This week, Dimbo’s Travelling Circus comes from Manchester.
With him are Cabinet Office minister Matthew Hancock MP, Kate Andrews of the Adam Smith Institute, comedian Matt Forde, Labour’s embarrasing old uncle Ken (Livingstone) and an SNP MP. In England.
Kick off tonight (Thursday) at 22.40
Chat here
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Via Bishop Hill:
The Spectator doesn’t do a great deal on the climate front, but when it does, it does it very well. At the moment they have a long piece (£, but you may get a free look) by David Rose on Judy Curry, which although containing little that will be new to BH readers will be informative for many.
If it’s pure entertainment you want, they also have a preview of Paris from Hugo Rifkind (£), a man with a wonderful facility for words, but also one who is just a moderately loud repeater of metroliberal certainties on the state of the climate. His effort this week is rather more thoughtful than usual, but he still retains some odd notions. Observing, quite correctly, that everyone in the UK is backing off green policy, he says that as a country we are starting to look a bit provincial:
Germany’s big push for renewables (which was admittedly predicated on an hysterical and frankly stupid post-Fukushima fear of nuclear) is surging ahead, in precisely the manner that Scotland’s could be if anybody still gave a damn.
This seems strange because according to Wikipedia, renewables as a whole generated just 11% of German energy last year – a strange kind of surging. And the renewables industry are facing a series of reforms to the subsidy regime that is going to make life rather harder for them.
He also seems to think that China is on board with the green cause:
China now worries enormously about CO2 emissions, and doesn’t just pretend to in order to stop Europe shouting so much.
China is famously opening one new coal-fired power station per week, a strategy that would be strange for a nation that was slightly concerned about CO2 emissions, let alone one that was worrying enormously.
But it’s when he gets to the new solar power station in Morocco that he really goes off the rails. This facility has been getting greens very excited – see for example Roger Harrabin here – in recent days. Here’s Hugo’s take:
With far less fanfare, Morocco is opening a vast solar plant next month in its otherwise useless desert, and aims to get 42 per cent of its energy from renewables (far more than us) by 2020.
With weary inevitability this turns out to be complete drivel. Every time a renewable power station is launched, its installed capacity is rapidly transformed into an expected level of power generation. These can easily be different by an order of magnitude, and perhaps by a factor of four for desert-based solar.
A little light Googling reveals that this is precisely what has happened here. The Moroccan government has actually set itself a target of 42% of installed generation capacity being renewables by 2020. So Hugo has made a howler of fairly epic proportions. But he is a wordsmith, and we should therefore be charitable if he struggles with numbers. Roger Harrabin, who is supposed to be a specialist in these areas, did exactly the same thing. There the howler is harder to excuse.
Update on Nov 26, 2015 byBishop Hill
Roger Harrabin says he has clarified his article on the BBC website.
Complete drivel from Harrabin and his ilk cheerleading climate change alarmism? How unusual.
Anonymous hackers’ list of ‘pro-ISIS’ Twitter accounts they claim to have taken down included BBC News, Barack Obama Hillary Clinton
The group released what it said was a hit list of 20,000 pro-ISIS Twitter accounts via anonymous-text sharing site Pastebin, the list actually includes accounts for US President Barack Obama, US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, BBC News, the New York Times, CNN, and other individual journalist accounts.
The BBC has always tried to downplay the amount of immigration to this country and has been far, far more intent on pushing supposed benefits of immigration than in exposing the problems….going so far as to commission a poll in Romania and Bulgaria to get some figures it could work with and told us that there was ‘No indication of huge Romanian-Bulgarian influx’…..unfortunately not many people believed the BBC’s interpretation of their expensive polling.
Here’s David Keighley at Conservative Woman and here’s the Telegraph.
Seems, once again, the BBC’s critics were right, as today’s figures show, about the level of Romanian immigration…
• New record for net migration figures, ONS says
• Number who migrated to Britain in the year was 636,000
• EU migrants arriving in Britain jumps 42,000 to 265,000
• Romania and Bulgaria arrivals are a main factor in the rise
• Britain is home to 8 million foreign-born for first time
• Romanians registering in Britain triple in just one year
And of course the net migration of foreigners to Britain is much higher than the overall net migration figure when you strip out the British immigrant and emigrant numbers.
How long can this go on for? The BBC never seems to seriously consider that there might just need to be a limit to immigration but then when you have senior BBC reporters such as Mark Easton actually taking part in conferences about immigration, speaking at them not reporting from them, you shouldn’t hold out much hope for any impartial treatment of the subject.
Well then, the BBC and Labour have been completely wrong footed by Osborne in his Autumn Statement. BOTH have been predicting an apocalypse if the Tax Credit changes and Policing budget cuts were implemented today. The comrades in the BBC seem shattered at Osborne’s unexpected nimble footedness and it fell to John McDonnell to respond and he did. In aces! He produced a copy (His personal copy?) of Mao’s little Red Book and quoted from it. The BBC may approve of this but the rest of the country is in convulsions. Corby and McDonnell are destroying Labour as a serious political opposition and that’s why Osborne keeps moving slightly more to the Left. I wonder if the BBC see this? The Corbynistas are blind to it but comes 2020, I suggest Labour will meltdown and I wonder where THAT will leave its broadcasting arm, the BBC?
Here you go, a Chairman Mao approved mid week Open Thread. Over to you, Comrades.
The BBC is always very concerned about the possibility of the ‘Far Right’ on the march again…the BBC is however quite unconcerned about the Far Left despite the fact that the Far Left has a history as bad if not worse than, say, the National Socialists.
Where were the BBC warnings from history about this?…..
Athens on edge after explosion severely damages buildings
A bomb has exploded outside the headquarters of Greece’s business federation, in the first major attack since Alexis Tsipras assumed power in January.
Police rushed to the scene after two Greek newspapers received warning calls at 3am that a bomb had been placed outside the entrance to the business federation.
Although there was no immediate claim of responsibility, suspicion has been quick to fall on imprisoned anarchists, who recently issued a call to arms in a manifesto posted online.
The proclamation, co-signed by Nikos Romanos, a young anarchist in prison for an armed bank robbery, urged Greeks to ensure a “black December” by taking part in “a month of coordinated actions” against banks, department stores, schools, universities and city halls, “spreading the message of rebellion, [placing] incendiary devices against fascists and bosses”.
“Our proposal is simple,” the manifesto declared. “An action campaign by the name Black December, which will be the detonator for the restart of anarchist insurgency inside and outside the prisons.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcATNp4Wfm0
Lord Hall Hall has spent much of the last year protecting the BBC’s very, very privileged and entrenched position when what he should have been doing is overseeing its news service and reining in the worst excesses of bias and foolishness that results in the BBC defending the mass murderers, killing in the name of Islam, in Paris.
Lord Hall Hall betrays everything the BBC should stand for and should be held accountable for his organisation’s aiding and abetting of the Islamist cause.
Even today we have three examples of the BBC trying to manipulate its audience’s perceptions of events…two by omission the other by a deliberate sleight of hand.
The first is a tale of a BBC star being abused by a Muslim with what can only be called hate speech for the way she dressed and the fact that she was a woman out alone…..if a non-Muslim spoke like that to a Muslim woman in a Niqab that would be classed as hate speech…why the difference? The BBC would be all over that story.
The BBC has not reported this story of ‘racial’ abuse….even though the victim is one of its own employees….the BBC would rather cover up for a Muslim extremist than defend its own employee in the interest of ‘community cohesion’.
The second example is classic BBC, taking a swipe at its commercial and political rival, the Murdoch Sun, and at the same time promoting the Islamist agenda. The Sun published the results of a survey into Muslim attitudes which revealed that a large percentage of Muslims have sympathy with Jihadis in Syria….this naturally produced a backlash from aggrieved Muslims and their useful idiot friends on the left.
The BBC published two stories on this…one in BBC Trending, the social media being left-wing dominated BBC Trending is a vehicle that seems designed to give cover to reporting that is predominantly about left wing concerns…mainly race or Islam….BBC Trending is knowingly biased.
What the BBC doesn’t admit openly is that the protests were organised by a professional Muslim campaigner…
Amazing work everyone involved in the
#1in5Muslims campaign. We’ve been featured on@BuzzFeed@guardian@HuffPostUK@ajplus to name a few…
The BBC also publishes this story on the same subject…
Curious thing that in neither story does the BBC make reference to its own survey of Muslim attitudes towards Jihadis in which 27% were found to be sympathetic to Jihadi killers….
27% of the 1,000 Muslims polled by ComRes said they had some sympathy for the motives behind the Paris attacks.
Of course the BBC tried to downplay that survey as well presenting a rosy picture of Muslim attitudes that are belied by reality….and as nearly 80% of the Muslims surveyed were outraged by cartoons of Muhammed who can doubt that 27% is a rather conservative figure?
The Telegraph got to the point…
Curiously the BBC also seems to have ignored another news story about Muslims in the UK that doesn’t fit with the BBC’s own narrative….
You may remember the BBC also totally ignored the astonishing expose by C4’s Dispatches programme ‘Undercover Mosque’ which revealed what the extremists were saying behind the closed doors of British mosques. The BBC instead spent the same week trashing Jade Goody for a ‘racist’ comment she made in the heat of the moment during an argument in the Big Brother house…great to see what the BBC’s real priorities are….never mind extremist Muslim hate speech, instead launch an all out, week long attack on a white (with a mixed-race father), working class girl.
Odd isn’t it what the BBC prioritises and what it seeks to hide. Three Muslim girls go off to be Jihadi brides and the BBC is there for them and their families….however, Muslim women aiding and abetting the radicalisation and recruitment of such girls in the name of Islam and the BBC ignores it.
From the Telegraph:
Undercover Mosque 2
The BBC faithfully reports;
A boy who was arrested for taking a homemade clock to class is seeking $15m (£10m) from his city and school. Ahmed Mohamed, 14, was held by police and suspended from his school in Texas because his teacher mistook the clock for a bomb. His lawyer said in a letter that the incident, which made global headlines, sparked threats against the teenager and left him deeply traumatised.
The entire tone of the BBC is biased TOWARDS Mohamed (sic) so I will allow Richard Dawkins to posit a voice the BBC will not tolerate;
Fergie
Don’t call him “clock boy” since he never made a clock. Hoax Boy, having hoaxed his way into the White House, now wants $15M in addition!
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) November 24, 2015
In a way, I suppose London represents the BBC’s utopian version of society with a population mix totally unlike anywhere else in the UK, and the likes of Tower Hamlets as a jewel in the proverbial multiculti crown. So I suppose items like “DNA study finds London was ethnically diverse from start” is simply reinforcement material to make them feel good.