Notices by Christine Burns MBE 🏳️‍⚧️📚⧖ (christineburns@mastodon.green)

Well! After years of trying to unearth the details I've finally found the parish birth record for my paternal great great grandfather James Byrne, born 20th August 1828 in Myshall, Co. Carlow Ireland (not Wicklow as I'd previously assumed). The next shock was to find he had been sent to prison for a month in 1848 for 'Hiding in a Haycock' (the precursor to a haystack). Why that was imprisonable isn't clear but the chap sentenced before him was stealing potatoes (this being the great famine)...

...Two years after being released, James married my g-g-grandmother Mary and then six years after that they resurface in Deptford, SE London having their first child (another James) in 1856 (my great grandfather). Interestingly, father and mother married again in 1857 in a London church. Whether they'd lost the record of their Irish marriage or it simply wasn't accepted i guess there was some need to make the marriage official for the baby's sake. They then had another five children.

These new details reopen the question of whether I would have enough heritage for an Irish passport. If great grandfather James had been born six years sooner in Ireland it would certainly be the case. Anyway this is the thing with family research: you never know when you'll find something new. I first started researching fifteen years ago and it's taken till now to narrow the date of James and Mary's emigration to England to just six years. Next: Can i find their date of passage?

@ChrisMayLA6 In a country where coupledom really doesn’t require marriage or civil partnership I’m not sure this claim can be reliably stood up. Yes, we know that the birth rate has declined (thank god) but to see that as a problem feeds a certain far right agenda. To associate it with an alleged decline in measurable coupledom (I.e. conventional hetero marriage) just dives in to the right’s obsession with ‘traditional families’ — an obsession really about the ‘right’ people reproducing

If you’re shocked by the thought of the US talking openly about subverting and overturning European liberal democracies spare a though for countries in Central and Southern America and (at various times) a large proportion of everything east of the baltics. It’s one of the prime missions of the CIA, even though we tend to know because of the times they’ve been crap at it. To only be insensed because they’re doing it to people like us points to some wilful blindness over the last 80 years.

Whilst folks are talking about the supersized distortion of Greenland by the Mercator projection it’s a good moment to point out that the size of the British Isles is also exaggerated. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mercator-map-true-size-of-countries/

At £46 billion (far over budget) Hinkley Point C is reckoned to be the most expensive project of its kind ever constructed. Britain just can’t do infrastructure can it.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ycNqII5HYMI&si=VTebV9YmNi85faAn

Every day when I check the news it feels more and more as though the effect of Brexit was to separate the UK from the safety of the pack. Alone and wounded the country feels increasingly prey to the predators and hyenas. Musk is a hyena. This week’s attacks feel like a rather brutal lesson in how the world has changed. We are not the only prey but we feel especially vulnerable.

@ChrisMayLA6 @aral I don’t think it’s as valuable as people may think. These days the vast majority of big ticket bills people HAVE to pay expect electronic payment in some form. Cash only has utility for bricks and mortar retail. You can’t easily pay council tax or energy bills with cash and most employers won’t pay you in cash either. High street banks are disappearing. So, even if you go on the run from a hostile society your cash won’t get you much or last long.

@aral @ChrisMayLA6 That is indeed how women were overpowered on day one of Gilead in the Handmaid’s Tale prequel.That’s not a cast iron case for cash though. Cash on hand won’t last you long in that scenario, no matter how big a mattress you store it under. Remember you can’t replenish cash from an ATM either in those circumstances. The scenario you’re painting happens every way so that says you have to think of alternative flight strategies, and I’m not revealing mine.

@ChrisMayLA6 I’m unmoved. I haven’t carried cash on me since March 2020 and it’s reached the point now where the idea of assigning value to little slips of paper and metal discs seems a bit strange. For budgeting I use computer ledgers and know not only where I stand to the penny but also how that position will change over months ahead. Cash would mean forever counting and trying to remember which bills are about to arrive. This wouldn’t have mattered when I worked and had an inherent..

@ChrisMayLA6 ..positive cash flow — one can afford to be imprecise in those circumstances — but in retirement I’m juggling a cash flow that can sometimes look deceptively comfortable but which I project will be uncomfortably tight in the next breath.

With Zuckerberg the warning signs were there when he set up a site using women’s photos without consent and invited all the guys to rate them. Maybe that should’ve been enough.

@goatsarah That was the shocking part I’d never heard about before. His videos are so thorough.

@goatsarah Killed (in effect) by Boeing management’s self serving decisions.

Thousands signing statement of support for ongoing inclusion of trans women in women’s football - Sports Media LGBT+

https://sportsmedialgbt.com/let-trans-women-play-football-v-transphobia-homophobia-statement-support

@goatsarah We need more billionaire trans people to buy the always biddable politicians.

They’re not well are they. They’ve not really been well since the enlightenment but the last fifty years have pushed the poor dears over the edge.

It’s all very well for us to fret about the degradation likely to result from using hallucinating LLMs to replace humans to write and summarise stuff but we shouldn’t forget that the AI matrices are in fact excellent analogues for the fault-and-prejudice prone acts of more humans than we hitherto realised. It turns out humans are fatally flawed at the population level. Crowds lack wisdom and make really poor decisions. And that will be the undoing of the species.

@goatsarah You’ve not given location to frame this. Are you judging British tat, Portuguese tat, French tat or what? Is it all unitat?