Monthly Archives: January 2010

Question Time 14th January 2010

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With 2010 now not just through the front door but making itself fully comfortable in your favourite armchair and smoking your cigars, we must surely be due a return to the weekly joy that is Question Time.

And indeed we are, for Question Time tomorrow comes from Finchley and the panel will feature amongst others Conservative MP Ken Clarke, comedienne Shappi Khorsandi and former Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie. More on the other panelists when details are published.

For those who wish to take part in the B-BBC Buzzword Bingo, we will be playing by the “Tudor Court Rules” meaning that ‘Thatchers‘ are worth double points and a ‘Climate Change‘ with an ‘Al Gore‘ on the same card means disqualification. The usual prizes will be awarded.

As usual, the live chat will begin here at 22:35 UK time. Please come and join us!

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Today’s Nazi words of wisdom from the BBC

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You may think that headline is overwrought, but it’s literally true. Today’s BBC front page http://www.bbc.co.uk currently has up, effectively as quote of the day, without any comment, and indeed with a slight implication of approval, the words of a prominent Nazi.

I don’t know how to record it for posterity, but the quote is towards the bottom left of the front page (as seen from Britain, anyway; the international version of the site may be different).

It comes as part of a “QI FACT OF THE DAY”, just after the information that Arthur Conan Doyle and WB Yeats believed in fairies. Placed thus, it reads to me as a kind of riposte to them:

“Unfortunately this earth is not a fairy-land, but a struggle for life, perfectly natural and therefore extremely harsh. MARTIN BORMANN”

Which is all very well, but the job of saying the stern words of sense in response to credulity could have been given to someone more savoury. Martin Bormann was Hitler’s Private Secretary and head of the Party Chancellery. He was condemned to death in absentia at Nuremberg.

OK, you don’t have to explain it to me. Whoever put this up has no idea who Bormann was but there were lots of those German philosopher blokes weren’t there? The BBC are not Nazis but numpties.

Update: Hat tip to Happysnapper who kindly provided this screenshot. I would also like to pass on Millie Tant’s comment:

It’s extremely crass of the BBC to quote a Nazi – and doubly crass: a murderer talking about the struggle for life. Yeah.

The Bormann quote is still there on the main page at 18.48 GMT.

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CLIMATEGATE BBC TERROR ALERT

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Fishy. Some days ago, the excellent Bishop Hill site broke the news that – rather bizzarely – the police National Domestic Extremism Unit is involved in investigating the ClimateGate leak at the University of East Anglia. The BBC has finally woken up to the story, and there are worrying signs that it is somehow part of the saga. First of all, it adamantly describes the leak as a “hack” even though this has not yet been established. Second, they have this extremely odd quote from the police:

“At present we have two police officers assisting Norfolk with their investigation, and we have also provided computer forensic expertise. While this is not strictly a domestic extremism matter, as a national police unit we had the expertise and resource to assist with this investigation, as well as good background knowledge of climate change issues in relation to criminal investigations.”

If I had been the journalist covering this story, I’d be asking first of all what the hell a terrorist unit is doing involved in ‘climate change’and what “expertise” in this field they claim to have. Second, with the world still on terrorist alert after the latest attempt to blow up a plane, how can a terrorist unit spare resources to investigate file hacking (if indeed, that is what it was) when the only ‘victim’ of this alleged crime is academic internal mail – and the leak was in any case in the public interest?

But not the BBC. It’s creepy beyond words that Climategate should be bracketed by the police as a terrorism incident, and equally so that the BBC should broadcast this chilling quote without asking such basic questions. My guess is that the police asked the BBC to carry the story as damage limitation because they suddenly realised that linking Climategate to terrorism was extremely questionable. In overall terms, the BBC has dismissed the importance of Climategate, but if it will provide material to attack ‘deniers’, they are on the case like a rat up a drain pipe.

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Unbelievable

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Here’s something that deserves to be aired on B-BBC.

Guantanamo Guard reunited with ex-inmates.

“But what were the pair doing in Afghanistan in 2001?
They explain that, being in their late teens and early twenties at the time, they had made a naïve, spontaneous decision to travel for free with an aid convoy weeks before a friend’s wedding, due to take place in Pakistan.”

If you believe that you’ll believe anything. The BBC seems to.
Harry’s Place shows the BBC sanitising radical Islam, and yet again meddling in an area that it shouldn’t.
An update includes a transcript of part of an interview on R5 where Victoria Derbyshire asks some questions, but eventually seems to give the Tipton Three the benefit of the doubt.

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Another Labour Luvvie

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The BBC began election year with a new topical comedy show hosted by a Tory-hating Labour supporter. What next, Labour luvvie Dermot O’Leary presenting election coverage? Actually, yes:

X Factor host Dermot O’Leary told of his “excitement” at the prospect of fronting a political show in the run-up to the general election.
The 36-year-old told the Radio Times he is obsessed with politics – but said the show would not be “particularly serious”.
The magazine said O’Leary is in talks with the BBC about presenting a political programme.
O’Leary said: “I won’t be the man with the swingometer, but politics is a huge obsession with me, so I’m incredibly excited about it.

Here’s O’Leary talking to the Guardian in 2003:

Labour, Tory, Liberal or Socialist Workers?

I suspect that these days I’m politically closest to the Socialist Workers, but they’d take all my money so it’s still Labour.

And from an article in the Independent in May 2005:

Shortly before the general election, O’Leary was branded a Labour luvvie after inadvertently suggesting at a Make Poverty History rally that Tony Blair should become head of state.

That rally, which took place during the 2005 election campaign, was covered by Ben MacIntyre in The Times:

OH, LUVVIE, I can’t tell you how marvellous it was; truly, darling, an unforgettable performance. There we were at the Old Vic Theatre — just twelve hundred of Labour’s closest friends — waiting for Tony and Gordon to do their matinee double act, when the whispered word went round the audience that the greatest political performer of our times would be making a cameo appearance — none other than old blue eyes, schmoozer in chief, the trouser president: Bill Clinton himself, via live satellite link.

The occasion was a rally — the biggest of the campaign so far — to mark World Poverty Day and held by the Make Poverty History coalition. Everybody who was anybody was there, le tout Labour: there was Dermot O’Leary, Big Brother presenter, and Alastair Campbell, Big Brother enforcer, and June Sarpong, the Channel 4 presenter.

The announcement of Ms Sarpong’s addition to the BBC election team can only be a matter of time.

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NEVER QUITE AS IT SEEMS…

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A B-BBC reader advises…

Did you see Marr on SundBlockquoteay, with Maureen lipman (Labour Supporter) and Tristam Hunt (Ex Labour Headquarters and prospective Labour candidate) reviewing the papers AND how quickly they glossed over Peter Wat’s new book! Tristram also had a go about climate change, funny his dad is a warmist ex-head of the met office.

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Dead as a dodo?

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Greenies, supported tirelessly by the BBC, never give up in their efforts to persuade us that we are all going to hell in a handcart. The UN, of course is the revered cheerleader, and today – as their ‘climate change’ fascism seems to have stalled a tad after Copenhagen – this corrupt Hydra has turned its attention to the need for ‘biodiversity’. There’s a special year devoted to it. So seriously does the BBC take this threat that it has sent Richard Black on a jolly to Berlin to watch the revered secretary-general deliver his hellfire sermon that we must stop our wicked ways. To him, there is no doubt what’s wrong:

The expansion of human cities, farming and infrastructure is (sic) the main reason. Dignitaries including UN chief Ban Ki-moon…will speak at the launch in Berlin. Mr Ban is due to say that human expansion is wiping out species at about 1,000 times the “natural” or “background” rate, and that “business as usual is not an option”.

As usual, Mr Black – in pursuit of his greenie zealotry – obviously thinks the science is totally settled and the words of Mr Ban are the Holy Writ. It’s the Wicked West to blame, as always. Shame that he could not do a little journalism and look for alternative views – this, for example from the Watt’s Up With That? blog. It points out that despite all the hot air about extinction:

Very few continental birds or mammals are recorded as having gone extinct, and none have gone extinct from habitat reduction alone. No continental forest bird or mammal is recorded as having gone extinct from any cause. Since the species-area relationship predicts that there should have been a very large number of recorded bird and mammal extinctions from habitat reduction over the last half millennium, I show that the species-area relationship gives erroneous answers to the question of extinction rates.

Complex stuff, but it shows just how deeply, deeply one-sided the BBC always is in its science coverage.

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Hold the front page!

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Shock, horror! Paul Hudson, the Yorkshire-based BBC weather reporter who caused a furore last year when he dared to break ranks from his warmist fanatic colleagues and suggested that the sun, not CO2, might be responsible for perceived global warming, has entered the fray again. This time, he’s pointed out that Joe Bastardi, of the climate realist weather service Accuweather, correctly forecast back in September that we were in for a tough winter, while the buffoons at the Met Office were busy using their new £170m computer to tell us that it was going to be – as ever- much milder than usual. Mr Hudson asks how this could have happened and poses in response a question which will no doubt leave his warmist colleagues speechless:

Could the model, seemingly with an inability to predict colder seasons, have developed a warm bias, after such a long period of milder than average years? Experts I have spoken to tell me that this certainly is possible with such computer models. And if this is the case, what are the implications for the Hadley centre’s predictions for future global temperatures? Could they be affected by such a warm bias? If global temperatures were to fall in years to come would the computer model be capable of forecasting this?

How long before Black, Harrabin &Co pile in with a horrified rebuttal?

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