Monthly Archives: November 2010

SIZE NINE CARBON FOOTPRINT…

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The central part of BBC reporting of climate change is an unquestioning acceptance of the tenets of the green religion. Here David Shukman – enlarging his size nine BBC carbon footprint with a nice trip to Texas in advance of Cancun – admiringly tells us that there are more wind turbines in the southern state than almost anywhere else. Breathlessly, too, he trots out their output as if, without a doubt, these monstrosities are going to be a replacement for the nasty coal and oil and gas. True, he talks to a few of those who oppose both the turbines and the concept of climate change; but his condescending tone implies strongly that these are right-wing Republican nutters.

I note, too, that Mr Shukman omits key issues which I would have regarded as important in a longer-form background story of this kind. He has not a scintilla of curiosity about whether wind farms are actually efficient, or whether they are – as T.Bone Pickens clearly believes – “green”. Matt Ridley (writer of the book The Rational Optimist) posted on this very issue yesterday, and Mr Shukman, had he been at all objective, could have dug it out. What he says is devastating:

Every wind turbine has a magnet made of a metal called neodymium. There are 2.5 tonnes of it in each of the behemoths that have just gone up to spoil my view in Northumberland. The mining and refining of neodymium is so dirty (involving repeated boiling in acid, with radioactive thorium as a waste product), that only one country does it: China. This year it flexed its trade muscles and briefly stopped exporting neodymium from its inner Mongolian mines. How’s that for dangerous reliance on a volatile foreign supply?

Besides, wind does nothing to reduce carbon emissions. As Robert Bryce shows in his book Power Hungry, even Denmark, which can switch off imported Norwegian hydro power when the wind spins its many turbines, has failed to save any significant net carbon emissions through wind. The intermittent nature of the wind means that fossil-fuel power stations have to be kept going, or inefficiently powered up and down. Besides, the total power produced from even the biggest wind farms is so small that, as a strategy for reducing carbon emissions significantly, wind power is a failure

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This lack of inclusion of such key facts is deliberate bias by omission and shows this story up for what it really is – yet another part of the BBC’s endless no-expense-spared green crusade.

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HOT HARRABIN

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With impeccable timing (cold weather is never “climate” to the BBC, only hot spells are), Roger Harrabin rushes to tell us about the alarmists’ pronouncement that 2010 is on course to be the hottest year ever, ever, ever, in the known history of the universe or anything. In usual lapdog fashion, he recycles the claptrap of the Met Office. Shame he did not pause for a second to look at this alternative view of the stats , or to register that – like everything else from the East Anglia econuts – their presentations are as reliable as a three-card trick huckster. They are so desperate to scare us that any old tosh will do – as this item on Met Office re-writing of statistics also shows (the point here is that the measurements were fine when they supported warmism; a re-write is going on now to make sure they do so again). Mr Harrabin, I note, does mention that sceptics don’t accept the Met Office spin, but the main thrust of the subbing leaves no doubt that the BBC wants us to believe that this is AGW in all its awfulness. The Met Office predictions were in yesterday’s Guardian, and I was half hoping that – for once – he would refrain from his usual alarmist Pavlovian response. I should have known better. And this is his lament that Copenhagen did not reach new binding targets on CO2 emissions.

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The BBC And Palin – Her Riposte..

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Naturally the BBC went orgasmic over Sarah Palin’s “gaffe”

Former Alaskan governor and potential 2012 presidential contender Sarah Palin has made a gaffe on a radio show by saying North Korea is a US ally.
Answering questions from host Glenn Beck she said, “Obviously, we’ve got to stand with our North Korean allies.”

Notice the weasel wording. Even though during the rest of the interview she had been talking of the need to support South Korea what was clearly a slip of the tongue has been twisted to give the impression she doesn’t know the difference between North and South Korea.
The Beeb, of course, was, as usual, following the lead of its left/liberal partners in the US media, who as one jumped onto this story with glee. But Palin always fights back – something the media on both sides of the pond find quite shocking because she does it via Facebook and therefore avoids the filters of the media monopolists.

A Thanksgiving Message to All 57 States

My fellow Americans in all 57 states, the time has changed for come. With our country founded more than 20 centuries ago, we have much to celebrate – from the FBI’s 100 days to the reforms that bring greater inefficiencies to our health care system. We know that countries like Europe are willing to stand with us in our fight to halt the rise of privacy, and Israel is a strong friend of Israel’s. And let’s face it, everybody knows that it makes no sense that you send a kid to the emergency room for a treatable illness like asthma and they end up taking up a hospital bed. It costs, when, if you, they just gave, you gave them treatment early, and they got some treatment, and ah, a breathalyzer, or an inhalator. I mean, not a breathalyzer, ah, I don’t know what the term is in Austrian for that…

And the beauty of that rather confusing riposte? It consists entirely of mangled word salad from Barack Obama, each one backed up with Youtube clips…

Read the rest here and realise how Palin is playing completely out of the box…..

cross posted at The Aged P

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Question Time LiveBlog 25th November 2010

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Question Time tonight comes from Maidstone in Kent, once the parliamentary seat of Disraeli, location of the largest paper recycling factory in Europe and birthplace of the bloke who plays “Barry” in Eastenders.

On the panel tonight we have Ken Clarke MP, ex-GMTV sofa-bunny Gloria de Piero MP, Nigel Farage MEP (presumably the token right-winger) “Lord” Ashdown, and someone called Kate Mosse….who has written a novel….about France. Maybe they tried to book the supermodel and it all went horribly wrong.

For those playing the Buzzword Bingo we’ll be using the Insulting Johnny Foreigner Rules, meaning that Godfrey Bloom makes an unexpected entry on tonight’s cards. Bonus points for Führer, Nazis and fascists; and the insult cranks and gadflies is also in play. References to the student riots and tuition fees will only count if the BBC narrative of LibDem betrayal is included. Same sentence only will count, and the adjudicator’s decision is final. Repeated over-use for years means that unfortunately Thatcher and Ashcroft are temporarily off the table.

The LiveBlog will also cover the awful This Week with Andrew Neil, Michael Portillo and a random socialist windbag – all joined by some deranged F-List wannabe-celebs.

Your dynamic Moderation team of David Vance, TheEye and David Mosque will be prowling the perimeter suspiciously here from 10:30pm.

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Palin/Obama Double Standards

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When Obama made his gaffe about visiting 57 states, his slip of the tongue about “my Muslim faith“, and displayed his ignorance about the military when mispronouncing “corpsman” (particularly embarrassing for the Commander in Chief), none of the incidents was reported by the BBC. When he appeared on Jay Leno’s show in March 2009, Obama’s description of his own bowling skills as “like Special Olympics” created many headlines and much comment around the world, and yet it wasn’t even mentioned in Rajini Vaidyanathan’s gushing account of the evening. (There was an online report later, but only after Obama had apologised.)

But when Sarah Palin misspeaks the BBC decides it’s news. (World Service journo Robyn Bresnahan couldn’t resist declaring her shock on Twitter and, inevitably, Richard Bacon was banging on about it on his show today.)

Perhaps someone from the BBC – or one of its drive-by supporters – could explain this double standard.

(Hat-tips all round)

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Our Culture

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The Guardian’s favourite cartoonist.
“Steve Bell – At the centre of our culture”
(David Yelland. Today radio 4.)

Update: New Sharon cartoon to replace previous image that wasn’t by the Guardian’s favourite cartoonist Steve Bell. Sorry for any inconvenience, and thanks to Mr Gregory for pointing out my mistake.

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BEYOND PARODY

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As several B-BBC readers have pointed out, the BBC has spent countless amounts of our money developing a “carbon footprint calculator” – launched yesterday with the requisite worthy pronouncements about saving the planet – which henceforward all its employeees will have to follow. Not only that, the corporation in its wisdom now plans to foist this smug self-righteousness upon the television industry as a whole. My question is why the hell were the BBC not making such economies of energy use anyway? It’s public money and every penny of usage should be tracked. The need for such measures confirms profligacy, and to cloak them in weasel words and nonsense jargon is simply hypocritical, especially from an organisation that has among the most pampered and well-paid employees in the land.

What’s also terrifying about the footprint nonsense is that it underlines that the BBC is a lead partner in spreading the lies about climate change, and that those lies have infected virtually the whole of industry and the political class. I was at a presentation on Monday at big advertisers Ogilvy and Mather; they have a whole “sustainability” unit that peddles such moonshine among its clients. Yesterday, too, BBC eco alarmist-in-chief Roger Harrabin was busy chairing a conference held by the National Environment Agency (no cuts there, then!) of a whole legion of fellow establishment fanatics, ranging from the Bishop of Liverpool to Caroline Spelman from the government. All of them were intoning with religious fervour that our ways are wicked and that we are damned. If they weren’t gobbling billions of our money in their mad zealotry it would be funny. But it isn’t. It’s beyond parody.

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STUDENT GRANT ON THE RAMPAGE…

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I thought Nick Robinson’s coverage of the student thuggery in London was a disgrace. At every opportunity he did his best to excuse the thugs and you know why? Because the BBC loves the set to with the Coalition. Did you see it? Thoughts? Rather than focus on the students violence, it’s all about the Lib-Dems breaking promises. Undermining the Coalition is the BBC meme.

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Two in a Million.

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We tear our hair over the way BBC journalists misrepresent issues we care about, so maybe we should sympathise with poor old Hamza A Tzortzis who complains rather perceptively that decontextualised references aren’t fair.

He has responded to John Ware’s Panorama ‘British Schools, Islamic Rules’ with a press release. (H/T Elder of Ziyon)

“In short, the programme misrepresented established Islamic teachings on a range of issues in a manner that portrayed them as crude and insensitive whilst linking them to social unrest and violence.”

I know how he feels about being misrepresented, but I’m not so sure about the rest. He quotes from a statement by Saqib Sattar , Vice Chair of the Islamic Education and Research Academy.
“The attack on Muslim schools as an institution is both ill-informed and misguided” He praises the academic excellence of these schools, which he attributes to their being rooted in Islamic scholarly tradition, then seamlessly encompasses all faith schools in a sweeping statement which compares them with an easy target – failing secular state schools.

Hamza A Tzortzis also says that Islamic law is like ours, only better. and that before we cut the bits off we really really make sure we’ve got proof. Honest.

Elder notices that their response didn’t actually contradict the Panorama. He reproduces this quote from the iERA press release:

“The attack on mainstream Islamic speakers because they hold established theological views is making the job of community cohesion difficult, as is the constant misconstruing or lack of context with regards to their statements. The programme-makers would have been better served to look deeply into the Islamic scholarly tradition and its historical impact, and they would have found a beautiful model of community cohesion. For example it is a well known historical fact that Islam and Muslims for centuries have been offering protection to the Jewish community.

and Elder concludes:” That “beautiful model of cohesion” is that the despised Jews can be “protected” as long as they meekly accept their inferior status and pay the jizya tax to their Muslim overlords. But that is apparently in no way incompatible with schoolbooks that ask Muslim children to detail all the “reprehensible” characteristics of Jews, which seems to be an established theological view.“

A set of two whole Panoramas have flown in the face of tradition, deviated from the norm, and departed from the default position! Both Jane Corbin’s Mavi Marmara Panorama and John Ware’s ‘British Schools, Islamic Rules’ Panorama strayed from the usual BBC pattern of sanitising Islam and denigrating Israel. Whatever next?

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