Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past

Britain’s winter ends tomorrow with further indications of a striking environmental change: snow is starting to disappear from our lives.

“Children just aren’t going to know what snow is.”

 

The BBC is always busy looking for ‘proof’ of global warming….here they are in Oz in July….

Artificial snow on slopes of hotter Australia

Australia is sometimes the petri dish of climate change – a place where global warming is not just a theoretical concept but a tangible reality.

Oops….just a month later….

Ready, set…snow! Australia blanketed in a winter wonderland as cold front delivers a brisk start to the weekend

And this is from June a month before the BBC paints its picture of doom….which really shows how untrustworthy the BBC is…they knew there was heavy snow in Oz and yet they report ‘artifical snow’ stories….

Best snowfalls in a decade forecast for eastern Australia. Strap yourselves in for the megablizzard

While Australia rejoices in the heaviest June snowfalls this century, with the majority of lifts at all resorts set to open by the weekend, the Kiwis have barely got two snowflakes to rub together.

Of course the late snow on Mt Buller is an entirely new phenomenon isn’t it?…

“Historically speaking though it is not unusual for us to have no snow on Opening Weekend,” says David McNamara from the Victorian ski resort of Mt Buller.

Ahh…an explanation…the reporter is the never-reliable Jon Donnison telling us that the snow is so late and so thin that artificial snow is needed.

Really?  The snow came, in bucket loads, two weeks ‘late’ into the skiing season…..

Experienced weather watchers are calling it the storm of the century. They’re saying it could snow on and off, but mostly on, for the next 10 days.

And now the megablizzard has arrived. The NSW resorts of Thredbo and Perisher received 40cm and 50cm respectively overnight. Hotham, Falls Creek and Mt Buller (pictured below) in Victoria all reported similar totals.

A spokesman for Thredbo confirmed to news.com.au that as of about 3.30pm, 80cm of snow had now fallen in the past 24 hours.

“It’s an incredible amount for June, I’m not sure it’s a record, but it has set us up for the rest of the season,” he said.

The official Australian ski season started two weeks ago but up till yesterday then, there had been a desperately thin snow base with only a lift or two turning at the NSW resorts of Perisher and Thredbo. Victorian resorts, which are a little lower than their NSW counterparts, had nothing but grass.

That all started to change yesterday and after a brief lull in the early morning hours, the storm appears to be intensifying now.

Here’s what a user called “Snowblowa” said on the forums on leading snow industry website ski.com.au:

“Seriously when was the last time we were looking at a potential 100cm event to kick off the season properly with potential mega follow up?!!!!!!! We gotta savour this, it’s gunna be awesome, we might be saying in five years “remember late June in 2014”. Besides, we are so over due, last few years in General have been pretty average.”

 

So let’s see…that’s deep snow and lots of it.

The BBC is obviously trying hard here…they even drag in Al Gore who tells us he isn’t impressed by Oz PM Tony Abbot who is somewhat sceptical about the extent of the threat that is global warming….that’ll be the Al Gore who made a video with copious ‘errors’ in it that misled viewers about climate change and had to be ‘corrected’….and the same Al Gore who has massive investements in green technology companies reliant on the climate change bandwagon to keep rolling and bringing in the dollars.

Funny old world when a man who expressed so much contempt for the Westminster ‘gang’ as he calls them, now seeks to rejoin as an MP despite, apparently, the fact that the “writing is on the wall for Westminster”.….what’s more curious is that the BBC don’t seem to notice this hypocrisy in their grand analysis…nor do they notice that when the Slippery Salmond says:

“We won’t have any deal with the Tories – they are not trusted by the people of Scotland” he said.

…the truth is the Tories are just as ‘trusted’ as the SNP…..

At the 2010 General Election, the SNP polled 19.9 per cent and won 491,386 votes, while the Conservative Party polled 16.7 per cent and won 412,855 votes. Yet it is the SNP that has been allowed to set the agenda in Scotland, and to call the shots on the possible future of the Union, while the Conservatives have been painted as pariahs, and deemed about as welcome in Scotland as a nationwide dose of the clap.

 

 

But then the BBC has always had a soft spot for anyone who wants to destroy the United Kingdom…be it Communists, Muslim fundamentalists, Brussels Bureaucrats or the SNP.

Alright folks, the weekend beckons and time for a fresh one of these Open Threads. Enjoy and detail the bias!

Apologies, no time to do this justice but here’s some rough workings to get your teeth into….

Labour’s spending as a proportion of GDP in 1998?  36%

The Coalition’s projected spending in 2019-20?        35.2%

Hardly an enormous difference and yet apparently ‘utterly terrifying’ according to the BBC.

There is an election coming and the BBC has been running a campaign to disparage everything the government does.

The BBC has been extraordinarily critical, not to say dishonest, in its reporting of the Autumn Statement…..telling us we are heading back to a 1930’s depression era economy.

The BBC’s Norman Smith saying:

“While there was a lot of enthusiasm on the Conservative benches and political joy at a lot of the popular measures, when you sit down and read the Office for Budget Responsibility report it reads like a book of doom.

“It is utterly terrifying, suggesting that spending will have to be hacked back to the levels of the 1930s as a proportion of GDP.

“That is an extraordinary concept, you’re back to the land of Road to Wigan Pier.”

I wonder where the Beeboids steal their ideas from…could it be the newspaper they read such as the Guardian in 2011?:

Today the book seems curiously relevant to our own distressed times. An Old Etonian prime minister, in a cabinet stuffed with public school boys, has embarked upon the most radical reduction of public spending in generations, making cuts that have prompted robust criticism of their pace and scale. North and south are pulling apart once more – not yet to the extent where Orwell could describe his journey as if “venturing among savages”, but getting there.

 

Here is a verdict on Orwell’s book….and probably one that could be recycled for the BBC’s reporting…an enormous pile of piffle…..

Jack Hilton, the man who set him [Orwell] on the road to Wigan, hated the book, judging it a failure and falling out with the author. “So George went to Wigan and he might have stayed at home. He wasted money, energy and wrote piffle,” was his damning verdict.

 

Evan Davis (Labour) on Newsnight tells us that:

“You have to go back to the depression of the 1930s to find a crisis comparable to the one we are in — it is one of those once-in-a-lifetime experiences.”

 

Now that’s just nonsense…and highly political.

For a start Orwell wrote ‘The Road To Wigan Pier’ in 1937…so about a period before 1937…and the OBR quote the BBC refers to actually says we could have spending as a ratio of GDP at a level equivalent to that in 1938  and certainly not the depression era of the early 1930’s which the BBC is linking to….

Government consumption of goods and services falls to its lowest share of GDP since at least 1948 – when comparable National Accounts data begins – and since 1938 using a historical dataset compiled by the Bank of England

 

But note this:

The UK’s National Accounts data have been revised substantially since our March forecast. In addition to the usual annual revisions process, the ONS has implemented the 2010 European System of Accounts (ESA10). The main consequence has been to increase the measured size of the economy. Relative to the data available at the time of our March forecast, nominal GDP in 2013 has been revised up by 6 per cent (around £90 billion)

 

So we are not comparing like with like….the GDP figure has been inflated by new accounting rules from Europe and so any cut in spending as a ratio of GDP will look worse.

Not only that but in 1998 Labour took us to similar low levels of spending….the OBR says…

As Chart 1.1 illustrates, total public spending is now projected to fall to 35.2 per cent of GDP in 2019-20

 

Labour’s spending in 1998 was 36%…a 0.8% difference then….hardly a massive difference….was that ‘utterly terrifying’ in 1998?

The BBC has been telling us that the Tories must answer the important, critical, question about how they will find the cuts, or savings, in government spending…apparently ‘critics’ and ‘people’ were asking this question….hmmm…does the BBC mean ‘Labour’ are asking the question and the BBC is doing Labour’s dirty work for them?…..however when it comes to Labour they actually praise Ed Ball’s refusal to answer claiming that he is intent on analysing the situation and will not be rushed into making a judgement…in other words he hasn’t got a plan and certainly doesn’t intend to let the Public know about one if he did have any thoughts on the subject….

The OBR report is more honest about what the parties say…curious the BBC missed this bit:

The recovery now looks stronger, with real GDP regaining its pre-recession peak in the third quarter of 2013, three quarters earlier than in the previous vintage of data.
The Conservatives have said they would look to cut welfare spending by more, so that they could cut public services by less. And the Liberal Democrats have said that they would be willing to borrow more to finance capital spending that would increase growth, and also to increase taxes on the relatively well-off. Labour has said that it would “balance the books and deliver a surplus on the current budget and falling national debt in the next Parliament. How fast we can go will depend on the state of the economy and the public finances we inherit.”

 

Now the BBC’s Adam Parsons told us that Labour had in fact, if you look closely, announced more plans to make cuts than the Tories….but he failed to lay out exactly what they were….and the OBR clearly doesn’t agree with the BBC on that.

The BBC doesn’t bother with this from the OBR:

On our central forecast, the Coalition Government is on track to meet its fiscal mandate – to borrow only what it needs to pay for investment, adjusting for the state of the economy, at the end of the five-year forecast – with £50.6 billion to spare. This implies an 80 per cent probability of success given the accuracy of past forecasts

 

The Telegraph does a fine job in critiquing the BBC’s coverage…Danny Cohen will be upset:

Once again, the BBC shows its true colours

Licence fee payers deserve better than the preposterous partisan bias of the BBC

David Cameron attacks BBC over ‘Wigan Pier’ cuts coverage

David Cameron’s spokesman says BBC coverage likening cuts programme to Depression-era Britain was ‘hyperbolic’

Tories at war with ‘biased BBC’

David Cameron and George Osborne furious over Autumn Statement coverage which they claim contained ‘systematic exaggeration’

Is Britain back on the Road to Wigan Pier?

As sparks fly between ministers and the BBC, the former mining town is yet to forgive George Orwell

Danny Cohen tells us that the BBC is an intrinsic part of the democratic process…I think it could be argued that it is the opposite and indeed encourages and supports terrorists and race hustlers who are intent on creating racial and religious conflict where they can for their own political purposes.

The BBC gave blanket coverage to the killing in Ferguson of a black thug by a white police officer and yet ignored the brutal murder of a white man by a gang of non-white youths who beat him to death with hammers.

The BBC still hasn’t reported on that savage killing…however they do try to play politics with it….trying to make out that any criticism of the lack of coverage is merely a ‘conservative’, right wing conspiracy theory that is completely unjustified in this ironic article…..

Are the media ignoring another St Louis killing?

The BBC completely accepts, without evidence, that the thug who died in Ferguson was killed purely because he was black. The white officer was clearly racist in their opinion….when as said, there’s no evidence of that at all.

Here is the BBC take on it:

Well, slavery may have long gone, but apprehending someone because they could be up to no good, simply because they’re black is still police policy in much of the land.

 

The killing in St Louis of  white man is automatically assumed to have no racial motive, and it probably hasn’t, but that isn’t the point…the point is the BBC’s different reaction to both stories.

Today we have Ferguson all over again with the BBC giving yet more blanket coverage to the death of a black man when being arrested by white police officers….a white man’s life is obviously worthless to the BBC.

The BBC one again reports this from one point of view…that if a black man dies being arrested by white police officers those officers killed him because he was black….the BBC totally accepts the premise that the officers are racist.

The BBC has been reporting all day on the radio that the police had the man in a chokehold and he died because of it… they have been playing a recording of the arrest and misled listeners to believe that the alleged ‘chokehold’ is still in place when the man says repeatedly ‘I can’t breathe’ and was the cause of his death.

The video of the arrest shows that the hold was in place the first time the man gave a strangulated cry that he couldn’t breathe and the officer released the hold but Eric Garner continued to say, loudly and clearly, that he couldn’t breathe as the officers restrained him….but why was he having trouble breathing?

The death is unfortunate but the main cause of death, as the BBC reports, was…..

The city’s medical examiner’s office found in the summer that Mr Garner’s death was caused by “the compression of his chest and prone positioning during physical restraint by police”.

 

Also….and not reported by the BBC….

Garner’s acute and chronic bronchial asthma, obesity and hypertensive cardiovascular disease were contributing factors, the medical examiner determined.

 

The BBC merely says….

The detainee, who is asthmatic, can be heard shouting repeatedly, “I can’t breathe!”.

 

The BBC places undue emphasis on the chokehold…

New York’s medical examiner had already ruled that the death of Eric Garner was a homicide, and that the chokehold contributed to it.

 

Yes, indeed he did say that…but as shown above he said a lot more besides which show that the chokehold wasn’t the main cause of death,  if a cause at all…..so why is the BBC still associating the ‘chokehold’ with his death and emphasisng it above all else?… the chokehold was said to be a contributory factor…but as he died a while after the hold was used, and used for a short period, that must be  a minimal factor…his own heatlh problems being the relevant  factor.

Eric Garner death: What next for the chokehold?

Eric Garner was being arrested for selling cigarettes illegally on the street and from the video you can hear he has been, at the very least, advised not to continue with that trade in the past….he then resists arrest and the officers apply the hold to restrain him.

Would they have done that if he was white?  The BBC is suggesting not…but on what evidence?  Eric Garner was a large man and not too happy in the video, he wasn’t going to ‘come quietly’….were the police supposed to just walk away because he was black?

This is not evidence of white police officers being racist but of the BBC’s own racism in their assumption that the police were racist.  It is also evidence of the BBC’s own tendency, a dangerous one, to incite racial conflict and inflame tensions…..undoubtedly this will be getting a large audience in Black communities in the UK and will be feeding into that grievance mindset with a stereotype fed to them by the likes of the BBC that white people are all racist and out to oppress them.

Note that the man reporting this:

Will black Americans finally get a fair deal?

Well, slavery may have long gone, but apprehending someone because they could be up to no good, simply because they’re black is still police policy in much of the land.

…is the BBC’s Clive Myrie…..

And note the BBC’s reporting of the verdict of ‘homicide’ on the death of Eric Garner…

New York’s medical examiner had already ruled that the death of Eric Garner was a homicide, and that the chokehold contributed to it.

To you and me that means murder…but not to the medical examiners….

“Homicide” in this context doesn’t mean what you think. It’s one of five categories medical examiners use to label causes of death and it indicates that “someone’s intentional actions led to the death of another person,” says Gregory G. Davis, president of the National Association of Medical Examiners. The other four labels are suicide, accident, natural, and undetermined, Davis says.

‘Intentional actions’ does not mean ‘intending to kill’…but their intent to restrain leading to the death…even if an accidental and unintended result.

The BBC’s use of that word without explanation of the context can only lead to the wrong impression of the verdict on the police’s action..careless use of words or intended by the BBC?

The BBC is an undemocratic, rampaging beast that is pretty much unaccountable and has been given carte blanche to do as it pleases, politicians too afraid to make the necessary changes to it, preferring instead to tinker around the edges…..hence we get no real, meaningful change to the method of financing the BBC and more importantly we get no change to its highly politicised, left-wing world view of how things should be.

Last night Danny Cohen, the BBC’s Director of Television, made a speech…here are some of the highlights:

I believe that the BBC is one of the most important institutions in the United Kingdom.

It is an intrinsic part of our democracy.

It delivers education and deep joy and stimulation to 97 percent of the population every month.

It would be crazy to damage, undermine or deflate what we have.

Part of the democratic process?  An organisation that attempts to close down debate on climate change, on immigration, on Europe, on Islam, on the Middle East.  An organisation that tries to shut parties like UKIP out of the political argument and actively worked to destroy ‘unacceptable’ organisations like the EDL …and has presenters who often express the desire for a Chinese, authoritarian type government that ‘gets things done’…ie without having the inconvenience of having to get the approval of the people.

No not part of the democratic process….or not one that facilitates democracy but rather ‘poisons the well’.

Cohen reels off a list of BBC programmes that he believes illustrate the importance of the BBC to life in the UK, nay the world, and says…

No broadcaster in the world provides this range, this quality, this commitment to all audiences.

 

Well, I suspect Sky, or even YouTube, might argue with that.

He comes to an end with a request that other Media groups stop criticising the BBC…

Of course, you will always hold us to account – and so you should.

But….I feel confident you will agree that a BBC that can flourish in a world of globalised media companies is the right thing for the UK and the right thing for audiences.

Perhaps this is time for a little less of the critical friend and a bit more of the friend.

That’ll be the BBC that tried to close down its political and commercial rival News International and crushes local news and rival magazine publishers.

With friends like Cohen whispering sweet nothings in your ear I’d  buy my own drinks and keep one eye open all night.

Deep joy and stimulation to one and all this winter holiday!!

There were great expectations in the corridors of the BBC…George Osborne was going to announce the latest borrowing figures and the deficit would be rising, they just knew it!...’On Wednesday we get the Chancellor’s Autumn statement and it looks almost certain he will have to announce worse than expected figures for the deficit’ ….a damning verdict on the ‘Tory’ government and its economic policies…the deficit is ‘hanging around the nation’s neck like a yuletide log!’…apparently.

Didn’t happen, the deficit is going down….Dominic Laurie must have been gutted having earlier announced that he was intensely interested in those borrowing figures….strange that after they were announced he, and the rest of the BBC, didn’t really want to talk about the deficit itself too much, preferring instead to express shock and amazement at the evergrowing national debt and the fact that it was rising…well it woud be…as long as you have a deficit you will add to the debt even if the deficit is getting smaller…as it is.

After the Autumn Statement the first reaction of Dominic Laurie was to call Osborne’s budget a ‘conjuring trick’ and Jon Pienaar claimed the borrowing figures were merely a result of a different way of looking at the figures…the day before when Osborne announced his spending plans for infrastructure spending Nick Robinson dismissed them as promises that will never be fulfilled…pre-election hype….and the BBC in general dismissed the spending as ‘old money’ and not shovel ready….never mind that they are shovel ready and the spending on infrastructure, so long awaited and urged by the likes of Flanders, has finally arrived after the government implemented planned spending cuts on infrastructure that it inherited from Labour in 2010.

The BBC’s approach is entirely negative and seems determined to undermine any ‘good news’ and paint an entirely bleak picture of the economy…depsite it being one of the best performing in the world at the moment…yes inflation is down, yes interest rates are low, yes unemployment is low, yes growth is ticking along nicely…but you know what….the economy’s dire…the figures are ‘terrible!’

So just how big though is the national debt…and is it bigger than expected?

I seem to remember that way back in 2010 the projections for national debt were that by 2015  it would be around £1.4 trillion…so what is the national debt today?

So that’ll be £1.4 trillion…as projected…here is Price Waterhouse Cooper’s projection from 2010...Government general debt £1.4 trillion:

Funny how those ‘on the money’ projections are conveniently forgotten by the BBC’s, and others who should know better, economics experts.

Here is Peter Allen, (10:37) who has spent years doing stories on austerity and the economy expressing astonishment, his incredulity, at the size of the national debt…he tells us it is a frightening debt…an economy not under control…we won’t do anything about it but we must do…you can’t carry on like that …..especially, he adds, as the threat from global warming is so severe…don’t ask me…at the beginning of the programme he said he would rather be talking about the dire threat of global warming than anything else.

Allen tells us that he’d never thought of the debt before, certainly not as a problem of that magnitude…pretty strange really…his ignorance didn’t stop him talking about the apparent ‘misery caused by austerity’ for years on end…and it could explain a lot about BBC coverage of austerity and the need for belt tightening…..they just buried their heads in the sand and hoped Labour would get in next time if they banged the drum for them enough.

You just know that whatever measures the government takes to rein in spending the BBC will be there with the Labour nay sayers, the charity shroud wavers, the selected voices of the ‘common’ man and woman telling us how austerity has ruined their lives…in fact carrying on pretty much as it has done for the last 4 years opposing every move the government makes….despite Allen proclaiming ‘something must be done!‘.

The BBC certainly seemed to be banging the drum for Labour today… Laurie telling us that what we need to put the economy back on its feet is a rise in wages….em…a ‘living wage’…heard that before somewhere…..Justin Webb told us that in relation to taxation we should perhaps be implementing new measures as corporation tax is so difficult to collect…perhaps a tax on wealth…he’d heard, he said, (08:50) some interesting ideas from Labour on that…something like  a ‘mansion tax’…never mind that it has been roundly condemned as unworkable by just about everyone who is even remotely connected to the real world.

We are also hearing a lot about that ‘tax gap’ as tax revenues aren’t as high as needed…..many experts have voiced their opinions in BBC studios…that it is a result primarily of a flood of low skilled workers on low wages who don’t pay taxes.

Curiously the BBC doesn’t make a link to immigration on this….the one time I heard someone mention it was to dismiss it as an unproven theory….they said that people often say that there is a link between having a large pool of labour and low wages, but the BBC told us there was ‘no clear analysis’ to prove this.

Really?  Would have thought it was one of the fundamental principles of economic theory.

Guess the BBC lets its own ‘principles’ get in the way of the facts…can’t have them ruining a good story.

Immigration has lowered wages, put British people out of work and reduced the tax take…and 400,000 immigrants get tax credits…..

So in summary, the BBC is entirely negative about the Autumn Statement, ignorant of the national debt….until now, just when Labour are making a lot of noise about it…coincidence?  I think not.  BBC journalists hype the mansion tax and the living wage…and dismiss links between immigration and low wages and low tax receipts….oh, and dismisses Osborne’s spending plans as electioneering hype…and there is a ‘detachment between government policies and the realities of the economy’.  Never mind that the economy seems to be doing reasonably well all considered.

Not a bad days work.  Saves Labour a lot of money on a party political broadcast.

They don’t like it up ’em….and are fighting back…..from the BBC’s press office……

Here you go, middle of the week Open Thread. Detail the bias here!

The Telegraph reports:

Politicians ‘pulled combat troops out of Afghanistan too early’

Britain and its allies would have been more prudent to keep combat troops supporting the Afghan government for longer, a former head of the Army says

Britain pulled combat troops out of Afghanistan too early because of political considerations back home, a former head of the Army has suggested.

Gen Sir Mike Jackson said a recent spate of bloody attacks in Kabul and the weekend Taliban assault on Britain’s former main base in Helmand, Camp Bastion, were “somewhat depressing”.