omega mail

The Daily Mail, to those of you that don't know it, is a rather bland comic for adults with learning difficulties. It rarely resorts to using words of more than one syllable, and paints a peculiar view of the world which seems to have absolutely no relation to reality. It's policy is socialism, intolerance and ignorance, and it embraces these concepts with an enthusiasm that is breathtaking.

It detests its readers. It considers them to be stupid and scared. It assumes they never interact with the world beyond twitching the curtains.

And what a world it paints! Criminals (usually foreign) lurk in every corner, the country has lost its way, politicians merely exist to make things worse, teenagers and the workshy are stealing their money ... and they are coming for you! Every real and imagined danger is built up to hysterical daftness, they want you to stay indoors and never go out.

Frightening people is what they do. But they frighten about all the wrong things. The things people SHOULD be frightened about they pretend isn't happening.

Their latest mad stunt is to claim that the world is COOLING down. This is based on a purely spurious figure (for ONE summer!!) that suggests the Arctic ice cap isn't melting quite so quickly as it has been, to them this means that we are heading to another Ice Age!! This rubbish is actually published by them, who knows, some people may even believe it!

Of course none of this stops the ice melting. Whilst the area of ice may be a little larger than last year, it's volume continues to decline. It has been doing that for years.

Now think about this. One (false) reading and the Mail immediately jumps to the conclusion that the world is cooling. Yet years of figures going the other way is irrelevant. You couldn't make it up!

chutney first!

 

A few months ago we bought an expensive tomato plant (£4.99!) which was on a grafted root 'for higher yield'. For the first week or two we thought we'd been sold a dummy as it really struggled, but

soon it flourished and now has about 400 fruits - small plum tomatoes. The trouble is they were ripening faster than we could eat them so we needed a solution. Chutney! I've never made chutney (or anything else much) before, but I thought I'd give it a try.

Growing your own is only part of the process of becoming food self sufficient. You also need to know how to preserve stuff to get you through the winter. Pickling, drying, storing, smoking ... chutney. And the time to learn is now, so you can keep practising until you get it right! And of course if it goes wrong for now at least there's always the local shop to buy from ...

 

I picked 750g of the tomatoes, all the red ones in fact.

 

Chopped 'em.

 

Then to our cooking apple tree that's fruited for the first time this year, and picked 5.

Peeled!

 

 

Supermarket ingredients added! Raisins, muscovado sugar, green pepper, onion and cyder vinegar.

 

Boil for 40 minutes - great fun!

 

Then into the Kilner jar!

 

Success - and if I can do it anyone can!

more energy wasted ...

 

There's no real argument over fracking. It is simply an act of desperation that governments are hoping will muddy the energy waters (in more ways than one) whilst using up scarce energy resources even more quickly.

 

I've never heard so much bullshit about anything - which suggests that governments worldwide are REALLY scared, for why else would they do this?

 

Fracking WON'T add a single litre of energy to world supplies, it will REDUCE what remaining energy there is. Why? Simple, fracked oil and gas is a last resort. Had it ever been a sensible energy source it would have been exploited decades ago. We are WASTING good energy to get at BAD, it makes no sense at all. The amount of conventional energy used to get this stuff out will, when all the transportation, equipment, policing, production and infrastructure investment energy costs are taken into account (which would be ZERO if we left the muck in the ground) far exceed any actual product that is got out. Basically fracking is a vanity project only viable in an age of easy and cheap energy, it would die an instant death in a world where net energy (EROEI) is a widely understood concept.

 

Fracking WON'T reduce the cost of energy. It will increase it. The costs in both money and energy of drilling at Balcombe have been enormous and not a single drop of oil or gas has been produced - and NEVER will be! Even if some wells do produce oil and gas they will simply be sold on the world market which is currently seeing conventional oil and gas deplete, ALL energy costs are tied to the cost of oil in any case. To suggest that some sort of bucolic socialist patriotic autarkhic secondary market in fracked oil and gas will develop (British gas and oil for British volk!) just shows how out of touch with reality Cameron and our government are. They take us for idiots. Daily Mail and Sun readers may be, but the rest of us aren't!

 

Fracking WILL damage communities, water supplies, food supplies, air quality and social relations.

 

Fracking WILL increase the cost of energy and the speed of climate change. It will also deplete energy sources more quickly.

 

The question has to be asked - what is so wrong in the world that any government or company would consider exploiting this wasteful, expensive, polluting muck?