- Local coots are the ground effect champions. If they ever actually fly out of ground effect, they do it in secret
- Cormorants always break ground effect and fly over bridges carrying power cables
- Crows won’t fly under bridges in ground effect. They’ll happily cross the Lea in ground effect, but very few will fly up-river. The ones who do will always pull up over the A13
- Pigeons use ground effect for rapid course corrections and high-speed, high-risk bounce landings. For pigeons it always seems tactical. They use a range of frankly insanely risky flight strategies
- Not sure if grey wagtails count - their flight is ballistic - but it seems the do ground effect bounces over stretches of open water
I’m doing the Hackney Legal Walk on Saturday to raise money for Citizens Advice. Their advice helps people assert their rights, leading to over £2M income gained by residents of East London in July and August alone.
More proof should you need it that the Tories think you are stupid.
Hello younger voters👋. You’ve heard that politics doesn’t offer you anything because you don’t vote. That’s only half the story. Politicians didn’t pay attention to deplorables or Brexiters until they voted the wrong way. You don’t need go fuck-barking, but do put the shits up the politicians.
What is remarkable about this is not that almost 80% of the electorate don’t trust Sunak on the environment, but that 20% of them are so terminally gullible and stupid that it’s a wonder they’ve lived to reach voting age.
Only 22% of Britons trust Sunak on climate, finds Guardian poll
Have we got to the stage yet where the parasites shuck off their Tory and begin to seek out a Labour host?
Sunak would not have given his climate speech if the Tories didn’t think us fools.
Tories vs ruinous Brexit: “Get it done!”
Tories vs existential climate crisis: “Let’s just slow things down for a culture wars poll bounce”. Not before shuttling over to the US to ensure UK banks get IRA bonanza dibs.
Sunak planning to drop net zero policies in pre-election challenge to Labour
I’m pretty sure everyone who booked Russell Brand knew what kind of person he was. Still, they went ahead and booked him.
Crazy how these credentialed white men reacted with a fantasy projection when an algorithm got as good at passing the tests they took as tokens of their entitled intelligence. “It’s a really clever machine and it will get cleverer and cleverer and, and, and turn you into paperclips! So there!”
What a steaming pile of crap Resy is. Truly awful user experience that must take some experience to have so enshittened.
It’s curious just how many boomer and gen-x academic and academic-adjacent types who spoke of the need for the young to develop critical thinking skills in the face of nascent Web 2.0 are now covid-denying antivaxxers railing against being imprisoned in 15 minute neighbourhoods.
Currently reading: The Tyranny of Merit by Michael J. Sandel. Thoughtful and articulate on how meritocracy has metastatised in neoliberal societies 📚
Neoliberal meritocracy doesn’t stand up to even the lightest scrutiny. I thought that its credentialed elite advocates championed it for self-congratulatory or self-serving reasons. That they do it out of ignorance and incuriosity seems now both more likely and considerably more depressing.
Oxford university, Britain’s educational Mordor, spewed out hordes of neoliberal PPE graduates who laid waste to public life and brought a Britain they had broken to its knees. Now its dank courtyards nurture the neofascist Longtermist death cult.
“What Britain needs is more spineless, visionless neoliberals whose big idea is NHS privatisation” said no one on the doorstep. So who are Labour talking to?
I was shopping for bird food at the Range at Surrey Quays this afternoon. What a nice store! There was a bit of a queue at the checkouts, and they put on more staff. The customers didn’t break queueing order, and the staff were friendly and helpful. Also, I scored 12.5kg of bird seed for £7.50.
Friends, what is the Magic Technocrat lever that the Tories haven’t used which Reeves and Starmer will pull to deliver growth and prosperity with otherwise the Exact Same Policies?
Local bird ground effect over water update
I’m reading Show Me the Bodies by Peter Apps 📚
Fuck me, this is a painful, important book. First non-fiction book this year that I’m crying as I read it.
Got home before the dishwasher finished for the first time and noticed it rather swankily projects its progress onto the kitchen floor. Maybe this is something all dishwashers do? In which case, shows how unobservant I am!
Do you live in Newham? Have a great idea? Residents can apply for grants of up to £5,000 for community projects through People Powered Places. There’s two weeks left to apply. You can get help with your application at your local library. newhamco-create.co.uk/en/pages/…
Saw this pigeon down at Telehouse. It looks like CGI, but there’s no trickery. The flesh had been torn from its neck, exposing the spine. It was steering clear of the flock there, but was quite agile, and dodged my attempts both to feed it and to grab it to take it to the pigeon hospital.
Not sure if it’s the weather or it’s time to fly home, but the swifts are massing over the Olympic Park.
Philosophically, neoliberalism is superficial and incoherent - almost as if it were designed to appeal to uncritical, incurious swots. In practice it is a failure: enabling a rentier plutocracy’s march to fascism
“Principled” conservatives: you may think the “dash for fash” is a cynical ploy to attract voters disenfranchised by neoliberal technocrats, a plan to entrench a rentier-capitalist plutocracy, or merely an unintended consequence of incompetent electioneering. Whatever. Why are you enabling fascists?