GoodFuckingIdea.com

Not the Greeks or the teachers, you understand, but the fucking selfish, greedy arsehole financiers who caused this whole fucking problem in the first place, and the fuckwitted fucking politicians who did nothing to prevent it even though it was fucking obvious years off.

Imagine if your pay was being cut or your country privatised (it is) because the government decides it wants to subsidise the financial system still further (it does). Fuck that, sunshine! It’s not war for fuck’s sake – it’s just some made up numbers and some over-ambitious ideologies about European harmony which haven’t turned out well.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for cutting the crap out of stupid stuff and making savings where we can (no NHS cover for anyone who works in advertising, for example); but if this is to be an age of self-imposed austerity then we shouldn’t cut back on the very education which helps prevent the next such fuck up. No, Sir, you cut the bullshit, penalise the bejesus out of the perpetrators, and try to make life make sense again.

The Euro is a fucking great and well intentioned idea, and one which facilitates a lot of good activity. However because it ignores both the evidence and the theory  it’s also one which fucks things up on an outrageous and indefensible scale (brón orm,  Ã‰ire,  Î£Ï…γνώμη,  Î•Î»Î»Î¬Î´Î±).

Greece is suffering the same mistakes as happened in Argentina 10 years ago. They were screwed by the IMF which was set up as a  lender for development, but became a creditor demanding privileges. In the same way, the Euro project was all about helping each other out, but has (predictably) turned loan-shark. It’s not currently in our social psychology to help out others who are so distant from our tribe.

We would benefit from  more currencies to create  more resilience within the system, and to  encourage local trade.

So in the UK,  if traders would like to accept the Euro, they should be free to do so, but it should not be compulsory. And in Greece traders should be free to continue to use the Drachma, just as a Spanish town has reintroduced the peseta.

The way  we have  chosen to structure money is no longer the best system we can think of. Like a flat Earth and Newtonian physics, it has served us well for a while, but we should update it if we are to minimise future problems.

Do check out these links. They’re fucking good and frequently important reading since they tell the future. And if you read only one, make it this one.

You’re probably thinking that you’d have to be fucking nuts to ask your MEP for MORE pollution. Me too. How disappointing, then, that we have to remember the existence of oil lobbyists. These a-moral fuckers have been out and about fucking things up again and making enough noise to ensure we don’t think of the alternatives.

Having successfully persuaded the Canadian Government to  deliberately exclude data indicating a 20 per cent increase in annual pollution from Canada’s oilsands industry from a report on climate change that it was required to submit to the United Nations, now they are moving on to Europe.

The MEPs are trying to pass a Fuel Quality Directive to improve sourcing and sale of fuel in the EU.

Tar sands were originally named in draft proposals from the European Commission which were drawn up to ensure that member states were able to meet the legally binding target of reducing greenhouse gas by 6% by 2020.  But by last year – following intense lobbying from the Canadian government – all references to tar sands were dropped.

The pollution from Canadian oilsands production alone is greater than the greenhouse gas emissions of all the cars driven on Canadian roads.

So lots of MEPs are trying to raise the bar for sustainable sourcing and say that tar sands are just too fucking polluting to be worth even considering. However, lots of MEPs are also naive, stupid, ill-informed of alternatives, and pressured to compromise. You need to make sure they hear your voice and know that if you’re going to pay their fucking wage, they’d better fucking man-up and save the world, or at least prevent things from getting worse.

So, yes, you’d have to be fucking nuts to ask your MEP for MORE pollution. However you’d also have to be a bit silly to have read all this and not to  take the extra minute to ensure they hear you asking them for less.

I thought we were all agreed that it’s a fucking bad idea to fuck fish? If so, then what the FUCK is all this? “World’s oceans in ‘shocking’ decline” is NOT a good headline for a Monday. All the top ocean scientists have got together in a room, each of them already having a pretty good idea that the oceans were basically pretty fucked, and concluded that it’s WAAAAAAAAAAAY more fucked than any of them had individually realised.

We humans are beyond hope.

I really fucking despise the fact that I have to live in a world populated by irresponsible fucking idiots who can’t even get it together to work out that ‘plenty more fish in the sea’ is just a stupid fucking phrase to make dumped people feel better, not a motherfucking fisheries policy.

ARGH the rage! But what the fuck are we supposed to do about it? We know all the answers BECAUSE THEY ARE FUCKING SIMPLE: pay 90% of fisherman to fish out only pollutants, and pay them well; close down anyone putting anything remotely toxic into rivers or directly into sea*; tax aviation fuel at the same rate as UK cars to cut down CO2 emissions; implement the ZeroCarbonBritain plan immediately. And that’s just on day one.

* The next two biggest problems after plastics are agricultural fertilisers and human waste. In the sea, those are two pollutants. On land, human waste is a fucking fertiliser, meaning we’d get rid of one of the problems, and reduce the other. Yet again, the problem is the solution.

Next election can we all agree to vote TO SAVE THE WORLD? Fuck the economy, fuck everything else. Without a healthy planet you have nothing. To paraphrase Clinton, it’s the FUCKING ECOLOGY, stupid.

I want to hurt something.

Stuff dries on its own. If you hang it out for about 30 minutes in the sun or a few hours indoors in summer, by the time you come back it will be dry. It’s so astonishingly simple and works so elegantly that it’s almost enough to give one faith in a higher power.

So why the fuck would anyone spends a few hundred quid on a tumble drier, and another handful of cash to run the fucking thing?

There’s only one time when it makes sense: if it’s winter, you live in a flat with no outside space, and the drier was free. If this isn’t you, you now have all the encouragement you need to free yourself from the hassle of ownership and ecocide and never use a tumble drier again.

If you find you absolutely MUST use a tumble drier:

• I’m sorry that you live in a flat with no outside space, and that it’s winter.
• Try to fit the maximum load in your tumble dryer every time.
• Use a high spin-speed on your washing machine to get your washing as dry as you can before you start.
• Clean the lint filter every time you use the tumble dryer. A blocked filter prevents the hot air from circulating freely, so clothes take longer to dry.
• Make sure the room the dryer is in is well ventilated. This stops the tumble dryer from overheating. If it overheats, it takes longer to finish drying a load.

Sources: Do the Green Thing wiki and Which

E.F.Schumacher is best known for his critique of Western economies and his proposals for human-scale, decentralized and appropriate technologies, and is a complete fucking dude.