Middle of the week and time for a new one of these for your completion! DETAIL the bias here!

Nothing so far on the BBC as this video is released by police….can’t imagine the same lack of, or similarly slow, reaction had the attackers been white and the victim Asian…

Shocking video footage shows gang of Asian men launch vicious Tower Bridge attack on a lone 29-year-old man

And this….

Public anger after French sunbather beaten up by gang for wearing a bikini in Reims park

French social networks exploded with anger after a young woman was reportedly beaten up by a gang of girls and young women for wearing a bikini in a park.

Authorities have not identified the attackers but most commentators have assumed that they were Muslims.

The authorities have not named them but said that they all came from housing estates with large Muslim populations.

Arnaud Robinet, the mayor of Reims, said: “We have to be very careful not to jump to conclusions. All the same, I can understand why people have assumed that this attack had religious motives. If that turns out to be the case, it is a very serious incident.”

Not so serious that the BBC deems it a reportable story.

And just for interest…

Denmark bans kosher and halal slaughter as minister says ‘animal rights come before religion’

The BBC thinks much of the problem with the Public is that they are ignorant and prejudiced.  The BBC sees it as its job to educate you, to enlighten you, to help you think the right thoughts.

Think the EU is a bad idea or that mass immigration is somehow detrimental to the interests of the UK?  Think again, the BBC is here to tell you why you must love the EU…

Why is EU free movement so important?

“The founding fathers of the European Community wanted it to be a construct that also had a political integration and for that you needed people to move because the minute people crossed boundaries and borders, you had deeper integration… So it was both a social as well as an economic aim.

“If you wish to create a structure which would stop Germany and France ever going to war again, which was at the heart of the original principle,” says Gisela Stuart, the Bavarian-born Labour MP for Birmingham Egbaston, “you did require a movement of the people in that area which would simply mean brother would never take up arms against brother again. And that has been achieved.”

Really?  The forced mingling of different populations, different races and different religions is a recipe for peace?

Really?

It has always been an excuse for war….Hitler was a fine example of the use of a German population in another country as an excuse to invade in order to ‘save’ them…look at Yugoslavia….and look at Ukraine and the Crimea now….look all around the world, look in the UK…look in Burma, look in the Middle East, look at Christians being persecuted everywhere by Muslims as the Guardian tells us.…’Christians are facing growing persecution around the world, fuelled mainly by Islamic extremism and repressive governments, leading the pope to warn of “a form of genocide” and for campaigners to speak of “religio-ethnic cleansing”.‘

The unwanted mingling of populations nearly always ends badly.

Just look how quickly the Greeks were ready to turn on the Germans with old hatreds.

The BBC knows where to point the finger of blame…..We have all been led up the garden path by Nigel Farage, he has ‘seized’ on, and presumably vastly and falsely inflated, the concerns about immigration and generated, all by himself, the idea that the EU is an undemocratic tyranny with too much power over us…..

It was this new wave of migration after 2004 that generated a sense of public unease about impacts on jobs and services. Nigel Farage, the leader of UKIP, has seized on these public concerns, arguing that high levels of migration from the rest of Europe have effectively been imposed on Britain by the European Union. He’s used it to bring to life the idea too much power has been transferred to Brussels.

Yep…I’d never come to that conclusion all by myself.

Good job the BBC is here to inform, educate and enthrall me with its insights…or “Ideological Sheepdip”  (H/T More Like The Soviet Bloc Every Day)

The Guardian is frantically pushing every knob and pulling every string in order to promote the BBC.  Losing the BBC, not that that is going to happen, would be a body blow to the vast array of leftist cabals that rely upon it to plug their world view without question.

The Guardian’s phone book is being well thumbed just now as they try to get all and sundry to write something nice about the BBC and raise the alarm about the coming apocalypse as the vengeful Tories target poor old Aunty.

The Guardian does its own bit to fly the flag with articles such as this…Why the BBC’s updated iPlayer Radio app will change your life  which is no more than a very obvious bit of cheerleading for the BBC and its services.

The Guardian even admits what it is up to…‘The update of the BBC iPlayer Radio app has arrived just in time to make a valuable contribution to the debate around the licence fee and also improve your summer holiday experience. ‘

The BBC however is not, as we know, standing back from the fight.  It is more than happy to use licence payer’s money to defend their entrenched and privileged position and do so not openly but by creating ‘news stories’ that are little more than disguised adverts or exhortations on behalf of the BBC itself…on Sunday I heard the head of British athletics  on 5Live saying that the BBC was essential for athletics in this country to prosper…we must have the BBC showing athletics apparently…..I wonder what conversation went on before he went on air and how many more such people will be claiming that the BBC is the only thing between them and a proper job?

Then there is this…

Is public service broadcasting in terminal decline?

Public service broadcasters all over the world are coming under increasing pressure to justify their funding models. So is it inevitable that these broadcasters will lose at least some of their public money, forcing them to adopt more commercial funding structures?

Would that actually be good for anyone?

Of course by ‘in decline’ the BBC means under attack from the vested interests of commercial companies and prejudiced politicians…there is no real justification for questioning the size, funding or scope of the BBC dontcherno… it’s all an anti-BBC plot!!….and nobody wants that the BBC relays to us…

Former World Service presenter Robin Lustig told Newshour Extra: “The great joy of having public service broadcasting is that it’s a form of entertainment, information and education which is not determined by advertisers or government interests. It’s determined, imperfectly, by what viewers and listeners want.”

And the statistics do seem to show that public service broadcasting is what the public wants.

And if the message wasn’t clear the BBC reinforces it at the end with the same old rhetoric…

As the debate continues on at least three different continents, Robin Lustig asks: “Who are the people who want to dilute the influence of public broadcasting?

“They are either commercial rivals who fear they are not making as much money as they would be able to, were it not for the public service broadcasters – or they are governments who want to have more control over what’s being said.”

Paul Mason is gone, but the memory lingers on…just why did the BBC think he was suitable candidate to be their economics editor on Newsnight?

Forever it seems a running dog of Communism he’s rapidly becoming a running joke on this site at least.

Today we bring you yet another example of his dodgy ideology that raises that question again about how he got his foot in the door at the BBC….perhaps it is in fact the answer.

He had a question and answer session in the Guardian today in which he put the world to rights.

His reply to the last question is all you need to know in order to drill down into the Mason brain…it’s a bit like Stalingrad after a year of intense street fighting, still standing, still in the grip of Stalin but somewhat turned to dust and rubble …

Does he also teach or lecture?  Tell me he doesn’t.  God help ’em.

What is this?…’ …we redesign the social relations around us to facilitate a tech-enabled world.’

What does that mean?  Aren’t all those techno-wonders like the smart phone meant to facilitate our social lives not the other way around?

And how about that 1920’s Communist economy?  Is that the one where they shot the wicked capitalist peasant who greedily kept two cows instead of the state quota of one per family and the economy that starved millions of peasants to death in the name of social progress?

I’m sure we can learn from the dynamics of such economies….they don’t work.

Perhaps Mason should invest in one of these contraptions that the Guardian was amused by and stick it somewhere useful and shut himself up….

Artist 3D prints Donald Trump butt plug in protest at immigration rhetoric

Noticed how coke-snorting prostitute loving Lord Sewel seems to have arrived in the House of Lords without any political assignation? Or at least that’s what BBC headlines would lead you to believe. Rather than point out that Sewel is a LABOUR peer, instead the comrades try to turn this into a moral victory for Labour by running the line “Labour MP John Mann said the 69-year-old should resign from the Lords voluntarily before he was expelled.” Put it this way. Imagine for a moment that Sewel was a UKIP Peer – the headline from the BBC would scream his political roots but when it comes to Labour……

Monday morning and a new week starts! Here’s where to detail the BIAS from the State Broadcaster that seems to loath the State it broadcasts from!

Annual rainfall (mm) England and Wales 1766-2012

The BBC has a reputation for being fairly untrustworthy in its climate reporting, guided as it is by the clever Roger Harrabin who admitted that he had been campaigning for climate change for over twenty years on the BBC…

‘I have spent much of the last two decades of my journalistic life warning about the potential dangers of climate change.’

It does its reputation no good with yet more dubious reporting such as this……

‘More hot summers’ for parts of UK

Scorching summers such as the one in 2003 look set to become more common in England and Wales, a study suggests.

And devastating rains such as in Britain’s worst winter in 2013-14 may be less likely in the decades ahead.

Work by the Met Office has calculated the odds of particular weather scenarios striking in future years.

The computer simulations-based study, in journal Nature Climate Change, finds that milder winters and drier summers will also become more likely.

Of course the Met. Office and Co famously predicted we would never see snow again and were not so long ago proposing that we were to be victims of extreme rainfall...apparently not anymore…but here’s the future we seem to have dodged…..

Extreme rainfall in UK ‘increasing’

The frequency of extreme rainfall in the UK may be increasing, according to analysis by the Met Office.

Risk from extreme weather set to rise

Climate change and population growth will hugely increase the risk to people from extreme weather, a report says.

The Royal Society warns that the risk of heatwaves to an ageing population will rise about ten-fold by 2090 if greenhouse gases continue to rise.

They estimate the risk to individuals from floods will rise more than four-fold and the drought risk will treble.

Why, oh why, does it keep raining?

Dr Peter Stott, a leading climate scientist at the UK Met Office, says that since the 1970s the amount of moisture in the atmosphere over the oceans has risen by 4%, a potentially important factor.

That does not sound like much but it does mean that extreme rain storms may bring more rain than before – with more moisture in the air, what goes up must come down, and the odds are worse.

Whatever happened to all that promised rain which we are now not going to be getting?

Then we have the BBC trying to defend the Met Office’s reputaion…..

‘Apparent contradiction’

A parallel goal is to make clear that a trend to warmer temperatures does not mean that extremes of cold or rainfall are made impossible – instead, weather that seems to buck the prevailing remains on the cards, if less likely as the century progresses.

The 2009 study had suggested that the country faced a future of milder, wetter winters and hotter, drier summers – and the Met Office faced fierce criticism when shortly afterwards Britain was suddenly plunged into the bitterly cold winter of 2009-10.

Met Office scientists acknowledge that there was confusion in the public mind about the “apparent contradiction” of hearing a 30-year projection for milder winters only to endure the reality of ice and snow.

A co-author of the report, David Sexton, said that basing the projections on 30-year averages, as in the UKCP09 study, risked giving the impression to people that those weather conditions would apply to every single year.

“When I talk to people, they remember the hot summer of 2003 or the wet winter of 2013-14 and they know they were extreme seasons – people can make tangible links to those impacts, they mean something to them personally, and the 30-year averages don’t make sense to people in the same way.”

Blogger ‘Autonomous Mind’ thinks there is no defence for the Met. Office in regard to the accuracy of its forecasts….

BBC spins that Met Office got winter right, just kept it secret from public

This is a potentially huge story with a nasty smell of conspiracy about it. There appears to be a concerted effort to whitewash serious failings at the Met Office, with the assistance of a senior climate change propagandist at the BBC who is fully bought in to the Met Office’s warmist agenda.

The Telegraph reports today that: ‘The Met Office knew that Britain was facing an early and exceptionally cold winter but failed to warn the public, hampering preparations for some of the coldest weather on record.’  The article goes on to say:

In October the forecaster privately warned the Government – with whom it has a contract – that Britain was likely to face an extremely cold winter.

It kept the prediction secret, however, after facing severe criticism over the accuracy of its long-term forecasts.

October? That is the same month that this temperature probability map was published – for public consumption:

There is absolutely no logical or rational basis for the Met Office publishing the probability map above, yet ‘secretly’ telling the government a completely different story. The Met Office not only published the map, it had meterologists speaking publicly about the map and setting an expectation of a very high probability of warmer than average winter.

The BBC itself noted way back in 2010 the Met. Office’s two-fold approach…and that it thinks the Press, Politicians and the Public are too unintelligent to understand their forecasts…

The Met Office and its seasonal problems

An internal executive paper noted the impact as follows:

“Unfortunately, less ‘intelligent’ (and potentially hostile) sections of the press, competitors and politicos have been able to maintain a sustained attack on the Met Office … The opprobrium is leaking across to areas where we have much higher skill such as in short range forecasting and climate change – our brand is coming under pressure and there is some evidence we are losing the respect of the public.”

This report argued that one downside of the seasonal forecasts was that they remained on the website and could easily be later compared to reality. It said:

“One of the weaknesses of the presentation of seasonal forecasts is that they were issued with much media involvement and then remain, unchanged, on our website for extended lengths of time – making us a hostage to fortune if the public perception is that the forecast is wrong for a long time before it is updated.”

In contrast it noted that the “medium range forecast (out to 15 days ahead) is updated daily on the website which means that no single forecast is ever seen as ‘wrong’ because long before the weather happens, the forecast has been updated many times.”

As another document put it, “‘Intelligent’ customers (such as the Cabinet Office) find probabilistic forecasts helpful in planning their resource deployment.”

A communications plan in February 2010 instructed staff that “interested customers” should be told the three-month outlook will be available on the research pages of the website but that “this message should not be used with our mainstream audiences”.

Met Office staff clearly feel the general British public find it difficult to cope with probabilistic statements.

“It is considered that the task of educating the UK public in interpreting probabilistic information will be neither a short-term, nor simple task.” It compares this unfavourably with the apparently greater ability of the US public to grasp such material.

Fascinatingly Kafkaesque….keep updating your forecast right up until the weather happens, whilst removing all previous forecasts, and you will never be wrong!  They really do think people are stupid.  The Met. Office doesn’t know whether to nobble the forecast by fixing what the Public can see or cobble together something that can be interpreted several different ways if necessary to cover their blushes when it all goes pear shaped later on.

Or perhaps a combination of the two as it tells government one thing and the Public another…..

Helen Chivers, Met Office forecaster, insisted the temperature map takes into account the influence of climate factors such as El Nino and La Nina – five-yearly climatic patterns that affect the weather – but admits this is only a “start point” for a seasonal forecast. She said: “The map shows probabilities of temperatures in months ahead compared to average temperatures over a 30-year period.

You kind of suspect the Met Office couldn’t predict last week’s weather never mind that over 30 years….or that in 100 years time as it supplies for the climate alarmist industry….speaking of which…from Christopher Booker…

How Arctic ice has made fools of all those poor warmists

Two events last week brought yet further twists to one of the longest-running farces of our modern world. One was the revelation by the European Space Agency that in 2013 and 2014, after years when the volume of Arctic ice had been diminishing, it increased again by as much as 33 per cent. The other was that Canadian scientists studying the effect of climate change on Arctic ice from an icebreaker had to suspend their research, when their vessel was called to the aid of other ships trapped in the thickest summer ice seen in Hudson Bay for 20 years.

In 2007, with the aid of scientists such as Wieslaw Maslowski and Peter Wadhams, the BBC and others were telling us that the Arctic would be totally “ice free by 2013” (the Independent even cleared its front page to announce that the ice could all have disappeared within weeks).

By 2011, the BBC’s science editor Richard Black was telling us that the ice would “probably be gone within this decade”. In 2012, his colleague Roger Harrabin was reporting that the sea ice was now melting so fast that more had vanished that summer than “at any time since satellite records began”.

The greatest scare story of all simply isn’t turning out as their computer models predicted. And no one has been more dangerously taken in by this silly scare story than the warmists themselves.

How we miss the Black propaganda, still we’ve always got the persistent Roger Harrabin…let’s hope he spent that £15,000 from the climate change propagandists at the Tyndall Centre wisely.

Just why did the pro climate change Tyndall Centre fund Harrabin et al?…..

Mike Hulme:  Did anyone hear Stott vs. Houghton on Today, radio 4 this morning? Woeful stuff really. This is one reason why Tyndall is sponsoring the Cambridge Media/Environment Programme to starve this type of reporting at source

The CMEP being Harrabin’s pet project.

The BBC’s admiration from Obama continues with its slabbering reports on his Kenyan tour. The BBC were bigging up Obama’s determination to push the gay rights agenda to Kenya – this seems a matter of great importance to the BBC hacks for some odd reason. When Kenyan President Kenyetta responds by tweeting “There are some things that we must admit we don’t share. It’s very difficult for us to impose on people that which they themselves do not accept. This is why I say for Kenyans today the issue of gay rights is really a non-issue” the BBC responds by relegating this to one bland sentence at the end of the report.

The BBC broadcast a programme about a new railway line that threads its way through Jerusalem.  The BBC thinks this line is somehow so controversial that it may be the catalyst for a new war, a new intifada…..started of course by the Palestinians…but we’ll gloss over that….‘ ….it has only deepened the sense of resentment on both sides. Travelling through the old city, he comes face to face with the battle over one of the world’s holiest sites and asks, could it be the flashpoint for the start of another war?’

The tale of the train, by Adam Wishart, a ‘British Jew’, as he liked to keep reminding us as if to suggest that as a Jew any criticisms of Israel are therefore valid and all the more powerful, was in reality just an excuse to parade a long list of ‘issues’ that are clearly of concern to Wishart and the Palestinians.  It was a bit like decorating a Christmas tree with Muslim artifacts…at first glance maybe a genuine attempt at conciliation but is in fact a calculated insult.

This wasn’t really about the rail line and turned out to be a pretty one sided diatribe that forgot to mention Hamas or Fatah or any other Islamist organisation bombarding Israel with missiles….and the important fact that they all wish to wipe out Israel and create a Palestinian state ‘from the river to the sea’.

Which is a bit of an omission when he seemed so concerned about Israeli activists who wanted to increase the Jewish presence in Jerusalem…one was from the ‘Temple Movement’ which wants to rebuild the Temple on the Mount, the other a property developer who bought up land from Palestinians and built homes that were bought by Israelis…hoping to make Jerusalem de facto Jewish….note that he was buying land not bulldozing the occupants off it as the programme seemed to like to imply.

Apparently land was compulsorily purchased to build the rail line on…not as if that doesn’t happen here…reference HS2.…‘The department has written to all owners of properties that are very close to the proposed line of the route to inform them of the government’s decision, and the potential need to compulsorily purchase their property.’

Wishart tells us of a Palestinian who was offered compensation but refused the money for political reasons….Wishart tells us that the buying of the land ‘fits into a broader picture’ of land ‘seizure’….he also claims that the security barrier is in reality meant to cordon off the squalor and deprivation.

Note that frequently you can hear the Palestinians talking of the Yahood, the Jews, but the film doesn’t translate the words when they would be controversial, opting for a different, less obviously loaded and racist, term.

Wishart also concentrates on the Shuafat refugee camp.  He puts all the blame for problems there onto the Jewish Mayor of Jerusalem.  What Wishart doesn’t tell us is that it is UNRWA that runs the camp, created by the UN and Jordan when it was in control of the West Bank in 1965, and that Israel offered to hand the Shuafat area which includes the camp over to the Palestinian Authority but Palestinians themselves refused this ‘opportunity’…. ‘Nabil Abu Issa, head of the village of Muchtar, located a few hundred meters above the refugee camp, told the Post that he doesn’t see himself as a Palestinian. “We don’t want to be under Palestinian authority. We are Jerusalemites, we vote for the mayor and for the Knesset. We are part of this place and unless there are no two countries for the two people, we will stay here. It would be a mistake to hand over these villages; it would cause a mess and a bloodshed. What [would] happen if Israel gives us to the PA? How can a family prevent the rocket launchers from taking over their house and firing at Jerusalem? If I would have to, I’ll take my family and move to east Jerusalem, Jaffa or Haifa,” Abu Issa said. ‘

Ironically many of the problems are caused because Palestinians themselves actually want to move into Shuarat camp where the Israeli police and city authorities fear to tread and enforce the laws…they overload the limited infrastructure.  As residents of an area of Jerusalem the Palestinians get the valuable ‘blue ID card’ which gives them the same rights as Israelis and allows them to travel freely.  Shuarat is not what the BBC likes to label one of those ‘open prisons’.

Wishart doesn’t like the security barrier.  He refers to it as the ‘barrier’…not a neutral term as it implies an attempt to create some sort of apartheid however there is a reason for that security barrier…..East Jerusalem’s Shuafat refugee camp a terrorist stronghold, security sources say.

Why did Wishart make this programme?  After all it’s an old story, one told by the Guardian last year….but that told a more nuanced tale than Wishart…Jerusalem’s light railway: commuting with a rifle through the conflicted city.

For instance the BBC’s narrative was that Palestinians don’t use this train and that it is mostly used by Israelis moving into Palestinian areas…..the Guardian’s narrative is less one-sided….

Men dressed in ultra-orthodox monochrome, under hats and coats even in the Middle Eastern summer, squeeze on board, averting their eyes from young women tourists in shorts and skimpy t-shirts. Religious Jewish mothers, hair bound in long winding scarves, with a brood of small children clutching at their ankle-length skirts, stand alongside Palestinian women in skinny jeans and elaborate hijabs framing carefully made-up faces and groomed eyebrows.

Israeli soldiers in uniform, some armed with guns and all apparently armed with smart phones, lounge on seats opposite Palestinian labourers heading for jobs in Jewish areas of the city. Christian pilgrims en route to Via Dolorosa and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the site of Jesus’s crucifixion, mingle with Muslims heading to the sacred Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa mosque, and Jews intent on praying at the revered Western Wall, the last surviving remnant of the Second Temple.

As for Israelis invading Palestinian areas and Palestinians being cut off by the railway…

The unintended consequence has been to make it much easier for Palestinians to get to the Old City. “It’s brought Haram al-Sharif [the site of the Dome of the Rock] closer to Beit Hanina and Shuafat,” says Seidemann.

And not just the Muslim holy sites, he adds; Palestinians are more visible in the west of the city than previously. “Has that united the city? No, but it’s an interesting change in the patterns of movement.”

The reverse is not the case. “The light rail has not brought Israelis into Palestinian areas of East Jerusalem. On the Israeli side, the patterns of movement have not changed at all.”

The main problem with the railway seems to be that it doesn’t run on the Sabbath…

That statement sits uncomfortably with the fact that Palestinians, who make up 37% of the city’s population, are deprived of this effective transport system on Saturdays, a normal working day for most of them, because the light rail does not operate on the Jewish sabbath.

Wishart finishes off his diatribe with clear evidence of what he intended with this film…

‘My journey has been heartbreaking.  When my grandparents campaigned for the State of Israel they hoped for a place of refuge, tolerance and equal rights for all. 

I just can’t believe this could be the place they dreamt of all those years ago.’

Maybe Wishart can explain the difference between his grandparents wishing to create the State of Israel by Jews in essence invading Palestine licensed by the UN and evicting the Palestinian residents and that of the settlers in the West Bank today.  Not a great deal of difference.  If his grandparents would have such qualms now why not in 1947?  He can’t paint his grandparents as ethical and humane people who campaign for equal rights and tolerance when they conquered and took over what was Palestinian land.  Maybe that’s what this film is all about…a great big guilty mea culpa.

On the same basis of land seized and a people unfairly treated where is his film about the creation of Pakistan and the even more horrendous events that unfold there?

I await it with interest.