In a world where every week new TV shows and articles seek to convince us all that people on welfare are feckless, lazy and can't budget, we need to put forward the alternative reality.
A crisis that started with an EU summit fiasco three months ago may reach its climax on Thursday with an EU summit failure as Putin's short-term hard power collides with European longer-term soft power and leaves the EU looking weak and feckless.
The Tory party commitment to this referendum is feckless and reckless.
Looking at these figures, some might say this is the fault of the feckless, of those who wanted newly built flats, German kitchens and exotic holidays during the boom but couldn't afford them.
And through this local's view of feckless and hostile black inhabitants, perhaps we can sense something of how the world might have looked to those five young men as they climbed into their Hilux that freezing July night.
Even his critics know that in today's world the cost of borrowing punishes the feckless.
As it propagates perverse caricatures of communities brimming with the feckless and the idle, the actual situation facing people around the UK is airbrushed out of the picture.
A year earlier, the show was forced to apologise to the Mexican ambassador to the UK, who complained about a special in which presenter Richard Hammond described Mexicans as "lazy, feckless and flatulent" with his co-presenters Clarkson and James May branding their food "refried sick".
In his Today show appearance, Cruz rejected the notion that he was an intransigent extremist whose unbending positions in the Senate had made him an enemy of compromise – the most glaring evidence of which, his critics say, being the partial shutdown of the federal government he helped precipitate in October 2013 with a profoundly feckless attempt to block the president's healthcare law.
How calling him feckless (which at the time was written with affectionate exasperation) would not help my relationship with him.
The German backlash was severe, with the media denouncing Greek spongers and feckless southern Europeans while attacking Merkel for betraying the principles supposed to underpin the euro.
