And now the weather (an accidentally political post)

From today's BBC weather site for our area:

Sunrise 05:16 (BST)
Sunset 20:56 (BST)
77°F high
61°F low

A typical pleasant summer's day. Just thought I'd record that for posterity before the next ice-age/ hurricane global mega ecological disaster arrives (for which we are no doubt supposed to feel responsible and consequentially miserable and GUILTY). Anyone noticed how damage to the environment is the new SIN!! We are all SINNERS for using tescos carrier bags and we will BURN (well, once the ozone layer has gone anyway). Really bugs me this. I didn't break the planet, it was broken when I got here and it'll still be broken when I depart. Yes I'll do my bit to ease the damage caused by my passage through life but I'm not going to let some no-hoper politicians distract me from the crappy job they're doing by making me worry about this all the time. Ditto for the credit crunch, pension black holes and the general state of the world economy.

Hmm. Actually, this is not an original thought: I appear to have just espoused Michael Crichton's theory from "State of Fear" (but not the plot, since that was bobbins), which I read in the Maldives a few years ago whilst watching some blokes heave chunks of tsunami debris off the island's reef. In it, Crichton basically says that politicians use these issues as a form of control - subjugate the popoulation by getting us to worry about things all the time. Same way religion was used to control the uneducated masses in the middle ages. Since we're more educated now though, something else is needed for the western world's populations to worry about (poorer areas of the world still get religion as the default option though). Etc. and so forth. Ooh, and London gets youth on youth knife crime to worry about as a special bonus.

Deluded or cynical? Well, since no-one seems to have actually gone on record saying he was talking nonsense, I guess that at least goes to show most of the western world leaders don't read Michael Crichton anymore when they're on the beach. What does Gordon Brown read on his sun lounger? I wonder..?