Is Maria gobbling their credibility?

The ghastly and demeaning Maria Miller affair rumbles on as these things do. Mostly because our leaders are far too thick to realise when the game is up. Iain Duncan Smith's comment puts the dimwit problem in an inadvertent nutshell.

MPs should do "whatever it takes" to stop rows over their expenses "eating away at the credibility of Parliament", a cabinet minister has said.

Eating away at the credibility of Parliament?

If dear old IDS thinks there is any meat left on that particular bone then he's not really paying attention.

Blobby shower gel

The respectable portion of the male sex in England may be divided into two classes, according to its method and manner of complete immersion in water. One class, the more clashing, dashes into a cold tub every morning. Another, the more cleanly, sedately takes a warm bath every Saturday night.

Arnold Bennett - A Great Man (1904)

I suppose things have changed since Bennett’s day. The daily shower is now something of a ritual. Or so one might assume, but what about the vexed question of shower gel?

Mine is deep blue, described as body wash and supposedly aimed at men, but it has what I consider to be a significant defect – it falls off. Unlike creams, the gel is liable to shed blue blobs of neat gel onto the shower tray.

It doesn't matter what technique I devise - somehow blobs of the stuff always fall off. It sometimes ends up on the shower door or leaves blue streaks down the tiled walls. How that happens I've no idea, maybe it's the laws of physics taking a break.

Having a suspicious cast of mind, I sometimes wonder if this wasteful gel formulation is deliberate. Does the manufacturer want me to waste as much as possible so I’ll soon be back for more? Is it aimed at men even clumsier than your humble blogger? I don’t know but I can’t see canny manufacturers missing out on such a cunning plan.

I’d change brands or move to a more creamy, stick-on-till-lather-forms version, but ironically the gel I use is cheap enough when on offer, so a few wasted blobs don’t matter. I still wonder if the blobby formulation is deliberate though. 

It’s something to think about while showering.

Are you dynamic?

Idleness, then, is so far from being the root of all evil that it is rather the true good.
Søren Kierkegaard

Are you dynamic, bone idle or somewhere in between?

I’m certainly not dynamic but not quite bone idle either – well not all the time. I’m not sure where human dynamism comes from, but I don’t have it. Or want it if I’m honest.

Yet success seems to be closely related to a certain kind of dynamism. Not necessarily hard work, although that comes into it, but ferocious self-centred, persistence usually dressed up as something else.

It seems to be a matter of goals and effort, although the effort may well be largely networking, sucking up to the right people, cultivating the image, softening a regional accent, personal appearance, the right point of view, an urbane manner, the arts of delegation, knowing the value of anger and politically correct disdain, artistic flim-flam, a second language, name-dropping, credentials, a suitable partner and so on.

It all sounds too much like hard work though doesn’t it? Presumably it is, or grossly time-hogging if not physically demanding.

No – it’s not for me.

Moving home

Although we’ve had modular houses for a long time, somehow the advantages never seem to make it into the political arena to any serious extent. The wartime UK prefab served its purpose and was discarded, although some have lasted for decades. My aunt and uncle lived in one in Derby.

Grade II listed Phoenix prefabs

Wake Green Road, Birmingham
From Wikipedia

 Yet today it is presumably even more feasible to mass-produce all the bits and pieces that go to make up a comfortable and energy efficient dwelling. So why don’t we do it and get rid of the housing shortage forever?

Caravans for example. Modern caravans are produced on factory production lines and a big one can cost as little as £20-30k. Comfortable, easy to heat in winter and needing little maintenance, what’s not to like about them? They can even be quite posh.

From leftbracket.com

Caravans are easy to move of course, so if we all lived in them, moving house would merely be a question of towing the thing from one plot to another. Hook up the utilities and job done. If anyone needs more living space I’m sure they could be designed to attach extra modules.

A big advantage is cost. Caravans are comparatively cheap, so the whole idea might highlight the cost of each plot of land. Maybe we could simply rent plots from the local authority, even making this the main tax base for the whole country. Westminster wouldn’t like it, so that’s another benefit.

We’d get rid of a load of other taxes and pensioners would just tow their homes to a cheaper plot of land on retirement, leaving city life to younger people with jobs and families.

The roof of the caravan could be an array of solar panels and because caravans have batteries, they could even be reasonably effective in a low-power caravan environment. In fact caravans with 12v lighting and gas cylinders for cooking and heating might cope quite well with intermittent power from wind turbines.

The practical stuff is easy enough for anyone to work out for themselves, so why don’t such ideas find their way into the political arena? After all, it's hardly a new or original notion.

Okay I know we aren't at all likely to go down this road. There are lots of reasons – there always are. Maybe the global warming brigade will push it, but somehow I don’t think it is close to their middle class hearts.

Thirty percent?

From AlanH

The sunny side of climate change

We spend our entire lives in one climate or another, so we may all claim intimate familiarity with climate behaviour even when we know little about the science.

Climate is a major factor in holiday destinations too. We we often toddle off in search of sunshine and higher temperatures - which oddly enough we don't regard as catastrophic.

This is a recent picture of our somewhat scrubby lawn after a frosty night. As you may be able to see, the morning sun has melted the frost apart from an area still in the shadow cast by our garage roof.

We’ve all seen something similar where night frosts are reasonably common, but what do we make of it apart from enjoying the ephemeral beauties of a sunny morning?

Well - first let's add another common experience.

Here in Derbyshire we recently had two consecutive days with the same temperature but different levels of sunshine. The first day was sunny and warm, the second was less sunny and felt less warm even though the air temperature was about the same for both days.

The house was warmer on the first day too, with all that sunshine streaming through the windows. So sunshine affects temperature without necessarily having an exact correspondence with air temperature.

Yet sunshine is important to plants, soil temperatures, soil moisture, shallow waters, oceans, forests, grassland and many animals. It isn’t only air temperature.

So why don't we hear more about sunshine in the CAGW  (catastrophic anthropogenic global warming) narrative? Is it :-

1. A paucity of reliable long-term sunshine records?
2. The poorly understood dynamics of cloud formation?
3. The problem of generating alarm about a bit more sunshine?

I'll go for all of them - particularly number 3. Long-term surface temperature records are available and they suit the CAGW narrative, so that big hot thing in the sky is quietly buried in the bowels of climate models. Yet simple observations such as frost on the lawn suggest a much more nuanced and complex story.

This is a non-technical post, not about solar effects on our climate, but human behaviour. It merely suggests how easy it has been to build an alarming climate narrative partly by leaving out a complex, yet familiar and generally welcome aspect of daily life - sunshine.

Do susceptible folk notice the significance of that frosty lawn once the CAGW narrative has dulled their critical faculties?

I don’t suppose they do.

Frozen blossom

From armenianow.com

I see the chattering classes are still willing to spout the latest IPCC fairy tales.

Increasing magnitudes of warming increase the likelihood of severe, pervasive, and irreversible impacts” warns the latest report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Meanwhile, in the real world some people still have to make a living. ArmeniaNow reports on the damage caused to fruit crops by unusually heavy snow and freezing temperatures.

A powerful cyclone that penetrated Armenia and was accompanied with a sharp temperature drop, hail and heavy snow has caused huge damage to the country’s agricultural sector.

Apricot, cherry, peach, plum orchards in the Ararat valley and low-lying parts of the foothills in which trees had already been in blossom were affected by the onslaught of the cold front over the weekend.

The Ministry of Agriculture has not yet published information on the scale of the damage caused by the weekend weather event.

Gyulnara Avetisyan, meanwhile, says the latest snowfalls and freezing temperatures are the hardest in her memory.

“I don’t remember such heavy snow and a drop in temperatures by 10 degrees,” she says.