Oh they’re not asking for much, only everything.

See it? “Codify trans-inclusive meanings of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ in law” – thus obliterating women’s rights.

That’s “doing better” is it? I would hate to see what doing worse would look like.

There’s a lot of paradox here.

[Stephen] Miller told Fox News: “Harvard has engaged in decades of invidious, unlawful and illegal race-based discrimination against American citizens … The Democrat party’s philosophy right now is for foreigners, everything – for Americans, nothing.”

Jason Johnson, a political scientist at Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland, said: “Their goal is to intimidate and break down institutions of higher learning in America because that is where most of the resistance to their authoritarian tendencies is going to come from.”

…

Other commentators detect an element of class warfare. Trump won election last November with a base drawing largely on non-college-educated white men. Now he is stoking hostility towards the ivory towers of the US’s most elite university.

It’s such a weird twisted turned inside out kind of class warfare though. Trump with his billions and golf resorts and gold shoelaces is a bizarre candidate for working class hero…but the US has a long history of swapping realities for symbols. Trump is enormously rich but he gets to play the class game in his favor because he is so ignorant and crude and trashy. It’s all surface and nothing underneath. He doesn’t give a good god damn about the working class, but he does love to make war on intelligent people for the edification of his “base.” He’s all hat and no cattle, all symbol and no substance. And it works for him.

Brendan Boyle, a Democratic representative who graduated from Harvard in 2005, said: “Part of Trump’s political skill is figuring out how to portray himself as this working man’s populist hero even though he’s a billionaire who pisses in gold toilets.”

Exactly so. It’s infuriating, and it keeps going and going and going.

Sigh. Every single news outlet that appears makes the same damn mistake.

In fact the same two damn mistakes. Each one says “trans” or “transgender” instead of “male” and each one fails to say “women’s” meet or event or championships.

For the billionth time, the problem is not being trans, the problem is being male and competing against females.

This endlessly repeated obfuscation benefits exclusively males who cheat females.

Mainstream newspaper refers to male athlete as trans athlete instead of male athlete in the eleventy billionth refusal to tell the truth about this relentless cheating of female athletes.

When East Valley of Spokane runner Verónica Garcia crossed the finish line at Mount Tahoma High School after winning the Class 2A 400-meter dash on Saturday, she looked over at the scoreboard, saw her time of 55.70, and smiled. 

Ignoring the boos she heard from the crowd, Garcia took a moment to bask in her accomplishment of winning her second consecutive Class 2A 400-meter state title. 

How sweet – except for the fact that he’s a boy and it was a girls’ race.

As a transgender person, Garcia has heard the boos before. She heard them last year when she hit the straightaway on her first state title run. She heard them again on Saturday, as the crowd cheered loudly for every other runner during the medal ceremony, before boos rang out when Garcia was announced as the winner. 

But he’s not a generic “transgender person.” He’s a boy. He’s not a she, he’s a he. The boos “rang out”” (how do boos “ring”?) because he cheated a girl out of winning the race. Calling him “she” obscures that fact. Journalism should not lie about what sex people are, especially when it’s a story about a male cheating females.

While she warmed up before the race, a man near the starting blocks wearing an American flag shirt that read “Save women’s sports”  repeated “Let’s go girls!” and “girls’ race!” seemingly making sure that Garcia was within earshot. 

She heard the heckles, but the 17-year old Garcia didn’t let it negatively affect her performance. Instead, she used it as fuel. 

“I’ll be honest, I kind of expect it,” Garcia said. “But it maybe didn’t have their intended effect. It made me angry, but not angry as in, I wanted to give up, but angry as in, I’m going to push.

Isn’t that nice? Framing this story as boy cheating girls = the victim of nasty right-wing bullies, as opposed to boy cheating girls = boy cheating girls. It’s not the guy in the flag shirt who’s the bully here, it’s the boy cheating a girl out of first place.

And in conclusion:

For Garcia, who plans to study fire science and someday drive a Spokane Fire Department engine, winning the state title wasn’t just about herself.  “One of the things that Martin Luther King always pointed out is that you have to do what’s right,” Garcia said. “Even if there comes risk, you still have to do what’s right.”

And what you’re doing is wrong, you smug little toad.

Tucking breaks.

An LGBTQ+ group within an NHS hospital trust drew up plans to give trans staff extra breaks if they wore chest binders or had to tuck their genitals away.

In draft guidance seen by The Telegraph, an LGBTQ+ staff network within the University Hospitals Sussex NHS Trust (UH Sussex) said trans colleagues “may require extra scheduled breaks in their shift in order to have breaks from binding and tucking”.

Well now wait a second. If they get extra breaks from binding and tucking, why shouldn’t women get extra breaks from/for wearing high heels or makeup or tampons? Why shouldn’t men have extra breaks from/for shaving or not shaving? If one group gets extra breaks then all groups should get extra breaks. Fair’s fair.

However, the trust said the new proposals, which also said women-only spaces should include trans women, had been dropped in February and would not be pursued following the Supreme Court ruling last month.

…

But critics said the draft guidance raised concerns about the time spent by NHS staff on working up and consulting on these types of policies. 

Well, that, plus the utter stupidity of the policies themselves.

Helen Joyce, the director of advocacy at Sex Matters, a human rights charity, said the proposals for “employees who are self-harming in pursuit of the impossible goal of sex change should never have made it onto paper, even as a draft”.

She added: “Tucking genitals and binding breasts are culturally motivated actions that cause permanent physical damage, just like breast ironing and the use of neck coils. The only difference is that self-harm in the name of trans identity is high status and fashionable.”

See also: female genital mutilation aka FGM. There are, of course, people who defend FGM because it’s a religious/cultural practice and therefore must be beyond criticism or prevention.

University Hospitals Sussex NHS Trust is vehement in its disavowal of these proposed policies, which it rejected entirely.

How embarrassing. A grown-up museum is doing this.

Gender Stories

Challenging rigid definitions and binary narratives, Gender Stories dives deep into the intricate connections between sex, gender, sexuality, and identity. Discover how these fluid, and multifaceted ideas have been mythologised, stereotyped, expressed – and sometimes concealed – through art, history, politics, and daily life over time.

Blah blah blah. It’s so rigid and binary and last Tuesday to know that men are not women. Do you want to be your grandmother?? Do you???!

Featuring works by David Hockney, Rene Matić, Zanele Muholi, Catherine Opie, Grayson Perry, and Del LaGrace Volcano, this ground-breaking exhibition invites visitors to delve into the multifaceted world of gender. It challenges traditional binary narratives and explores how gender intersects with sex, identity, and sexuality across cultures and history.

That’s the ticket! Traditional and binary=wrong and stupid, so do the opposite of them at all times. It’s traditional and binary to think gravity is real, so walk off the top deck of tall buildings every chance you get. It’s traditional and binary to think people need to eat food to survive, so go ahead and starve yourself until you reach peak enlightenment.

We don’t have all the answers, but we’re excited to explore these complex questions together. Whether you’re beginning, continuing, or seeking to understand a gender journey – your own or someone else’s – this exhibition offers a meaningful space for reflection and discovery.

You mean there’s somewhere quiet to sit down?

When confusions collide:

A practising witch claims she was thrown off a druid training course over accusations by a member of the UK Pagan Federation that she was “transphobic” in a row about women’s rights.

When even the Druids believe it you know it’s gone mainstream.

Angela Howard said she became involved with paganism and joined the British Druid Order (BDO) in 2020 to find “spiritual healing” after being sexually assaulted.

Somebody needs to set up a British Terf Order.

However, Howard said the solace she sought in druidry and paganism was shattered when she was banned in April from continuing her training because of her support of the exclusion of trans women — males who identify as female — from single-sex spaces for women.

…

The dispute began, she said, three days after the landmark Supreme Court judgment that ruled the definition of a woman under equality laws related to biological sex, rather than “certificated gender” acquired by trans people.

She said the Pagan Federation put up a post on its official Facebook page entitled: “Statement of Support for Trans People from the Pagan Federation”.

According to Howard, 48, in contradiction of the Supreme Court ruling, it asserted that trans women should be regarded to be exactly the same as biological females and that this position was “not up for debate”.

Well not exactly in contradiction of the ruling, because the ruling doesn’t tell people how we should or should not “regard” things. The ruling leaves us free to “regard” men as women if we want to. The law is about actions, not thoughts. Laws about thoughts are extremely hard to police, so legislatures and courts generally avoid them.

Howard said she responded to this statement by commenting that there were situations in which women needed single-sex spaces, such as changing rooms, women’s refuges and prisons. She illustrated the point by citing her own experience of being sexually assaulted by a trans person, a man who identified as a woman, and being unable to access a rape crisis service because it was “mixed-sex”.

And so they punished her because of course they did.

Four days later, the British Druid Order also banned her from their Facebook page when she criticised an article posted there that described the Supreme Court ruling as a “victory for bigotry”, she said, adding that her response included only one line of criticism, an expression of sympathy for trans women in prison. She also asked the article’s author whether he had read the judgment.

However, she said she was expelled from the site by its administrators after a member of the Pagan Federation support team claimed she had been “more unequivocally transphobic” in her comments.

Of course. This is how you win points in The Great Global Who Is Most Transphilic contest. You keep your eyes and ears open for the tiniest deviation from Transphilic Law and then you pounce before someone else does. Ding ding ding! You get to move forward ten steps.

In a written complaint to the BDO this week, Howard pointed out that women and girls were the “largest and most consistently oppressed group worldwide”, adding: “Even here in the UK, I cannot safely wear a witch’s hat in public without receiving threatening or fearful looks.”

Well…I hate to spoil the fun, but you also can’t wear a chicken on your head in public without receiving threatening or fearful looks. Funny clothes are going to get funny looks, because people expect the expected. That is after all the whole point of wearing a witch’s hat or a chicken when out in public.

Hmm. Is citing non-existent sources a “formatting issue”? I don’t think so.

The White House will fix errors in a much-anticipated federal government report spearheaded by U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., which decried America’s food supply, pesticides and prescription drugs.

Kennedy’s wide-ranging “Make America Healthy Again” report, released last week, cited hundreds of studies, but a closer look by the news organization NOTUS found that some of those studies did not actually exist.

Excuse me, excuse me – that’s not “errors.” Citing studies that don’t exist is not an error, it’s lying. It’s fraud. It’s playing craps with other people’s lives. It’s not a mistake, it’s a crime.

Asked about the report’s problems, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the report will be updated.

“I understand there was some formatting issues with the MAHA report that are being addressed and the report will be updated.” Leavitt told reporters during her briefing.

Oh puhleeze. Citing fake studies is not a fucking formatting issue.

Ouch. Sports journalist Steve Bunce is getting ferociously chastised for pretending he never did fall for the Imane Khelif bullshit when in fact…

Some of us did, but it seems he did that other thing.

Well um errr

Thieves fall out.

Donald Trump unleashed a furious screed lamenting his recent legal loss on tariffs, and pointed the finger at “sleazebag” conservative billionaire Leonard Leo, the ex-chairman of the Federalist Society.

In a post on Truth Social Thursday night, Trump railed against the U.S. Court of International Trade’s ruling the previous day, which found that the president had exceeded his legal authority by imposing sweeping tariffs on dozens of countries, based on vague claims of “national emergencies.”

Oh dear, he’s a sleazebag? According to Donald Trump, the sleaziest sleaze bag most of us have ever seen?

On Thursday, the Trump administration was granted a temporary stay of the little-known federal court’s ruling while the government appeals—but that didn’t keep Trump from flying off the handle.

“Where do these initial three Judges come from? How is it possible for them to have potentially done such damage to the United States of America? Is it purely a hatred of ‘TRUMP?’ What other reason could it be?” Trump wrote.

How is it possible for Trump to have done so much irreparable damage to the US? Is it purely hatred of everyone who isn’t Trump?

(Spoiler: yes.)

Trump said that he regretted taking recommendations for judges from the Federalist Society, and lashed out at Leo specifically. “I was new to Washington, and it was suggested that I use The Federalist Society as a recommending source on Judges. 

Wait stop right there. He was “new to Washington” i.e. he was completely ignorant of anything and everything relevant to the job of presiding but he went for the job anyway because he has such a bloated ego and an infinite supply of greed and self-dealing. Someone as pig-ignorant as he is should never ever put xirself forward for that job.

“I did so, openly and freely, but then realized that they were under the thumb of a real ‘sleazebag’ named Leonard Leo, a bad person who, in his own way, probably hates America, and obviously has his own separate ambitions,” Trump wrote.

Trump is a bad person. Trump is the most bad living person the majority of us have ever seen. He’s bad in so many ways, and so thoroughly bad in all of them. There is no compensating good to alleviate the gruesome picture. He’s all bad. There are few bad qualities that don’t apply to him – in fact I can’t think of any, but I’m being generous because I’m better than he is.

Khelif told “no” at last.

Imane Khelif, the boxer at the heart of the gender controversy at the Olympics, has been barred from making a competitive comeback next week.

World Boxing have confirmed that they will introduce mandatory sex testing and that they have written to the Algerian Boxing Federation to inform them that Khelif will not be able to compete at the Eindhoven Box Cup.

The amateur boxing federation said that Khelif would have to undergo sex testing before she could compete at any of their events.

HE. Don’t call him “she” in the very act of reporting on his cheating ffs.

In a statement, the governing body, which has taken on running amateur boxing and did not run it at the Paris Olympics, said: “World Boxing will introduce mandatory sex testing, to determine the eligibility of male and female athletes that want to take part in its competitions.

“The introduction of mandatory testing will be part of a new policy on “Sex, Age and Weight” to ensure the safety of all participants and deliver a competitive level playing field for men and women.

Especially women. It’s women who are cheated by gender nonsense.

This is just dumb. Really dumb.

Gay and lesbian adults identify more with straight and bisexual individuals, nearly doubling in percentage compared to what they have in common with transgender individuals, according to a new survey.

…

About half of gay and lesbian adults said they have a great deal or a fair amount in common with bisexual people (50 percent) and straight people (51 percent), compared to 28 percent who said they have a lot in common with transgender people.

But it’s a stupid question. It’s like asking people if they have more in common with farmers or Santa Claus. Pretending to be the opposite sex is radically different from being attracted to either sex. Attraction is one thing and being is quite quite another. It’s so much another. There’s no pretending involved in sexual attraction, while idennifying as the other sex is all about pretending. Being gay is reality, being trans is fantasy.

Both trans individuals and those who identify as gay or bisexual represent parallel groups, she added, as they’ve had a long shared history of social marginalization and discrimination.

Yeah no. That’s not enough. Murderers also have a long history of social marginalization and discrimination; that doesn’t mean they represent a “parallel group” to people who get parking tickets.

“The gay rights movement, going all the way back to Stonewall, has significant representation by trans people,” Schwartz said. “Historically, it has always been referred to as the LGBT community as opposed to the LGB community.

That’s just not true. At all.

Difference? What difference? I don’t see any difference? Do you see any difference?

The Catholic church is evil chapter eleventy billion.

Washington’s Catholic leaders sued state leaders and county prosecutors Thursday, alleging that a controversial new law requiring priests to break the confessional seal to report suspected child abuse is “a brazen act of religious discrimination.”

Oh piss off you evil theocratic shits. Your “confessional seal” has protected who knows how many child rapists and torturers.

The new law adds clergy to a list of other professions, such as health care workers and school personnel, who are mandatory reporters of abuse. But the church’s lawsuit pushes back on a provision of the law that does not allow carve-outs for things said during confession, and exposes priests to potential arrest. 

Long overdue. The church is a goddy Mafia, and it’s about damn time for it to be subject to the same laws as everyone else.

That decision by lawmakers violates the First Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, alleges the lawsuit filed in Tacoma’s federal court by leaders and priests in Washington’s three archdioceses, including Seattle archbishop Paul Etienne. It names Gov. Bob Ferguson, Attorney General Nick Brown and a host of local law enforcement officials, who could be tasked with enforcing the law.

Tensions remain over the balance between what the church says violates the sacramental seal of confession and a duty to report child abuse or neglect. The Catholic church has been wracked by a decades-long clergy abuse scandal that led to generations of trauma and the bankruptcy of the Spokane diocese. The Trump administration’s Department of Justice declared the law “anti-Catholic” and worthy of a federal investigation.

The law is anti-priestly rape and official secrecy around and protection of same.

“I’m disappointed my Church is filing a federal lawsuit to protect individuals who abuse kids,” Ferguson said in a statement to The Seattle Times.

That’s how his church is though.

Terrence Carroll, a retired King County judge who co-founded Heal Our Church, an alliance of practicing Catholics seeking reforms, said the lawsuit filed Thursday is part of a “broader resistance to transparency” by the church.  “The issue comes down to what’s more important here, transparency on the part of the church and the protection of children, or this small part of the confession?” Carroll said. 

Carroll said that while confession is part of religion, the actual protection of children is not that separate from the practice of religion, and he believes the church should be prioritizing the protection of children.  He noted that the Washington state Constitution guarantees religious freedom, “except for licentious behavior,” and said he believed the DOJ’s claims of anti-Catholic bias are “propaganda” that may have encouraged the bishops to file the lawsuit. 

Because Trump and his people are in favor of protecting Catholics who abuse children.

The bill’s sponsor, Sen. Noel Frame, D-Seattle, has previously said the bill was crafted after she read a 2022 InvestigateWest article detailing how Washington Jehovah’s Witnesses hid child sexual abuse for decades. Similar versions of the bill had failed in previous legislative sessions and were the subject of heated lobbying by child advocates and the Catholic church during the 2025 session.

It’s in the nature of religious sects to do this. Religion is special, it’s mysterious, it’s magical, it’s holy, it’s taboo. It mandates belief in supernatural beings and events, and it protects itself first and people later. It’s a very long con.

Fake fake fake fake.

A US government report on children’s health cited “totally fabricated” studies to back up its findings, academics wrongly listed as the authors of those studies have said.

First released on 22 May, the report detailed causes of a “chronic disease crisis” among children in the US. An amended version was issued on 29 May after digital outlet NOTUS found it had used seven non-existent sources.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said there were “formatting issues” and the report would be updated, but it did “not negate the substance of the report”.

Uh, no, citing sources that don’t exist is not a “formatting issue” – and citing sources that don’t exist very much does negate whatever the “substance” of the report may be. Why? Because fakery=fakery. Fictional sources=a zero grade.

Katherine Keyes, an epidemiology professor who told news agency Reuters she was also wrongly named as an author, said: “It does make me concerned given that citation practices are an important part of conducting and reporting rigorous science.”

Because of course they are, because for one thing they’re a red flag for other cheating, and for another thing they cast doubt on the truth of the claims.

Hmmm. Who is really biased and abusing power?

A federal appeals court on Thursday granted the Trump administration’s request to temporarily pause a lower-court ruling that struck down most of President Donald Trump’s tariffs.

The Trump administration had earlier told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit that it would seek “emergency relief” from the Supreme Court as soon as Friday if the tariff ruling [were] not quickly put on pause.

The judgment issued Wednesday night by the U.S. Court of International Trade is “temporarily stayed until further notice while this court considers the motions papers,” the appeals court said in its order.

…

The three-judge trade court panel — which included a Trump appointee — had invalidated all of Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs and other duties.

The judges found that the 1970s-era law Trump had invoked to enact those tariffs, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, does not “confer such unbounded authority” to presidents.

The nationwide, permanent block they imposed covered all of the retaliatory tariffs that Trump issued in early April as part of his sweeping “liberation day” plan to reshape international trade with the rest of the world.

And by “sweeping” they mean lawless, reckless, dictatorial, and grotesque.

At the same time, the Trump administration aimed a barrage of criticism at the trade-court judges, accusing them of bias and abusing their power.

“The Supreme Court must put an end to this,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Thursday afternoon. “These judges are threatening to undermine the credibility of the United States on the world stage.”

Uh, no, sorry. It’s Trump who is doing that, with the help of bozos like you.

Guest post by Ryan Richter

At this point I hope we have all imagined the possibility of a future with economic prosperity and without fossil carbon-based motor fuels. You can use electricity and renewable sources for most things. OK, but what about everything else? Motor fuels and fossil carbon electricity generation aren’t the whole story by a long shot. There’s steel and aliminum, oh and also cement. And then there’s organic chemistry more generally – can’t you do that without burning the oil? Well, no, not today you can’t. This is what I want to take the knife to. We have the tools, but I don’t hear many people talking about how to really use them to full effect.

I’m talking about nuclear power of course. We certainly want to take the fullest advantage of solar power and other renewable sources as well. I want to additionally propose the use of radioisotope heater units to replace a number of unobvious carbon sources in today’s heavy industry. Nuclear advocates have recommended the reprocessing of fuel to extend the nuclear fuel cycle in the past, but relatively little has been done so far. This lackadasical effort needs to end yesterday, of course. I fully recommend an expanded nuclear fuel cycle including reprocessing and fast breeder reactors, and maybe also a thorium cycle. But in addition to that, I want to re-propose an old idea (I don’t know where it originates) in a new context – not only extracting and fully using the actinides in the fuel cycle, but also extracting the fission products to make Fission Product Radioisotope Heater Units, FPRHUs.

Now let me change tack for a bit and talk about some very nasty fossil CO2 sources in heavy industry today. We use coal to make iron and steel. We use petroleum coke to make aliminum. We have lime kilns which release the CO2 from carbonate rocks, which is perhaps the very worst. And then there’s the awful oil-powered oil refinery. If you’re not familiar with the industry (I have never been any part of it), you may not have heard any of the details, so let me try to explain from what I’ve been able to piece together.

My explanation of the oil refinery will focus on what I consider to be the two fundamental processes in a refinery that’s not dedicated to motor fuels, which is a difficult thing to imagine based on what engineers build today. One is called the hydrotreater, which is an industry name for the high-pressure hydrogenation of hydrocarbons[1][3][4][5]. The so-called naphtha hydrotreater seems to operate somewhere around 100 atmospheres and maybe 300-400 celcius ([1][3][5] – this is difficult. According to [1] and [3] the hydrocarbons are pressurized to ~40atm and by [5] the H2 to ~200atm, which makes sense as H2 is cheaper to compress. A similar process is Hydrocracking [9] which is around 120atm). There is also a diesel or lube oil hydrotreater which operates at more extreme conditions [5] and processes a smaller feed. These hydrotreaters are fed with hydrogen from a reaction which overall is basically

CH4 + 2 H2O -> 4 H2 + CO2 (where does the CH4 come from? – not natural gas)

The second fundamental process is called the olefins unit pyrolysis furnace [8], which operates at more like 30 atmospheres and maybe 800 celsius. This is simply the thermal decomposition of hydrocarbons, in this case only the lighter naphtha mixture. The feeds to both of the fundamental precesses are highly miscellaneous mixtures of hydrocarbons, although not exactly the same. The hydrotreater in effect comes first, after the main fractionation (called the crude unit [1][2][7]). The feed from the crude unit typically still includes organic sulfur and nitrogen, and the hydrotreater is the sledgehammer for dealing with that, as sulfur comes out as H2S and N as NH3. But the other effect of the hydrotreater is to add hydrogen across carbon-carbon double bonds to make single bonds, although this makes it sound far more surgical than it is. On the other hand, the pyrolysis furnace in effect cooks hydrogen out – how many things can a hydrocarbon decompose to? So in that one you make double bonds, and also triple bonds, and some coke too no doubt, and some hydrogen, and also some methane. Well, more than a little bit in fact. The hydrotreater is also a prodigious producer of methane, being a hydrogenator after all. So that’s where the methane comes from. As it happens, only a little of it is needed to make the hydrogen that’s needed. A third process is called Hydrocracking [9], essentially a combination of the above two in one reactor, said to occur around 450 Celsius and 120 atmospheres.

So neither of the fundamental processes is especially chemically efficient. And if you’ve looked at the reaction conditions you can see that some thermal and mechanical power inputs are required also, not a small amount. What a horrible mess. How can you ever make money doing something like that – OH WAIT. You can burn the methane. So at the inlet to the hydrotreater there’s a jet engine the size of a large truck burning, in effect, the same methane that’s cooking out of the reaction. The naphtha hydrotreater at a medium size refinery costs over 200 megawatts to run (I swear I saw this number somewhere but now I can’t find it again) – but not in money. The pyrolysis furnace is a very similar story. This is where ethylene for plastics comes from. And the big embarrasment is that you have to send the same oil to the hydrotreater fisrt even though the pyrolysis furnace undoes the single bond-double bond thing. The cruse unit – the tallest tower – also has a house-sized burner fed by the so-called refinery fuel gas mix. All the other hundreds of other smaller towers also have their fuel gas-powered preheaters or compressors. It’s said that you can turn crude oil into anything, but it you want to turn all of it into polyethylene you have to, basically, burn half or more of it first, counting carbon atom by carbon atom. But in every case what you need is a concentrated heat source, and so I propose the FPRHU. There is a question about the effect of ionizing radiation on the chemical process, but I have a surprising answer for that.

What’s needed is a convenient high-temperature heat transfer material, and I have no idea what chemical engineers would propose based on that criterion alone. But I will propose the use of molten silicates for another reason. The Radioisotope Silicate Foundry (RSF) can be the basis of a carbon-free construction industry. The idea is that the RSF is located at a nucear fuel reprocessing facility and uses its freshest isotopes to produce both a high-temperature heat source for co-located heavy industry and a precast building material to replace concrete. This may not sound remotely believable based on the scale of recently-imagined nuclear reprocessing efforts, but I propose a great increase in that. Another benefit here is that all of this activity, together with the complete nuclear fuel cycle for actinides, reduces the final amount of nuclear waste produced for each ton of uranium mined.

It starts to become clearer what the overall picture looks like. Let me say a little bit about the metals first before sharpening the chemistry picture a little more. You need a reducing agent to make metals. One possibility is a electrical/nuclear biomass charcoal furnace. What biomass you would want and how much would be available is an interesting question I don’t know much about, as the chemical quality of the charcoal is important. An interesting alternative is hydrogen produced either by electrolysis of water or the pyrolysis of fossil carbon methane, not yet fully developed.

The steel mill coke ovens also produce a coal gas which is now called coke oven gas [6], and is used in the steel mill to het furnaces much the same as the oil refinery fuel gas. This would also be replaced by FPRHU/RSF. Preparing aluminum ore is mainly mechanical and wet chemistry, but iron ores are roasted and that’s a nut to crack. Heat is no problem with abundant FPRHUs, but some carbonates are decomposed here also. This may be on a scale that can be accepted if all other main sources of fossil CO2 are really eliminated. The other possibility is to treat carbonates with a wet chemistry, i.e. to use an acid to release CO2 and then a mineral base to absorb it. That would require support from the chloralkali process, more or less.

Finally, what would carbon chemistry look like? You will still need things like oil and coal to produce a number of things including asphalt and lubricants. Polymers and chemical feedstocks are also needed. Some of this can come from biomass, e.g. you can easily make ethylene from ethanol, although competing with food sources is not necessarily a good idea. Some real new chemical enginnering is needed, to say the least. I would presume butadiene still comes out of oil and coal. You can picture a refinery that processes heavy inputs with FPRHU/RSF heating, and which uses pyrolysis to destroy the methane which is the ultimate waste product. The hydrogen can be used liberally for anything, making iron, whatever. The carbon black has to end up in steel, tires, carbon fibre materials, and on printed pages I guess. There’s another interesting engineering question as to the overall balance between electricity usage and FPRHU, the point of which is that the FPRHUs need to be available on a real market. So in a little more detail, in a nuclear powered oil refinery the compressors would be powered by electricity but the feed preheat would be done by direct radioisotope heating. As I understand, the rule of thumb is that the fission products release about 10% of the heat that the original reactor produced. The thermal efficiency into electricity at a large reactor is around 40%. Waste heat at a power reactor is in the form of low-temperature steam, although some fast breeders may allow for something better – I’m not really sure.

OK, so I hope I’ve shown that it’s basically possible to do things this way, and emit only the smallest amount of fossil CO2 while making all the things we expect to make and have. The extensive handling of radioisotopes within the heavy manufacturing centers will necessitate an increase in automation, but the industry was really heading in that direction anyway. The big question is the capital expenditure. Of course the answer to that is state involvement to some degree – it’s just a question, politically, of what kind of future we want.

My data source for petrleum industry stuff are the reports of the CSB (which has an annoyingly long name), which investigates fatal accidents in the chimical industry in the US. They were created out of the EPA in the Clinton years with a subpoena power to reveal industry secrets. I downloaded personal copies of these when Trump was elected, having seen previous EPA reports disappear under Bush. This turned out to be a good idea, as the older reports are no longer linked from the main page. Other people have made archives. Report number 1 is particularly revealing. If you read only one report about a fatal accident at an oil refinery, make it that one. Number 2 is really shocking in the details and has a hilarious photo. 6 and 7 are weirdly macabre, seeming to describe the same accident at two different places.

[1] BP-Husky Toledo Refinery 2022

[2] Husky Superior Refinery 2018

[3] Tesoro Anacortes Refinery 2010

[4] Silver Eagle Woods Cross Refinery 2009

[5] BP Texas City Refinery 2005 (RHU Unit)

[6] Bethlehem Steel Chesterton 2001

[7] Tosco Avon Refinery 2001

[8] Shell Chemical Deer Park 1997

[9] Tosco Avon Refinery 1997

Paul Krugman is verklempt.

It will take me a while to digest this:

Quoting from the NY Times article then commenting:

A panel of federal judges on Wednesday blocked President Trump from imposing some of his steepest tariffs on China and other U.S. trading partners, finding in two cases that he vastly overstepped his ability to issue those expansive duties under federal law.

The ruling, by the U.S. Court of International Trade, delivered an early yet significant setback to Mr. Trump in his campaign to strike a series of agreements that reorient the nation’s trading relationships, setting up a legal fight that could soon reach the Supreme Court.

The cases centered on the president’s use of a 1977 federal economic emergency law to issue many of his steep duties, including some of his tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China, and his “reciprocal” rates on much of the rest of the world, which Mr. Trump announced and then suspended in April.

The thing is, it has been obvious all along that Trump’s use of the 1977 International Economic Emergency Powers Act to justify Smoot-Hawley level tariffs was a massive abuse of power. I mean, since when are 4 percent unemployment and 2.5 percent inflation an emergency justifying the reversal of 90 years of policy? But I guess I just assumed that things like that didn’t matter anymore.

Don’t we all.

A fool named Kate Nash lectures JK Rowling and the rest of us on feminism.

Germ, a spoken word track, consists of a repeated declaration that an unnamed “girl” is “exclusionary, regressive, misogynist” for raising concerns about transgender issues.

Nash has said it is transphobic to exclude trans women from female-only lavatories and sports, and declared in the track that she had “never felt threatened by a trans person”.

The track appears to reference the Harry Potter author posing with a cigar to celebrate the Supreme Court ruling that trans women are legally male.

It states: “you can call a cigar a cigar” but “a cigar cannot be compared to a human being can it, you f—ing idiot”.

Who is the fucking idiot here? JK Rowling who knows that men are not women, or Kate Nash who thinks men can be women?

Nash also posted this on Instagram:

Since the photo is of JK Rowling I think the Telegraph is being over-cautious in saying the track “appears” to reference her. See the photo? Yeah it’s referencing her. While calling her “GERM” and “it”.

Trans ideology is so enlightened.

Jolyon telling us what feminism is and what we must do and when we must shut up.