Monthly Archives: August 2011

HIDEOUSLY MALE…

By | |
12 Comments

When he took over BBC1, Controller Danny Cohen said the Corporation was overrun with middle-class programmes. In his first speech at the Edinburgh Television Festival since moving to BBC1 from BBC3 in November, Mr Cohen, 37, said: ‘I want to get the balance right and for people to think that on BBC1 we have a greater diversity. Now he has turned his attention to crime drama, saying there are too many male detectives on TV.   Hideously white. Now Hideously male. As a Biased BBC reader pointed out to me; 

“Personally, I think
there are too many white, middle-aged, males at BBC, pushing political agendas
instead of doing their jobs – I trust that Danny Cohen will do the right thing
and step down!”

I guess it’s only when we have transsexual Islamic Detectives solving crime under Sharia Law that Danny will feel his mission is accomplished?

Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.

THE RACE IS ON..

By | |
4 Comments

Isn’t it inspirational the way the BBC spends OUR cash?

The BBC has used licence fee payers’ cash to buy hundreds of tickets to the 2012 Olympics for staff and guests, writes Jon Coates. Despite receiving press passes for its army of commentators, cameramen and production crew, it has bought 430 tickets, an average of about 27 for every day of the Games. Matthew Sinclair, director of ­campaign group TaxPayers’ ­Alliance, said it was an inappropriate use of public funds. He said: “The BBC shouldn’t be buying tickets to impress corporate contacts at the expense of ordinary licence fee payers, many of whom will have been unable to get their own seats.”

So, is this a proper use of our money?

Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.

NEWSGASM…

By | |
10 Comments

All the MSM were as bad, but the BBC, as usual, was a cheerleader in whipping up a major storm in a teacup over hurricane Irene. Of course severe bad weather on the eastern seaboard of the US is potentially news. But the BBC is now so determined to ram down our throats that all climate events prove its alarmist narrative that coverage of such events loses all proportion. By the time Irene hit New York it was not a hurricane but a storm with 50mph winds. And of course, 21 lives lost is always tragedy, but it is not a catastrophe or a disaster. It’s a shame that the corporation can’t spend more time frothing at the cause of most climate-related deaths – bitter cold.

A disaster it is. That’s how the BBC is still casting it this morning:

The BBC’s Laura Trevelyan in New York says Irene threatened 65 million people along the US east coast – thought to be largest number of Americans ever affected by a single storm.

The clear intent is to raise Irene to the level of the worst storm in US history. What utter tosh. Try these, for starters, nine out of 10 from the days when alarmists say that CO2 levels were safe. The entire feature is larded with the same immoderate language: “deep scars”, “billions of dollars”…and so on, and of course, there’s an obligatory warning that another such catastrophe could be on its way. Plus – the ultimate BBC bonus – the sainted Obama says the worst is not yet over.

Alan Caruba of the Canada Free Press has coined a word for it – a newsgasm.

The reality is that the US has always been subject to the risk of hurricanes. This one was bad weather but it was not anywhere near as devastating as the alarmists predicted, thank goodness. The BBC can’t acknowledge this because it is locked in an end-of-the-world narrative.

Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.

FOR BETTER FOR WORSE

By | |
16 Comments

I love this one. According to BBC eco-warrior Matt McGrath, the number of mosquitoes is in sharp decline in parts of Africa because “climate change” has (without question) changed rainfall patterns and “disrupted” (poor darlings!) their breeding cycle. Could this be a cause for celebration – a positive outcome despite our wicked carbon dioxide emitting ways? Er, no. He’s dug out a quote from a gloom merchant who warns that children growing up in mosquito-free areas will suffer all the more in future epidemics when the blood suckers return. So to the BBC, “climate change” makes things worse even when it makes things better.

I note that Richard Black is back, and is adding to the BBC’s propaganda drive by the bucketload. I can’t face discussing the totally predictable drivel he has written about Arctic ice melting and climate change causing civil war. My conclusion? There is no climate change without Richard Black.

Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.

The BBC Solicits Advice On The US Economy

By | | , ,
16 Comments

BBC News Online has a little piece entitled “US economy: What can be done to stimulate growth?”

It’s actually not so bad, with two of the four economists interviewed taking positions which aren’t 100% in favor of more borrowing and spending. Although, there is an obvious bias on the part of the online editor who chose them. The first up, Robert di Clemente (a generally sharp guy) speaks more truth than the other three combined, and makes real points about why we are where we are. The other three either say “Please, sir, may I have some more QE”, or suggest that we may as well get around to doing more of it.

Naturally, one of them is the BBC’s favorite far-Left economists not named Paul Krugman, one David Blanchflower. I’m sure many people here have seen him over and over again on the BBC (type his name in the search field on this blog).

What’s interesting is that only di Clemente says outright that Government policies on jobs and growth have failed. He also tells us something that nobody has ever said on the BBC before: 40% of jobs losses have come from three industries: housing, automotive, and finance. Think for a second about what this means, as two out of three are very relevant to the UK.

The reason for all those job losses in the housing industry is obvious: the whole thing was bloated way, way out of proportion, to an unsustainable level, by specific Government policies. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the Government-sponsored sub-prime mortgage scheme all led to houses being far overvalued, and a massive construction boom by developers in the hopes of everyone getting to buy and sell and flip houses and buy-to-let, and all that. Does that sound familiar? It should. So when that bubble burst, of course there were going to be an awful lot of people out of work.

That doesn’t mean that we need to do something to raise the industry back up again to unsustainable levels so all those people can have jobs again, either. It means that many of those jobs should never have existed in the first place, and were actually based on an ethereal foundation. Things never should have gotten so out of hand. If many of those jobs hadn’t existed, it’s quite possible many of those now unemployed would have found work in other, more sustainable sectors, and would still have jobs now.

The automotive industry has been bleeding jobs for ages, and the bailout didn’t stop it from continuing. The loans and what amounted to taxpayer funding of union pensions didn’t add a single job, and hasn’t put a single person back to work. Nor can any QE scheme return the automotive industry to its former, unsustainable level. So again, Government policies did not and cannot bring back jobs.



Di Clemente also mentions the finance industry. I know what you’re thinking: “Hang on, the BBC told me that we bailed out the evil bankers so the greedy bastards who caused all our woes got off scott free and still got their massive bonuses, etc.” So how can there be unemployment in the finance industry? It certainly doesn’t jibe with the BBC Narrative.

In fact, 106 banks went bust in 2009, large and small, retail and investment. Last year, the number was 109. Some of these got bought out and absorbed into larger companies, which, or course, still means plenty of people made redundant. This doesn’t include venture capital firms, hedge funds, etc., which have also folded since then.

The other fascinating thing di Clemente mentions is that there are plenty of employers out there looking to hire, but simply can’t find the right skilled workers. Apparently all those liberal arts graduates with watered down degrees we’re churning out don’t have the right skills for real existing jobs. Does that sound familiar?

The next bubble to burst in the US is student debt. That’s another Government scheme artificially propping up an entire industry to unsustainable levels. Cracks are beginning to show, but it will be a couple years before it all starts to go south in the manner of the mortgage crisis. Watch this space, and don’t expect the BBC to tell you about it. It’s actually rather strange that the BBC has never mentioned this, considering how much energy they’ve spent telling you that student debt is terrible so the nasty Tories should abolish tuition fees like they do in wonderful Scotland. You’d think they’d be looking for some context which might back up their ideology. Only they can’t be bothered because they just know they’re right, so it’s not important.

In essence, di Clemente raises more interesting points in 340 words than an entire year of BBC reporting on the US economy. He basically blows all of Mardell’s and Flanders’ reporting out of the water. These are major issues, none of which are discussed openly and honestly by the BBC. He’s smart enough not to point his finger directly at the President, and instead blames the ideological divide in Congress. But it’s very clear from his statement which side he thinks is the problem, and it ain’t the heroes of the BBC. Why isn’t this man on speed dial instead of Blanchflower? Ah, I see I’ve answered my own question.

More damning is the fact that there are exact parallels in Britain for most of this. Yet the BBC never discusses it. Where’s the context? Why not look for lessons to be learned, BBC? Is it because you don’t like what you see and it will hurt the Narrative?

Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.

Questions and Answers

By | | , , , ,
45 Comments

Last night’s Any Questions panel spoke for multiculturalism, women, and the Arab Spring. The solitary male member, if you’ll excuse the expression, was Jehangir Malik OBE, UK Director of Islamic Relief, who was roped in to opine on behalf of the Arab World.

The panellists still spoke elegiacally of the Arab Spring, which, for them still heralds the dawning of a new age of enlightenment. It’s just as if they’d never heard of the disconcerting rise of Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, or listened to any of the creeping doubts that are beginning to emerge everywhere but in their own consciousness. They seem a bit like the befuddled fugitive who hasn’t discovered that the war he’s been hiding from for the last decade ended years ago.

In this vein, they expressed undiluted optimism over the Arab Spring, and deep joy at the diversity and multiculturalism in the UK.

The thing that was omitted from the discourse was, of course, Islam.

Diversity is undoubtedly beneficial. I myself am diverse. Variety is the spice of life, and variegated skin-colour, racial origin, a multiplicity of traditions and customs are all jolly good ingredients when added to the mix in correct, proportional measure.

But political correctness ignores the essential truth, which is that the benefits immigration might bring to the UK must outweigh and not overwhelm the very things that make it an attractive destination. There comes a point where those who ‘flock’ from far and wide to partake, begin to resemble tourists who, by sheer numbers, wreck the beauty and tranquility of the tourist attractions they visit, robbing them of their attractiveness in the process. Before people recognise what is happening, too many are profiting from the status quo, so don’t want to admit there’s a problem.

The Islamic faith may well be beneficial in potentially volatile Islamic regimes which are kept on an even keel by people we consider tyrants and despots. They control populations by fear, as do religious leaders who stunt the imagination by persuading vulnerable people that this life is a mere preparation for the next.

Refusing to get to grips with the fact that a functioning democratic society requires the population to be reasonably free from constraints that interfere with the ability to think, is a huge handicap. That’s what political correctness does to us. It won’t permit open discussion, and explains the puzzling tyranny of the P.C. edict, which proclaims ” to be good, one must be non-judgmental.” That leads to moral equivalence, which in turn might explain the frequent appearance on our screens, courtesy of the BBC, of Abdel al-Bari Atwan. Mr. Atwan has been endorsing last week’s attacks near Eilat in which Israelis were murdered.

‘The Eilat operation, as I see it, corrected the course of the Arab revolutions and refocused them on the most dangerous disease, namely the Israeli tyranny. This disease is the cause of all the defects that have afflicted the region for the past 65 years…’

CiFWatch, the watchdog website that monitors the Guardian’s increasingly overt antisemitism, is concerned about Atwan’s frequent contributions to Comment is Free. The Guardian represents the intelligentsia, many of whom have travelled so far to the left that they’ve gone right round the back and out the other side, having picked up radical Islam along the way, like a burr on your woolly jumper. How did that happen? It’s inexplicable to many of us, and apparently to them. At least, I haven’t heard a convincing explanation so far.

The BBC’s fondness for hiring Abdel al-Bari Atwan is clear. He’s never off our screens. Opining on this and that, his eyes bulging preternaturally, he’s regarded as an authority on all things Arab. Springs, Uprisings, and Resistance? Ask Abdel. His speciality is demonising Israel and fantasising about it being nuked.

Is he impartial? Is he sane? Are his prejudices balanced on the air, in the short term or the long term, by opposing views? Are his views given undue respect and credibility?

Why does the BBC give inflammatory, racist, antisemitic and warmongering individuals the oxygen of publicity on programmes like Dateline or Newsnight? We know the BBC is mischievous and likes a bit of a barney for the ratings. But this is serious. They might want to try and make sparks fly, but sparks have a habit of getting out of control if they’re given free rein.

Any Questions? Here’s one. Does the panel think the BBC is after a conflagration?

A caller has phoned in to Any Answers to self-flagellate over our colonial past, and has invented a new despot named ‘Dugaffi.” I despair.

Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.

BBC MIRACLE OR BBC CURSE

By | |
5 Comments

Mark Mardell, that pro-Obama shill operating Stateside is worth watching; A regular B-BBC contributor has held his latest pronouncements up to the light and this is what can be seen;

“Catching up with Mardell and his up close and personal attack on Rick Perry: Mark Mardell is a slippery fellow…giving truth but missing out salient facts that would alter people’s perceptions of what he says: He lays into the Republican Governor of Texas, Rick Perry, and tells us that there are people who would dispute that the Republicans (Thatcher admiring conservatives) have done as well as they say on the economy.

‘The Texas economy may feel like a miracle to some, but to others it is more like a diabolical torment. ‘

He links to an article by a Richard W Fisher (and note how up to date Mardell is..must be desperately scouring the internet to dig up any opposing voices)…..

http://dallasfed.org/news/speeches/fisher/2011/fs110817.cfm
Richard W. Fisher
Connecting the Dots: Texas Employment Growth; a Dissenting Vote; and the Ugly Truth (With Reference to P.G. Wodehouse)
August 17, 2011

Who is Fisher? He turns out he is a Democrat:


Richard W Fisher
‘…he was a candidate for the same U.S. Senate seat in the regularly scheduled election, defeating former Texas Attorney General Jim Mattox and U.S. Congressman Michael A. Andrews in the Democratic primary.’  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_W._Fisher

Mardell then links us to the Pastor Gerald Taylor of the Texas Organizing Project…...

‘Texas Organizing Project says it’s ‘not ACORN with a new name’ ‘

ACORN was a Obama supporting organisation that tried to fix elections in the US amongst many other scandals……and it looks as if TOP is formed along exactly the same lines organising ‘community leaders’ and getting involved in electoral organizing despite denials of doing so….

http://www.dallasnews.com/news/community-news/coppell/headlines/20100723-texas-organizing-project-says-it_s-not-acorn-with-a-new-name.ece
“We’re not ACORN with a new name,” Brim said. “We’re a completely new organization.”
TOP aims to work for improving schools, neighborhoods and access to health care and jobs. Brim said TOP is not working on any voter registration drives, though it may in the future.’

Really?
‘The Texas Organizing Project (TOP) promotes social and economic equality for low to moderate income Texans through community and electoral organizing.’

‘Many consider them a new version of an old community-organizing group that folded earlier this year after a string of controversies: ACORN. Like the defunct Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, TOP is a grass-roots community-organizing group. The new Houston-based nonprofit was formed by several former Texas ACORN employees.’

Texas Organizing Project Is Newest ACORN Spinoff Group
By Matthew Vadum on 3.29.10 @ 6:39PM
An inside ACORN source has just confirmed this to me: the Texas chapter of ACORN has pretended to break off from the national group and has incorporated itself under the name Texas Organizing Project.
http://spectator.org/blog/2010/03/29/texas-organizing-project-is-ne#

Want a job at the TOP?

http://www.unionjobs.com/staff/tx/tx-opef.html
Mission: The 501(c)(3) Organizing Table is a fiscally sponsored project of the Texas Organizing Project. The Voter Engagement Organizing Table is working in target communities in the Houston area and Harris County to engage underrepresented communities in the democratic process, develop new leadership from within these constituencies, take collective action on important policy issues and establish a long-term model and infrastructure for increasing voter participation in the County.
Job Title: Coordinator Voter Engagement Table; Reports to: Director Texas Organizing Project

Mardell has ‘forgotten’ to tell us that two of the opposing voices he has named are in fact Democrat supporters…..bearing in mind his blog is probably read in the US as well that surely amounts to an attempt to swing people’s voting decisions away from the Republican candidate……is the BBC like the Guardian (which had its nose punched when it similarly told Americans to ‘vote democrat’) subverting American politics to its own ends? Surely not?

Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.