see a number of outlets have simply cropped him out or covered him in captions.
@Daojoan The ‘beat them with debate’ nonsense (especially favoured by the products of school and college debating societies) is not that far removed from the idea that the way to deal with a bad man with a gun is to have a good man with a gun. It’s not hard to see why that’s an infantile idea but people who ought to know better cling to these sorts of ideas to avoid doing something decisive about a threat.
What better way to spend the first proper warm day by going to clean and polish my parents’ headstone in Chester and then stop off at my favourite tea shop, which has been here in the village of Tarporley for at least 40 years. I love the ceremony of teapot, milk and strainer. They make gorgeous carrot cake.
I may be wrong but it seems to me that, in each generation since the boomers came of age, Americans have spent an eye watering fortune sending their cleverest kids off to learn critical thinking at Uni and then set paramilitary police or national guard on them, with often lethal results. If you hate clever kids that much America why not shoot them at home and save on the expense?
Imagine 25% of Londoners thinking walking gaffe Susan Hall was a credible candidate for Mayor. Mind you, every day it amazes me that Joe Biden and Donald Trump are neck and neck and anyone thought Liz Truss could be prime minister.
In a landmark ruling, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that gender identity is a protected characteristic, and that Medicaid bans on treatments for gender dysphoria are unconstitutional.
Guess when I’m charging the car today. 3 hours at 6.4kW is 19.2kWh, which is almost a third of the battery capacity. I’m on 40% right now (over a hundred miles) so I should be able to top up to about 72-74% before the afternoon demand peak arrives. In that modest way I’m helping to balance the grid.
A nice coincidence is that the cheapest electricity is also the lowest carbon. Here in the North West I’ll be charging up with energy that cost 2g of CO2 per kWh to generate. https://agile.octopushome.net/dashboard
