Blogging Volumes

A couple of weeks ago, I sprayed bright orange paint all over the windows of an Aston Martin storefront in London, then gave a speech about the climate emergency we're living in. I quoted the UN's Secretary-General, who has called our government "dangerous radicals" for pushing through genocidal oil and gas expansion policies that will, in no uncertain terms, kill millions of people, predominantly in the Global South. I reminded people of the context of my action: floodwaters from monsoons and glacial melt ripped 33 million people from their homes, permanently obliterating schools, hospitals, and crops across Pakistan, just last month . 16 million of those scattered from safety were children. Our moral situation right now is this: we act on the climate crisis and save billions from the horror of forced migration over the coming decades, or we get distracted by division, and allow billionaires to profit on the largest genocide the world has ever seen. Most of the comme...

Lauren is still getting used to her world. Her world is still getting used to Lauren. She stumbles where she would swoosh, stammers where she would speak, sits slowly, still unsure of how to swing a skirt over even a low bench. She still sings; music moves her the same, although "man, I feel like a woman" now sends shockwaves, shivers, spineward. Lauren gets looks. Lauren gets looks of curiosity from children, of love from those who know her, who know where she comes from; Lauren gets looks like Lauren came into the world on the bottom of a boot. A boot that had walked through a hundred miles of shit. Lauren gets looks from herself, posing back at herself, posing as herself, posing. She poses. In front of clothes-shop windows, reflection as feminine as the mannequins without heads who stare with their slender shoulders into the flowing of bodies on the street. Lauren looks at the looks she gets, lucky to get good looks or to feel good-looking and even luckier to not care. Tho...

 I just don't really get it. Apparently, (though it's far from apparent to me), quantum particles can exist in 'superposition'; prior to any external interaction with them, tiny particles like electrons can flip between two separate locations in space, without ever really forming solidly in either. They could be said to exist in two places simultaneously, while never truly existing in either place at all. It appears, or at least it did to 20th century quantum physicists, that stuff only exists in a solid, binary sense when it comes into contact with other stuff. Apparently, I’m more than one gender. I’m a man, and have always been a man, and I’m also a woman (surprise!) - and, perhaps most confusingly, I’m neither. There’s my superposition - call me the Jon/Lauren particle (for, in case you didn’t know yet, Lauren is the name I’m taking to embark upon my voyage through the world as a woman). Watch me relate to the world around me. Observe me, flitting between states of ...

We associate "warmth" with kindness. A warm person is someone generous, someone you'd like to talk to. This isn't something abstract - we associate physical warmth with emotional kindness : if you're holding a hot cup of coffee, you're more likely to see the person in front of you as an emotionally "warm" person than if you were looking at that person with an iced coffee in your hand. The cognitive linguist George Lakoff attributes this to the fact that most of our warm experiences as children involved being held by our parents. Our group declaring our faith in one another before heading out to the action But perhaps our early experiences with warmth have mislead us about what to expect from people when temperatures start to rise. Here's what heat does, when it's not making us trust those around us more: It increases violent crime . Studies in New York alone have found a positive correlation between ice cream sales and murder rates . Crimes ...

Another week in the Anthropocene. Oh, to say the word, to think the thought! Anthropocene. Feel the power . This week in the Anthropocene , in the geological epoch of the Anthropos , of the upright ape with opposable thumbs, this week, some Sapiens stopped some oil. Some more Sapiens reported on their actions as if they were somehow 'radical'. Hundreds of humans got together and glued their bodies to fossil fuel infrastructure, locked their wrists to the top of tankers, stopping ten key oil refineries from functioning altogether. They acted in unison with groups from around the world, and their actions have already led to immense queues for petrol at empty stations. And while they went home, in their Pampers, from their overnight stays in beautifully rigid, admirably human police cells, the government of their country went ahead and announced they'd be selling off their own ocean for oil and gas drilling. It cannot be overstated just how radically Boris Johnson, and the ent...

To be honest, I’m not sure I would’ve wanted to go. Sat in rows of seats, forced to watch Jacob Rees-Mogg’s ulcerous standup dictionary-waving ‘comedy’ while echoes of “yah, splendid zinger mate” rang out around me, like the tropical birdsong of a Waitrose car park? I’d rather stay at home, thanks. Protect the NHS. But fortunately, I wasn’t even approached by a single member of the Conservative Party for their not-so-conservative, tenuously-labelled ‘party’, so I didn’t have to worry about making some terrible lapse of judgement and going along. It’s difficult though. Despite how shit the party appeared, it seems like loads of people are still a bit jealous, and would’ve gone if they were allowed. FOMO, probably: Fear Of More Obfuscation. And what do you do when you’re partying exclusively but worried other people might sneak their way in? If you’re Priti Patel, it seems, the solution to possible party-crashers is immediate deportation. And for all those people standing outside complai...

Me at the start of the protest in Kelvingrove Park, in my Greenpeace T-shirt my Mam bought me Tipping Point They did it. They finally did it. After all our waiting, and campaigning, and civil disobedience; after all the warnings from climate scientists all round the world, after all the floods, and the fires, and the ceaseless agitation of extremity … Our world leaders finally got together and did it. They sold the world. And I was there . Among the hundred thousand horde chanting and dancing; I was there in the city of the COP adding my voice to a mass of maddened activists demanding a change . I was not there for the actual signing of the deal; but then, none of us were invited to that. None of us were invited to the deal that still has us on track for 2.4 degrees of warming (and that’s if leaders keep to their commitments, which, historically, they have never done). This deal is essentially a death sentence for hundreds of millions of people. That’s what the science says, and in fac...