We’ve had Alvin Hall’s interesting and original treatment of Black musical history on the BBC and now we have another attempt to rewrite it and turn everything any Black person ever did or said in history into an act of resistance against the white ‘Massa’…..

Dr Hepcat and the Hepster’s Dictionary

In this programme we hear about the music of Cab Calloway and his ‘Hepster’s Dictionary’ the roots of which, we are told, are the slave slang of the plantations invented as a code to befuddle and undermine the authority of the white ‘Massa’.

The language and Cab Calloway’s jive talk was ‘racial politics’, Calloway was a cultural warrior battling aggressive eurocentricism….white culture in other words.

Or so we are told by the BBC whose interpretation of Calloway’s intentions is somewhat self-serving.

Desperate to make us realise the suffering of the Black American they tell us that the word ‘Pounder’ used as a description of a police officer, was because the police used to ‘pound’ on Blacks…nothing to do with them being ‘pavement pounders’ out ‘pounding the beat’.   There’s one they missed…cops on the ‘beat’.  Must have a deeper significance.  Similarly we are told that ‘Bebop’ was actually a reference to the sound truncheons made on Black heads as they were set upon by white ‘pounders’.

Or it could just be this:

bebop, also called bop,  the first kind of modern jazz, which split jazz into two opposing camps in the last half of the 1940s. The word is an onomatopoeic rendering of a staccato two-tone phrase distinctive in this type of music.

Did the slaves create a secret language to enable them to resist white oppression?  Or did the language develop its own unique shape in the same way that any language does when a group of people are essentially isolated from other groups and develop their own language…its just a fact of life not a conspiracy, not a revolution.

The BBC is talking crap…..or racially motivated, politically charged, emotive language designed to create a particular misperception of history to suit Black activists intent on stirring up racial grievances.

Here’s a different interpretation…..

Each generation has their own slang and lingo, a language that defines them. Each generation also has a purveyor of cool who creates a language that only the initiated understand. During the 1950s and 60s, Frank Sinatra created a personal lingo that influenced a generation of swanky and swaggering men.

But before Sinatra, there was Cab Calloway.

In addition to writing and performing great swing music, Calloway created an entirely new lingo. He never took his hepster slang too seriously; it was all about having fun and being unique. Soon lots of people wanted to speak just like Cab. To help facilitate this, Calloway produced a Hepster Dictionary in 1940 that accompanied Cab Calloway sheet music.

 

So rather than being a political statement the Hepster chat and dictionary was in fact all about having fun and being different….and helping people to understand his music and life….so being different but not that different.

What the BBC and its Black activist presenters don’t tell us is this:

Cab Calloway: On the Yiddish Side of the Street

In 1930s New York, no cat was more of a “hepster” than Cab Calloway. The son of a lawyer father and a church-organist mother, Calloway met Louis Armstrong while at Chicago’s Crane College. There he learned to scat-sing so well that he left school to relocate his well-trained tenor voice, and his band, to an extended engagement at Harlem’s Cotton Club. He soon hit the dance halls and stages of the wider world, barely stopping to breathe until the 20^th century was almost over. Along the way, he took it all in: the sights, the sounds, and the fine points of the language of the streets, eventually publishing the first-ever dictionary of African-American slang, The New Cab Calloway’s Hepsters Dictionary: The Language of Jive, in 1938.

But there was another “hep” language floating around 1930s New York: Yiddish.

Yiddish laced the speech of Irving Mills, a man of Odessa Jewish stock who became Calloway’s manager. The language of meshugas, dzhlubs, and mamzers resonated more than a little with Calloway.  In partnership with Mills, he soon found ingenious ways to infuse his act with retooled Yiddish folksongs, hilarious, if ironic, parodies of Jewish black-face performance, and mock cantorial melismas that incorporated his own unique brand of pidgin Hebrew, morphing into jazz-jive jargon at the drop of a white Panama hat.

It all started with “Minnie the Moocher,” a tune he co-wrote with Mills in 1931, and which became his first major hit, the first number-one song by an African-American performer, and his theme song for the rest of his career.

So Calloway’s most famous song, his big break, had some Jewish influences. Guess they were slaves too once.  It all works.

The BBC must love that.

Still, as long as you’ve got the message that Blacks have suffered, and continue to suffer, at the hands of their white oppressors, the BBC’s job is done.

The Significance of Muslim growth in the UK

Peter Allen told us yesterday that ‘It is very difficult to wake up the world and make it care about North Korea.’

Of course no one takes North Korea seriously.  Thank God that we have the BBC to remind us of what a dangerous and nasty regime it is!

Of course the BBC, in the shape of John Sweeney, had a famous stab at uncovering North Korea as they went undercover for 8 days.   So desperate were the to bring us the terrible truth about the ‘neo nazi’ communists of North Korea that they were willing to put the lives of several students at risk…but…it was worth it the BBC tells us…

North Korea is….‘A state that is more like Hitler’s Germany than any other state in the world, It is extraordinarily scary, dark and evil….. We maintain all of the students were aware of the risk.’

We didn’t learn a great deal from Sweeney’s Great Expose.

We did learn more yesterday as a girl who escaped from North Korea told Peter Allen that she witnessed the execution of a woman whose sole crime was to be caught watching a Hollywood movie.

That for some reason made me think that there is a striking similarity between the extraordinarily scary, dark and evil North Korea and the BBC.

North Korea doesn’t want its population watching films and reading journalism that might open its eyes to the real world outside the bubble imposed by the regime.

Similarly for the BBC which imposes its Big Brother approach to censoring the news in a similarly brutal fashion…not with a bullet to the back of the head but with a bit of character and reputational assassination…..ala the EDL’s Tommy Robinson or UKIP’s Farage.

That Big Brother was once again in action yesterday as Peter Allen, having obviously read the Guardian’s Today’s key fact: you are probably wrong about almost everything, started preaching to us about our misconceptions about Muslims and immigration……he mixed in other figures but you and I know the real message he wants to impose upon us….it is highly political….as the Guardian admits….

Britons overstate the proportion of Muslims in their country by a factor of four, according to a new survey by Ipsos Mori that reveals public understanding of the numbers behind the daily news in 14 countries.

People from the UK also think immigrants make up twice the proportion of the population as is really the case – and that many more people are unemployed than actually are.

Such misconceptions are typical around the world, but they can have a significant impact as politicians aim to focus on voter perceptions, not on the actual data.

Bobby Duffy, managing director of the Ipsos Mori social research institute, said:

These misperceptions present clear issues for informed public debate and policymaking. For example, public priorities may well be different if we had a clearer view of the scale of immigration and the real incidence of teenage mothers.

 

 

Just so we’re clear…you are absolutely wrong about the numbers of Muslims in this country…and the numbers of immigrants and the effects they have upon communties.

Muslims and immigrants are wonderful and bring huge benefits to the country.

Your ignorance, stupidity and prejudice is all that stops you from recognising this.

The BBC is here to help you overcome such prejudice and hatred.

Not sure just how reliable the survey was…The research, carried out by an online survey of approximately 1,000 people aged 16 to 64.

Pretty indepth then.

And em…

Here is a much more honest appraisal of how the Muslim population is growing in size and influence…and what the future might hold….an assessment made by a Muslim:

The Significance of Muslim growth in the UK

Surveying what was written about the figures from the 2011 census confirms what was expected; the Muslim population has grown by 73% in just 10 years making it the fastest growing group in the UK excluding those who describe themselves as having no religion. The Muslim population in the UK jumped from 1.7 million (3%) to 2.8 million (4.8%) establishing itself as the second largest religious group after Christianity. In fact, as researchers have confirmed, the increase is potentially greater than this as it is very likely that a large percentage of the 7% of the population who did not answer the optional question regarding religion are Muslims.

As a matter of fact, the Muslim population has become a significant percentage within the fabric of the total population in the UK. Furthermore, Muslims have become the majority in one of the main boroughs in London, Tower Hamlets, reaching 34% while the proportion of Christians is at 27%. Moreover, in a number of places Muslims make up one of the major groups, reaching 34% in Newham for example, while the proportion of Christians is 40%. There are at least 1 million Muslims in London forming at least 10% of the capital’s population notwithstanding the significant Muslim populations in Birmingham and Manchester.

Although it is difficult to perceive how such figures are viewed by thinkers, journalists, politicians and the general non-Muslim mass, there have appeared a number of reasonable analysis and recommendations from the results of the census. Dr Leon Moosavi who is a Lecturer at the University of Liverpool, (specialising in the sociology of race and religion and an expert on Muslims in Britain) concluded, “by the next census Muslims may even double again and make up 10% of the population. These statistics encourage us to think more carefully about the provisions made for British Muslims and the ways in which they are an integral part of the nation” including many other positive statements in the article that are worth reading.

Here is why you should pay attention to their words and what they could mean for your society….. you’ve heard fo the ‘Trojan Horse’ haven’t you?:

Muslims must rise up and publicly debate the role of Orthodox Islam in Public life.

British Muslims should re-think how they view their presence in Britain, realising that it is their country in which they will spend their future as Muslims. Muslims must work hard to establish Islam in the UK, or at least ensure that the UK is a suitable place where Muslims can live without compromising their faith and such may entail the involvement in the socio-political dynamics of the country.

The British Government must be extremely cautious not to fail its people by making the detrimental mistake of ignoring the real needs of the second largest religious group in the country. The official recognition of Islam and what it entails will solve the many problems Muslims face today. Incorporation of the Muslim personal law within the judicial system should be looked into more constructively and Muslim lawyers and scholars should work hand in hand to integrate the key elements of the Muslim civil law.

The Educational system should furthermore recognise the specific needs of the Muslims while the Ministry of Education should accommodate them. However it must be clearly understood that the responsibility will always remain on the Muslim educationalists along with law experts to engage with the system such that they influence the necessary changes. Similarly, it is high time for Muslims to consider building a strong Islamic financial alternative for their needs such as housing and education.

The census additionally shows that the Christian population of England and Wales is ageing whilst the Muslim community is relatively young.

This sends a very strong message to Britain and to the international community that it is almost impossible to change Orthodox Muslim norms. Is it then worth the effort of liberal Muslims to continue in their attempt to promote liberalism while it is the pure Orthodox Islam that is flourishing and penetrating people’s lives?

If the BBC doesn’t understand what that means here’s a hint…..the Mooslims are coming.

Peter Allen on the previous day was talking about immigration (11:27)….he told us that ‘Nobody puts the case for the advantages of immigration and yet they’re clear enough…I want to hear some positive things about immigration.’

Clearly he doesn’t listen to the BBC….but at least we know that we can rely on Allen to give us an impartial and accurate picture of what is going on.

The benefits of an influx of 270,000 foreign immigrants, every year, swamping our towns and cities must be enormous.  I’m sure.

Good old BBC, and Guardian, moving into gear to make sure we are thinking the right thoughts.

Curious that the same IPSOS survey came out last year….note the same anxieties about our ‘misconceptions’…

The Perils of Perception

People are wildly wrong when we ask them about many aspects of life in Britain, as highlighted in a new survey by Ipsos MORI for the Royal Statistical Society and King’s College London.

Just to pick out three big errors on who lives here: on average, we think 24% of the population (one in every four people!) are Muslims – when the real figure is around 5%; we think 31% are immigrants – when the official figure is 13%; and we think 36% are aged 65+ – when in fact only 16% are.

 

The man bringing us this ‘research’ is Bobby Duffy, head of IPSOS with links to Demos and the IPPR, and a campaigner it would seem for open borders…he tells us that immigration concerns are the preserve of the ‘Far Right’ which of course intentionally fails to recognise that a majority of the population have legitimate and reasoned concerns…

Remaining sensitive to these concerns will be important for politicians who are conscious of the need to keep the extreme right marginalized.

The EU needs to hold fast in its defense of Schengen. To give ground would not address the real problem—the porous nature of a small portion of the external border. It would also threaten the free movement of people, trade and money that European economies need now more than ever.

Any link that this ‘new research’ has been released as we head for the Rochester by-election with UKIP the front runner?

A guy without a television has successfully sued TV Licensing for costs incurred dealing with its threatening demands for payment. In a wonderful twist he even threatened to send in the bailiffs. Read all about it at the TV Licensing Blog.

The Brand wagon keeps on rolling courtesy of the People’s BBC.

Kind of ironic really, a multi-millionaire living the celebrity lifestyle complaining about the plebs not having a voice, excluded by the Establishment…and yet it is not Joe Bloggs from Peckham who is given the chance to air his views, it is that multi-millionaire celebrity who has decided we all want a revolution and has been given the privileged position of a platform on the BBC to make sure we have to suffer one whether we want one or not….Brand apparently ‘giving voice to the populist resurgence of a serious but controversial idea: anarchism.’

Can’t say I have ever heard anarchism on the ballot sheet coming up as a topic in conversation…so just how ‘populist’ is it?

Brand has once again been thrust upon us by the BBC on Start the Week which tells us that…

Here you go, a new Open Thread,  detail the bias here!

The BBC has been hitting us hard in the last week with what is without any shadow of a doubt pure Labour Party propaganda about living standards, the minimum wage and ‘breadline Britain’….the central message at the heart of Labour’s election strategy

More on that later but as a run up to a more indepth look at the BBC’s coverage in which we are presented with ‘Jason from Stockport’ who has nothing to eat in his cupboards, you might like to hear what Stephanie Flanders, now off the leash, admits in the Sunday Times today……

The Treasury likes to point out that overall earnings figures make things look worse than they actually are, at least for people who have been in jobs for a while.  On average, people in full-time jobs who have been in work for at least a year have seen their wages go up faster than inflation from 2012 onwards.

But…

It’s a lost cause trying to get people to admit that they feel better off than before.

A decade of reporting on the economy for the BBC proved to me that it was incredibly hard to get people to admit on camera to having become richer.  That was true even in the boom years, let alone now.

I could be standing in a supermarket, surrounded by ‘lowest ever’ price signs, on the day wages werer rising at the fastest rate in a decade and inflation had fallen to a record low:  everyone who talked to us would doggedly insist their grocery bills were heading through the roof and they were haiving trouble making ends meet.  British people find it difficult to be upbeat on television.

So when the BBC wheels out those poverty stricken families and the ‘Jason’s in Stockport’ as evidence of ‘Breadline Britain’ it all needs to be taken with a huge pinch of salt.  We are being very deliberately lied to and manipulated.

Flanders tells us that the economy is 15% smaller than it would have been had we ‘trundled along at our long-term average rate of growth since 2007.’

Bt that’s not the fault of this government….she tells us ‘we are not alone.  Nearly every advanced economy is facing the same shortfall…[but]….we have handled this difficult new reality better than many.’

Flanders also tells us that….

Labour will want to play down Britain’s relative economic success to focus on the ‘crisis in living standards’.  What it is easy to miss is that it’s the squeeze in living standards that as largely made that relative success possible by pricing British workers into work.

That fall in wages has one  enormous beenfit; it helped make it affordable for business to keep workers and hire new ones, even in very tough times.

That made for a very different kind of recession and recovery from what we have seen before.

In previous recessions the pain of the downturn fell on the relatively small chunk of the population who lost their jobs.  Anyone laid off saw their living standards collapse.  Everyone else saw their earnings tick along much as before.  Not this time.

This time we really were ‘all in it together’.

Lower wages have kept people in work and allowed more to be employed……..Labour and the BBC are pushing the line that benefits are higher because people are in low paid wages which conveniently neglects to say what the bill would have been if all those on lower wages had no wages and had to receive full unemployment benefit…never mind the effect on their standard of living.

Last week on Peter Allen’s show(11:10) we heard that the top 20% of earners had seen a large fall in income of 5.2% whilst the lowest 20% had seen growth of 3.5%.

We were told that the average UK disposable income level was £28,700….now the BBC’s Panorama told us a family who had an income of £29,000 including benefits were on the breadline…..as a result of this government’s policies…and yet average incomes have only fallen by 4% compared to pre-crash levels.

A fall of 4% does not suddenly put people into poverty as the BBC seems to be claiming.

That’s, as I said, just a warm up for the real exploration of the BBC’s coverage of ‘Breadline Britain’ as it pumps out material like this…

Low-paid Britons now number five million, think tank concludes

…on behalf of the Labour Party.

The BBC seems fatally drawn to outspoken, controversial and ultimately, mistaken, flawed characters, otherwise known as charlattans, whom they can rely upon either to make headlines and help them chase ratings, ala Russell Brand, or to ensure the schedules are filled with left wing drudgery ala Owen Jones or Giles Fraser.

Giles Fraser, that turbulent priest with inclinations towards the radical, has some interesting thoughts.  Not all of them thought out perhaps.

But still, the BBC seems to think he has something important to say so much of the time.

He is of course, being a Christian, tolerant of the enemy religion…Islam.  However he is not tolerant of those who would criticise Islam…

Islamophobia is the moral blind spot of modern Britain

The dinner party bigot’s attack on Islam as a creed can all too easily become an excuse for an attack upon an ethnic group

Yep…not only are you a bigot for criticisng Islam but you are using it as a covert means to attack a particular race…not sure which as there are so many different races who are Muslims…and of course he forgets to mention Sikhophobia and Hinduophobia and Whirling Dervishophobia and so on…all practised mainly by people of a non-white persuasion….so why aren’t these bigoted, secret racists denouncing those religions as well around the dinner table?

People like Fraser like to tell the lie that Islam is the religion of peace, that Islam means peace, that Islam wasn’t spread by the sword.

However when it comes to Christianity he is more open about the connection between religion, fanatics and violence…..

The English, of course, have always been a little bit awkward when it comes to full-throttle Christianity…It wasn’t always this way. Thousands were butchered during the Civil War in the name of their different understandings of God – probably the last flowering of popular religious fundamentalism in England.

When religious ideology got as toxic as it did, it was an act of genius to redefine religion as being primarily about pastoral care. From the 18th Century onwards, Christianity ceased to be about pike-toting revolutionaries hoping to rebuild Jerusalem in here in England.
Instead, through the Church of England, it increasingly became a David Cameron-type faith: the religion of good deeds.
It served the English well. It was dignified, socially useful and largely undemanding. The big society in action.

Fraser admits religion can inspire violence…even Christianity, a religion in which there are no exhortations to conquer the world or to kill your enemy.

Religion had to be neutered in order for a peaceful, tolerant society to blossom.

However Fraser hankers after the old school  hellfire and damnation interpretation of the Bible….

….. it is offensive and scandalous stuff. It means being brave, taking risks, standing up to wrong, even when – and this is bound to happen – it is personally distressing for us to do
that. It means real belief and absolute commitment. It is so much more than a brief nod to Sunday school truisms.

‘real belief and absolute commitment’….dangerous, foolish stuff….if he’s advocating this for Christians how can he deny the same to Muslims or any other religion or belief such as Fascism or Communism?  It would be a nation at war with itself.

Real belief is nothing less than fundamentalism, extremism, oppressive institutionalised tyranny.

Real belief is bigotry of the purest kind…‘I am right, you are wrong…and so you are going to hell…and I might just help to speed you on your way there.’

Fraser expands on his desire for hellfire on earth with the thought that terrorism might have his divine sanction if in a ‘just’ cause….curious when he admitted above that religion had become toxic and led to thousands being brutally butchered in the name of God and yet he now justifies it……

If we can have just war, why not just terrorism?

I was criticised for suggesting there could be a moral right of resistance to oppression but Christianity has thought a great deal about the idea of just resistance.

The weird thing about this is that Christianity has thought a great deal about the idea of just resistance. The Reformation, for instance, saw a flurry of moral justifications for resistance to the state, when that state is seeking to impose on its subjects its own particular understanding of religious faith. In 1574, for example, Theodore Beza published his The Right of Magistrates in which he affirmed the right of resistance – and violent resistance in the final instance – to state tyranny.

Ah…there’s that Christian inspired violence again….‘Christianity has thought a great deal about the idea of just resistance.’  I wonder if Islam has ‘thought a great deal about the idea of just resistance’?

However Fraser isn’t keen on ‘Just’ Torture, even if it were the kind that might save lives whilst not killing the person being tortured, merely being ‘enhanced interrogation’.…

It was called “tortura del agua” by the Spanish Inquisition. The Nazis used it, as did the Japanese and the Vietcong. We now call it waterboarding, and all reasonable people would also call it torture. That is, except — because it is a technique now widely practised by the CIA, and because the United States wants to claim that it does not torture prisoners — that the current US administration calls it an “enhanced interrogation technique”. Once again, Mr Bush’s dodgy dictionary finds new ways to lie.

This is what makes the war on terror such a well of moral evil.
I love the United States, but its moral conscience has been diseased by the war on terror. It is now time for American churches to speak out more clearly.

 

So…torture, however much it might save lives, is a ‘well of moral evil’ that is condoned and practised by minds diseased by the war on terror….but terrorism that deliberately, knowingly and cold bloodedly kills thousands, men, women and children, at a stroke, is a ‘just’ terrorism if in a morally justifiable cause.

So let’s get Fraser right…religion can be a toxic, brutal, murderous tyranny and yet anyone who dares link Islam to the violent exhortations and ‘racism’ in the Koran is an Islamophobe?

Waterboarding, stress positions, shouting at prisoners and other intensive interrogation techniques are morally evil but butchering the Fogel family, hacking off a baby’s head, is a ‘just’ terrorism?

Fraser is a classic example of Doublethink…when you can hold two opposing and contradictory views and yet believe totally in both of them….

To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies—all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.

The BBC must adore little Fraser…pro-Muslim, anti-Bush, anti the war on terror, anti-interrogation, anti-capitalism, anti-Islamophobia……he could have a channel all to himself….a circus dog indeed, all too happy to jump through the hoops, peddling the codswallop,  and needing no commands to do so.

Shame he’s such a hypocrite, such an advocate of violence, intolerance and religious fanaticism.

What can I say?

There isn’t much you can say about the BBC’s fawning submission to the unstoppable prophet of kooky pap, Russell Brand.

What could say it all is that this, em, genuine, ‘exclusive extract’, from Brand’s new booky wooky, courtesy of Michael Deacon at the Telegraph, isn’t the authentic Brand revealing his deepest and most cherished, fantastical imaginings but you’d be forgiven for thinking it was……Katz must be thinking how lucky he was to have had the bearded one in person on his show…and I suppose that’s what Newsnight is now….Showtime.

None so totalitarian as the BBC;

The BBC is using laws designed to catch terrorists and organised crime networks to track down people who dodge the licence fee, it emerged yesterday. The publicly-funded corporation uses the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), designed by the last Labour government to fight terrorism, to catch those who evade paying the £145.50 fee. Now, however, its ability to use sweeping surveillance powers could be stopped by a new review announced yesterday by culture secretary Sajid Javid. Mr Javid’s independent inquiry into TV licence fee enforcement will examine the corporation’s use of covert surveillance operations on those it thinks have not paid the obligatory licence fee.

Well then, the weekend beckons and so time for a new one of these for your edification!