Stop press .....

Preface - there is little punctuation to this article 'cos I typed it quickly - just read it quickly and do your best ...

Gobsmacked - I am truly gobsmacked! (Look it up you non-northerners.)

I have just heard on the news that some money-grubbing councils in England (a country that is currently majoring in an insidious fascism of covert taxation and over weaning interference in personal liberties) are proposing to fine motorists who "refuse" to turn off their engines in stationary traffic and that the zealous Hitler youth movement that is also known vicariously as traffic enforcement officers, parking attendants and illegal immigrants (oops - sorry - mustn't generalise - though illegal immigrants are usually the most polite of this lot and invariably have better teeth for some reason!) , will be empowered to shove a probe up your stationary exhaust and God-forgive you if they sense even a whiff of an emission gas. KERCHING - you owe them a reasonable fine, to off-set your unnecessary carbon emission, instead of your thought that what you actually owe them is a conversion of their probe into something all together more anal.

I have checked the calendar and it is actually March 1st (so no April fools due yet) so this idea must have been floated into the news to soften us up - to see if we will react in a sort of, "fuck you - were not gonna vote for you again" sort of way.

Are these people of this world?

Are they willing to prop-up expenditure not often based upon practical need, but the political aspirations of bureaucratic half-wit policy makers who, if not employed by the council, would be unemployable, such is their apparent dislocation from practical, real-world people "on the street". (Am I sounding like a rabid dog yet? - not that I have ever conversed with a rabid dog by the way).

We (you and me and the rational people) recognise that a car that is stopping and starting is wasting fuel at a prodigious rate (compared to a quiet, low tick over when stationary); that the hydrocarbon emissions per "traffic jam" or "rush hour" misery will be huge and that the noise of hundreds of cars starting and stopping , restarting and restarting and restarting (you get the drift of this I'm sure) would be a bigger ecological "disaster" then just letting us overburdened motorists slog our lemming-like way to "work". I refrained from using the words, "to our chosen career choice" as for us low-life, lower-middle-class oinks there is no career, just a vacuous hope that your job will not disappear overnight, when your foreign owner (I am not thinking of TATA of India at this time - honest!) decides it is better for them to "mothball" a major UK steel-works, because their carbon-offset reward is greater then trade to be had at this difficult point in the international steel trade cycle. (Though I would bet that just a bit more steel will now be made in India)

Phew - did I really just write that little diatribe? Look out Jack Dee - the new Mr. Misery is in town and coming your way! While I'm here, you don't often here the use of gobsmacked and then I came across this BBC article about climate change - something we can no-longer deny, nor exacerbate further if we wish crops to continue growing (for example).

SOURCES:-
http://www.southportvisiter.co.uk/southport-news/southport-southport-news/2009/11/27/stationary-motorists-in-sefton-could-be-fined-for-leaving-engines-running-if-plans-are-approved-101022-25263545/

http://www.steel-beam.co.uk/blog/second-corus-plant-to-be-mothballed

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/6847227/Questions-over-business-deals-of-UN-climate-change-guru-Dr-Rajendra-Pachauri.html