Monthly Archives: February 2013

What’s the US military doing in a remote corner of the Philippines? Kate McGeown’s gone to find out.(12mins 30 secs)

International terrorism brought the US troops to the islands….to advise and assist…‘and its clearly paying off’.

And  look, the Filipino Jollibee restaurant chain is opening up franchises….

‘The place is a bit safer now but also a bit more American too.’

Do I detect a bit of regret about that?

Gotta celebrate that diversity and cosmopolitan atmosphere generated by all those ‘foreign’ food restauraunts as in the UK where having Chinese, Indian, Thai, Pizza and US burger chains all add to the wonderful multi-cultural mix that is the UK.

Seems a little bit of doubt about that applying to American food chains in non Western countries perhaps?

Much as Western influences were polluting the pure and noble savages of Qatar where the BBC’s Razia Iqbal suggests:  ‘ ‘importing’ Western culture such as orchestras will dilute what it is to be Qatari’……only to be rebuffed with a dose of reality:  ‘No, we have opportunities now beyond our wildest dreams in education and business and in daily life.’

The Qatar Philharmonic was established in 2008, the first western symphony orchestra in a Gulf state, and just one of a number of institutions intended to demonstrate the country’s cultural ambitions.

Razia Iqbal visits Katar, the official cultural village of Doha, and talks to members of the orchestra, many of whom have been imported from Europe. And she interviews the country’s ‘culture queen’, Sheikha Mayassa Al-Thani, daughter of the Emir of Qatar.

No such concerns about diluting British culture and what it is to be British from the BBC.

The Guardinianista’s are up in arms about the Sun’s frontpage:

But not too bothered about the Star:

The Guardian’s Paul Harris though is most upset to see similar frontpages in New York and says:

‘But after having read about the scandal in the UK, what I was not expecting to see as I walked to work in New York was the same offence repeated in New York’s daily newspapers – and, apparently, not a word of anger about it.’

Possibly the lack of interest in the Star’s frontpage and the American’s lack of outrage is connected…neither are related to Murdoch or News International….that is purely a BBC, Guardian and Fellow Traveller’s bête noire…no one else is really interested.

The Guardian itself seems entirely unconcerned about the Hard Left Mirror’s frontpage which seesm even more in bad taste….almost celebrating guns, being titled ‘BladeGunner’:

At least someone else noticed:

Andrew Bloch ‏@AndrewBloch

Blimey! Daily Mirror front page… “Blade Gunner” pic.twitter.com/fQmieHuE

The BBC itself is happy to use a not too dissimilar in style photo in their write up:

‘There is no living musician who has been more influential than Bob Dylan.’

So he must have something worthwhile to say….

“I realized at the time that the press, the media, they’re not the judge – God’s the judge,” says Dylan. “The only person you have to think about lying twice to is either yourself or to God. The press isn’t either of them. And I just figured they’re irrelevant.”

Yeah.

Kind of puts Billy Bragg in perspective….

Speaking of whom….The Picket Line Poet strikes again…As DV noticed, Billy Bragg has been putting in another appearance on R4.…anymore and he might as well be put on the payroll.

Now…there’s an idea…the BBC want an authentic working class tinge to their output….who better than Billy boy?   Make sure there’s somewhere for his whippet and pigeons  in the studio,  a spittoon, and nurse on standby…these working class heroes have had such a hard life they might just keel over from the stress at any moment. Gor blimey guvn’r.

Isn’t it an incongruous paradox that it is a lefty boot boy who is the über middle class R4’s favourite pet….do they have him like some form of performing monkey wheeling him in for a bit of amusement…..ever seen Trading Places?  Are they all laughing at him really whilst at the same time somehow horrified?

Looking for ‘bias’ on R4 on a Saturday morning is like shooting fish in a barrel…almost too easy to be worth the effort….but this morning had such a rich vein of worthy codswallop you’ve just gotta have a go….the Reverend Cole, Billy Bragg, Peter Oborne and FOOC…deep joy.

Bragg  is just beyond parody, more Bob Hope than Bob Dylan….a living cartoon stereotype of a corny old act dragged in from the 70’s and 80’s.  The simple trite leftwing tripe that he spouts, the soundbite slogans, the thoughtless makebelieve signifying nothing that trips off his tongue…..all no doubt just the right size to fit on a student placard….ironically it’s probably those very middle class students that he despises so much who paid Bragg’s mortgage.

Bragg thinks you shouldn’t be allowed to succeed however good you are, however popular…if you’re not working class…..ironic for this man who espouses equality he wants success handed on a plate to those from the council estate….hardly ‘authentic’.

Just wonder how many of these artists, groups and bands are from the 6percenters?  Not  many I’ll bet.

I don’t suppose Bob Dylan is working class, certainly not in attitude, and he went to university…..would Bragg allow him to be a success?…has he earned the right?

‘There is no living musician who has been more influential than Bob Dylan.’

I heard that said on the BBC recently as well…so it must be true.

What does Bob think about ‘authenticity’ and ‘roots’?……

“You’re born, you know, the wrong names, wrong parents. I mean, that happens. You call yourself what you want to call yourself. This is the land of the free.”

Ah….so no matter what your ‘birth’ you’ve still got a right to have a go?

So what made Dylan different? What pushed him out there?

“I listened to the radio a lot. I hung out in the record stores. And I slam-banged around on the guitar and played the piano and learned songs from a world which didn’t exist around me,” says Dylan.

He says that he knew even then that he was destined to become a music legend. “I was heading for the fantastic lights,” he writes. “Destiny was looking right at me and nobody else.”

So hard work and self belief and a bit of luck no doubt.  The secret of success….not a Billy Bragg quota system.

What really amused me was Braggs assertion that what you get when you have ‘Markets’ is ‘horsemeat’.  When you have ‘Bragg’ you get ‘hogwash’.

Horsemeat?  Tell that to the Chinese, they‘d have killed for some horse meat…they know what State controlled enterprise really means…..and it didn’t mean a land of bread and honey…it meant being treated like horses, workhorses….and having to eat grass to survive…before turning to cannibalism,  finally succumbing to starvation…just like the millions in the Socialist haven of Soviet Russia…never mind the marvels of the Socialist Republic of North Korea.

Yes, State control.  Stuff that nightmares are made of.  Never mind Billy you keep sweating away banging out the tunes for the Brothers and Sisters oppressed by Capitalism.  I’m sure you’re making a difference.  Meanwhile they’re off to Magaluf on  cheap RyanAir flights, knocking back the booze and dancing to the beat of those middleclass minstrels you so love to hate.  Stuff their grandparents could only dream of in austere, rationed 1950’s Britain before Capitalism was spread to the masses.

Hilariously Labour’s Frank Dobson turned up on ‘Week in Westminster’  interviewed by Peter Oborne (22 mins 30 sec) chatting about ‘Capitalism in Crisis’…no not banking…but horsemeat in your burger following on from Bragg.

Strange how this bloke who also spoke of the whistleblowers in the NHS and boasted here of having put in legislation to allow ‘whilstleblowing’ didn’t seem too keen to boast about Labour’s record running the Stafford Hospital.

If a few traces of horse meat in a burger is a crisis in capitalism…what’s a few thousand deaths in state run hospitals Franky baby?

I can’t understand why you don’t want to talk about it…not want to blow the whistle Frank old son?

The BBC have made no effort at all to take to task the Labour politicians at the heart of that genuine crisis….they do however seem keen to lay some blame at the Tory led Coalition’s feet…despite them coming to power long after these events.

Oborne interviewing Dobson raises the subject of politicians dodging the Stafford scandal but allows Dobson to sidestep it as he put the blame on the Media and then told a joke about the horsemeat scandal.

Ironic that when given the chance to tackle Dobson, a former Labour Health Secretary, Oborne ducks out of the fight as he seems pretty keen to nail them in this Telegraph column:

‘At any given moment, there exists at least one delicate subject that all mainstream political parties would much rather not discuss.
Now the subject which nobody wants to talk about is the National Health Service. It is just over a week since the publication of the Francis report into Stafford hospital, where some 1,200 patients died in appalling circumstances. Had any other institution been involved in a scandal on this scale, the consequences would have been momentous: sackings, arrests and prosecutions.‘

Guess Dobson might be right…the Media seem to lack the will or the backbone to target the real culprits…the politicians who like to take the credit but dodge the blame when things go wrong on their watch….and it’s not as if Oborne doesn’t know that Dobson was dodging the bullet and diverting attention with his joke as he finished his article with this:

‘Psychologists would call the events of the last week “transference”. And if British politicians (of all parties) carry on changing the subject, the more certain it is that there will be fresh Staffords to come.’

Pretty clear and damning…and yet….

NHS boss Gary Walker was ‘gagged’ by the NHS from talking about the circumstances of his dismissal from his job….but the BBC are on the trail of the Department of Health and the responsible Minister as they may have known about the ‘gagging order’ in 2010.

The BBC are not bothered about the mass deaths of patients under Labour…but are about the horrible unfairness of a man paid £500,000 to keep schtumm….

Walker made this statement:
“I don’t think it’s simply about the Lincolnshire Trust,” he added, calling for Mr Hunt to investigate the “chain of command” that led to the gagging, which he said included the Department of Health, the East Midlands Strategic Health Authority (SHA) and the Lincolnshire Trust.
“I don’t think Mr Hunt can investigate his own department so I think he should be looking for someone exceptionally independent from all of this.”

And the BBC have latched on to the part about investigating the Department of Health….as  you listened during the day that part of the story was highlighted increasingly by the BBC.  It is certain to be  a major line in any interviews to come…much like the new line that is growing like topsy about horsemeat in burgers….that it is yet another attack on the poorest in society by an uncaring Capitalism.  Another soundbite that Labour politicians and their fellow travellers are increasingly splashing vigorously around like Holy Water on a vampire.

So how ironic…BBC gear up for attack on Tories for a supposed ‘cover up’ after the event but fail entirely to tackle the real villains…Labour who for years ignored the scandalous and deadly lack of care.

BBC Bias…maybe I should write a song about that!

Had to laugh at this!

The BBC will negotiate “tougher” contracts with new managers in future to avoid a repeat of the fiasco over George Entwistle’s £450,000 pay-off when he quit as director-general, Lord Patten has said.

Oh really? Meanwhile…

The appointment of a former Labour cabinet minister to a senior BBC job on a salary of almost £300,000 a year last night re-ignited concerns over the corporation’s links with the Left. James Purnell, who served as both Culture and Work and Pensions Secretary under Gordon Brown, has been handed the job as the corporation’s strategy chief.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2278944/Former-Labour-minister-lands-300-000-BBC-job-James-Purnell-faces-accusations-bias.html#ixzz2L3W2iNRK
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I had the misfortune to listen to BBC Radio 4 “Saturday Live” this morning, presented by Rev Richard Coles and Sian Williams.  The special guest was Billy Bragg, yeah, I know. He was introduced as an intrepid fighter against “fascism” and the entire tone of the interview as simpering sycophancy. Bragg moaned about the fact that too many posh boys were in the charts these days and he proclaimed that you just had to look at  Mumford and Sons “to know” their background. You just have to look at Comrade Billy to see the giant chips he has on both shoulders. Bragg articulates a hard left meme that resonates easily at the BBC…. his cliched anachronistic left wingism fits in perfectly with the State Broadcaster. Here is his bedsit in the frontline in ..erm..west Dorset. Power to the people!

The BBC pursues any Israeli weakness or fault with a vengeance that belies bias; Here is BBC Watch picking up the details…

On February 14^th – just one day after a report about a group of racist fans from the Beitar Jerusalem football club (one of two produced until then by the BBC) had finally given up the place it had held on the Middle East page of the BBC News website for six whole days – two more articles on the same subject were instated on that same page.

Here you go, better late than never! BBC bothering you, what’s the detail on it? Please spill the beans! I was on BBC5 LIVE this morning with Fi Glover and to be fair she gave me first and last word on the topic under discussion.

Harry’s Place explains it all:

Lone voices against Terror

…expanding on Nick Cohen’s piece in The Spectator:

‘British Asian feminists and their supporters had gathered to launch the Centre for Secular Space an organisation whose work I would say is close to essential. It is not fashionable, however, because its focus is the collusion between the Anglo-American left and the Islamist right, which has betrayed so many Muslims and ex-Muslims, most notably Muslim and ex-Muslim women.

The failure of Britain’s liberal establishment and white left to combat reactionary religion, or even call it by its real name, stuns them.

All emphasized how many in the British state and British left were racists hiding behind liberal masks.

This would be bad enough if we did not see from the far Left way into the liberal mainstream supposed progressives allying with clerical reactionaries and clerical fascists. They ignore the victims of theocracy and accept their oppression.

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch look with horror on those who speak out about murder, mutilation and oppression if the murderers, mutilators and oppressors do not fit into their script. The Guardian, New Statesman and BBC turn away with embarrassed coughs. The police want to keep the natives of the East End quiet by cooperating with Islamic Forum Europe. Although Labour ministers, particularly Labour women ministers, tried to speak out against the double standards during the last government, the policy of the Labour establishment has been to do nothing to upset the ethnic block vote.

I hope you could hear a lot more in that vein. The trouble is that because the Centre for Secular Space argues against our shifty consensus it has no money. They need everything from computers to wages for secretaries. If you can help at all, even by giving them an old laptop, please contact them via the link here‘

The BBC is one of those who remain silent in the face of Islamic violence and threats.  Worse it often makes excuses for that violence.

One day, BBC,  they will come for you…and who will be there to speak out for you?

Thirteen years of Labour mis-government have been airbrushed from history by the BBC just like the Medieval Warm Period.

We once had a Labour Prime Minister called Tony Blair and a Chancellor named Gordon Brown, who went on to become Prime Minister himself.

If you only get your news from the BBC that all might come as a bit of a shock.

Today all that changed.  The archives have been rifled and dusted down, the story fixed and the tone set right.

We are now offically allowed to hear about Blair and Brown and even that they made the odd mistake….all in the best possible interest of the country naturally.

How so?  What has changed?

Well for a start the BBC has a new/old recruit dragged in through the BBC’s revolving door that connects it directly to Labour Party HQ as ex Labour MP James Purnell is given the job of Director of Strategy at the BBC….but it’s OK….he quit his Labour government job in disgust at Gordon Brown’s policies.

What’s the strategy?  Get the Labour Party elected naturally.  I joke.

The BBC clearly have to now mention Brown and his misdemeanours and Purnell’s antipathy towards Brown so that their ‘new boy’  is cleared of any likely charge of bias….a good try…unlikely to succeed.

Secondly Ed Miliband has relaunched, rebranded and rebooted his Party with a little ‘mea culpa’…..Brown got it wrong on taxes and abandoned the working class.

“We would put right the mistake made by Gordon Brown and the last Labour government.”

The BBC has to again mention Brown and his little errors of judgement, just enough for Miliband to apologise and then promise it will all be so different under a  new Labour…no that’s been done hasn’t it?  It’s good old Old Labour under Red Ed.  Back to the future, with lessons learned, fingers burned.

Two mentions of Gordon Brown in one day on the BBC….with the BBC you know you really are history once they start airbrushing you back into the picture.

In ‘In Our Time’ Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss ice ages, periods when a reduction in the surface temperature of the Earth has resulted in ice sheets at the Poles.

Melvyn Bragg has the decency to be seemingly embarrassed during this programme, presumably forced upon him….yet another global warming ‘persuader’ moulded to bring us into the fold….it was always clear where it was going to end up…and sure as snowballs will melt in the burning hell of a CO2 polluted world the final words were ‘We’re doomed’.

Having said that listen to the programme and I doubt you will be at all convinced by it that global warming is a man made threat….never mind Bragg saying that warming benefitted mankind…but ‘we’d  better park that idea.‘  Why?  Wasn’t it in the script?

There clearly was a script..not just the usual one to guide the drift of a debate to search into all corners of a subject…this one was definitely heading in one direction only…however not even the guests seemed convinced.

For instance they kept revealing information that seemed at odds with the global warming story….the history of the earth is that for only 15% of its existence has it been covered in ice…the other 85% it has been in a ‘Greenhouse’ state.

We were told that the Antarctic became frozen as the continents drifted away from it and the vast expanse of sea meant that it became colder…..the narrative of that was interrupted by a second guest who said ‘Remember that CO2 is driving this of course’…..‘Oh yes‘ said the narrator, ‘CO2 of course…yes it drives this’.

Convincing?  Not at all.  Was someone off script?

What else?  Oh yes…CO2 levels have been 12 times higher than at present and the greenhouse state is the normal one for the planet.

At the end of the programme the BBC, after 40 or so minutes of interesting stuff about ice ages, decides that’s enough of that….whatever you the listener has concluded yourself you’re going to be given the summary of what you really should be thinking…whether it really embodies the content of the programme or not….and of course that conclusion is…‘We’re doomed’.

Despite my scepticism, about the BBC motive, it’s very worth a listen in its own right if you have the time.