Imagine a global spying network that can eavesdrop on every single phone call, fax or e-mail, anywhere on the planet.

It sounds like science fiction, but it’s true.

The power of the network, codenamed Echelon, is astounding.

Every international telephone call, fax, e-mail, or radio transmission can be listened to by powerful computers capable of voice recognition.

That was written in 1999….and its still true now….what’s new?

The NSA has been hoovering up all your data….and it’s just one big surprise…who knew?  Obama has things under control though….

Mark Mardell’s love-in with the Pres. continues….

As ever, insiders say the president has mastered all the complex technical details in play and thought long and hard about which way to go.

As so often, his liberal instincts may be at war with his perceived duty as commander in chief – and he may be doomed to disappoint many on both sides of the debate.

Isn’t the Pres. just great?  So intelligent, so Liberal…and forced against his better nature to keep Guantanamo open, to increase drone attacks…and to spy relentlessly on his political opponents in the election.

Ironically perhaps this is from the Guardian:

Oh hang on Mark…… here is another example of Obama’s Liberal ethics:

Obama: No warrantless wiretaps if you elect me

Well….just for the election run up anyway…..

The ACLU released a report this week that shows that under Obama and his Attorney General Eric Holder, warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of American’s electronic communications is “sharply on the rise.”

Obama Warrantless Wiretapping….Obama Signs Extension Of Controversial Bush-Era Program

The Guardian’s editor, Alan Rusbridger said on the Today programme:

This is a remarkable day. The president of the United States responding to information that’s been put into the public domain by newspaper, not by the oversight committees that are supposed to look after these things.

Well…..hardly ‘Breaking News’ is it….14 years out of date in fact….not so ‘remarkable’.

Asked about MI6 chief Sir John Sawers’s claim that terrorists were “rubbing their hands with glee” at the revelations, he said:

That was a very theatrical moment, but there was no evidence attached. The NSA is collecting 200m records a day on people who are not suspected of anything. This is warrant-less, suspicion-less collection of data on all of us, and that’s why it has become such a huge issue amongst people who think this is a bit disturbing.

I mean don’t listen to me, listen to Tim Berners-Lee, the guy who invented the internet [in fact the world wide web]; he was horrified to learn about the weaknesses that had been put into the web, and how this is going to harm the web itself.

Listen to the tech companies – the American … tech companies see a revulsion from the end of the world at their businesses, and this is going to have severe financial implications.

Just a shame that every time you log onto his paper’s website you are being tracked often by those very tech companies…….and such tracking can be blocked by the paper…the BBC usually has no tracking for instance…..

Does the Guardian get paid to allow tracking of its customers?

Here is Google Analytics:

Your customers go everywhere; shouldn’t your analytics? Google Analytics shows you the full customer picture across ads and videos, websites and social tools, tablets and smartphones. That makes it easier to serve your current customers and win new ones.

Know your audience

No two people think exactly alike. Google Analytics helps you analyze visitor traffic and paint a complete picture of your audience and their needs, wherever they are along the path to purchase.

Pretty clear….your every move on the net is being analysed by commercial companies….and clear that a company must actively want to have ‘Google Analytics’ on its site to help it track its customers.

You can of course try to block the trackers….but most sites require you to allow their cookies which also track you whilst ‘helping you get a better service’.

Why no concern about these Trackers…or about the phone companies that have your every movement on their data bases, or the network of numberplate recognition cameras that track you around the country, or Tescos logging your every purchase, or smart meters logging  everything you do at home…etc….

And is  all this such a surprise?  The BBC consistently fails to mention the exact same revelations from 1999.….the exact same complaints….and it was Republican congressman who began the ball rolling to investigate all that.

Not sure why the BBC lets the Guardian get away with this….Humphrys didn’t push Rusbridger very hard at all this morning…as said this is nothing new….massive trawls of data by the intelligence agencies, collection of intelligence on friendly countries and commercial interests, cries of outrage and appeals for investigations…..what’s new?

A couple of the BBC’s reports from 1999…..

Echelon: Big brother without a cause?

Critics accuse the United States’ intelligence community and its English-speaking partners of waging what is in effect a new Cold War.

At stake are international contracts worth billions of dollars, and at the disposal of the spymasters is an intelligence gathering system of immense power.

The Echelon spy system, whose existence has only recently been acknowledged by US officials, is capable of hoovering up millions of phone calls, faxes and emails a minute.

A report published by the European Parliament in February alleges that Echelon twice helped US companies gain a commercial advantage over European firms.

“There’s no safeguards, no remedies…….There’s nowhere you can go to say that they’ve been snooping on your international communications. It is a totally lawless world.”

EU probes Echelon

The European Parliament has voted to form a committee to investigate allegation that the US spy network, Echelon, is being used as a tool for industrial espionage.

So shouldn’t the BBC be asking what happened to all that ‘investigation’ in 1999?

Rusbridger’s ‘theatrical’ claims are just that…nothing new…and according to the intelligence agencies putting lives at risk as Rusbridger and Co aid the terrorists.

As the Guardian’s revelations are not new their publication of the material is clearly unnecessary…and therefore unnecessary risks are being taken regardless of the dangers associated with publishing….all so that Rusbridger can pose as the saviour of a Liberal world….

Is that not what the BBC should concentrate on with this story…whether the Guardian is unnecessarily putting lives at risk for commercial gain?

Met Office: Arctic sea-ice loss linked to colder, drier UK winters

Richard Black ?@enviroblack @markpmcc Leveson… ‘a cultural tendency…to practice journalism which on occasion is deliberately, recklessly or negligently inaccurate’

On Sunday I posted this:

Strangle The Climate Sceptics In Their Beds!!

It was meant to add some context to a post I intended to write up looking at a BBC piece on the Today show, Is there a Green hush?,  which claimed that climate scientists, green lobbyists and the media were being bullied and intimidated into silence by climate sceptics….but a look at the Today interview had to be put off because the more I looked into climate scientists’ claims and their theories the more I realised they just don’t have a clue.

However here we go…..

Is there a green hush?

First the technical issue…just how was the piece set up?
We had Evan Davis, who volunteered that yes, climate sceptics were vitriolic, so no bias there,  and then we had Mark Lynas and Rowan Sutton…both pro-man made global warming.

And that was it.  No sceptical voices, neither to defend sceptics against the charges or to put the other side as illustrated by my post, nor to debate the ‘science’ when Davis asked if the recent floods were the result of climate change.

There was absolutely no mention of ‘vitriol’ from the pro-AGW side…nor any other reasons given as to why there might be a ‘silence’ from the alarmist side of things…or even if there is a silence….can’t say I’ve noticed such a thing.

What we did get was firstly a denial that there is a link between floods and climate change…but then we had ‘But physics says’…then it was ‘yes ‘….but you can’t claim a particular event…but….you have to look at the world as a whole and at patterns over many years.

So….that’ll be a sneaky yes then…they are claiming a link.

Em……

Prime Minister climate change opinion not backed up by science, says Met Office
Nicola Maxey from the Met Office said the Prime Minister failed to draw the crucial distinction between weather and climate change.
“What happened at the end of December and at the beginning of January is weather,” she said.
“Climate change happens on a global scale, and weather happens at a local scale. Climate scientists have been saying that for quite a while.
“It’s impossible to say that these storms are more intense because of climate change.”
She added: “In real terms we had a low depression over the Atlantic which deepened, which caused the swell, and that combined with the spring tide caused the coastal waves.”

or….em…

Paul Davis, chief meteorologist for the Met Office said that very strong winds much of the UK experienced which was caused by jet stream.
“December has been the windiest spell since 1969, but unprecedented perhaps not. It probably feels unusual because the last few winters have been fairly settled and cold and we haven’t had the story conditions that just experienced.”

or…em….

Direct from the Met. Office:   There’s currently no evidence to suggest that the UK is increasing in storminess.

Still…we’ll just ignore all that.

Carry on…and panic.

Davis then gets onto the ‘vitriolic’ sceptics…..asking ‘Just how bad is it on Twitter…why would that deter you?’

Why indeed.

Apparently sceptic reaction to ‘alarmist claims’ by scientists and environmentalists, is instant and overwhelming….and has everyone looking over their shoulders…from politicians, to scientists, to the media itself all worried about being attacked by the Sceptics.

Terrible thing isn’t it that lack of deference to assumed authority…but isn’t that what the 60’s was all about?  How the tables have turned  now ‘they’ are the Establishment.

 
Then paradoxically it was claimed that it was a strong lobby, powerful voices from politics, who silenced the scientists et al…such as the Tories….em…like who?…Tim Yeo?

Apparently the Science is being misrepresented and used for political purposes by the Sceptics, and that is putting off people from engaging with climate change.

Ironically Lynas said that he would ‘love it if we could just talk about the science…it would be very useful for society.’

The Sceptics would also love to talk about the science but shutting them out of that debate has been the aim of the likes of Harrabin, Joe Smith and Steve Jones….this very interview was part of the plot to malign Sceptics and silence them.

Then apparently you can’t be too alarmist….it’s such an important subject with such serious consequences that you have to grab people’s attention….however that doesn’t include the Science of it all…just the dramatic and dire consequences must be publicised so that all those drastic new green policies can be implemented.

 
So all in all a pretty dire interview, bias all round from presenter to guests, and a definite narrative trying to smear and vilify Sceptics.

However if you’ve read that previous post you will have seen that it is the Sceptics who have been at the receiving end of extreme abuse and threats…even climate scientist Phil Jones runs scared of the pro climate lobby:

“The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998. Okay it has but it is only seven years of data and it isn’t statistically significant.”

The BBC has often been the cheerleader for the abusers giving the nod and a wink to them by its own denigration and dismissal of the sceptics.

Richard Black was a prime suspect in this…here is a classic example where he questions the sanity of sceptics…smearing them either as being conspiracy theorists or abused in childhood:

[One view is that] climate scepticism has psychological roots; that it stems from a deep-seated inability or unwillingness to accept the overwhelming evidence that humanity has built with coal and lubricated with oil its own handcart whose destination board reads “climate hell”.  As one climate advocate said…
“I’ve been debating the science with them for years, but recently I realised we shouldn’t be talking about the science but about something unpleasant that happened in their childhood”.

And then there is Professor Steve Jones…fanatical climate change advocate who wants to silence the sceptics…..just why was a man so clearly biased allowed to review the BBC’s science output and advise the BBC on impartiality?  Just who was it at the BBC that recommended Jones for the job?  Harrabin?

Why then are Sceptics so sceptical you might ask?

Not such a puzzle…..Harrabin’s mate, Dr Joe Smith, can provide the answer perhaps…..

Perhaps it shouldn’t puzzle us that that the promise of rapid environmental and social change is greeted with a ‘gloom of inattention’.
Much of the current discussion about climate change falls between the overstated rhetoric of jeopardy, which is now having a diminishing public impact, and more sober and open-ended discussions of risk and uncertainty, which are largely unreported because they do not readily fit into media conventions.

Most of environmentalism has done little new work in over a decade, and its tendency towards hyperbole, and its reliance on a narrow stock of fear-based narratives appears to have left portions of the public apathetic and fateful, and others hostile.

And a bubble of alarmist environmental hype…..

Lord Stern suggests that ‘The quantity and quality of coverage of climate change has undoubtedly declined’.
Joe Smith: Climate contrarian voices are having a very good run of it I’d agree with that too. But should we be surprised? The last quarter of 2009 saw an inflated bubble of (monotonous) climate-worrying stories. Even in June of that year you could more or less book a ticket to watch the media bubble bursting in the days that followed COP15 that December. It didn’t require an intriguing Climategate or a disappointing Copenhagen conference: editorial and public boredom would have dished the news value of climate change with no further effort from anyone.

In 2009 Joe Smith said they needed a new angle, a new narrative…..don’t scare the punters…

What have been the achievements of the environmental community over the last 20 years?….The generation of fear, concern and anxiety….now we need a different set of emotions to get a working majority to engage people and change policies….creativity,, innovation, imagination, even passion.

Ironically he didn’t follow his own advice about not being alarmist…here in 2012 he signed a letter to the Guardian, natch, saying we had 50 months to save the Earth (that’ll be 35 now then)

‘On current trends, there are around just 50 months left before we cross a critical climate threshold. After that, it will no longer be ‘likely’ that we will stay on the right side of a 2 degree temperature rise.
Now we call on the government and opposition to say what they will do in the same time frame to grab the opportunity of action and prevent catastrophic climate change.’

Perhaps it was the Marxist angle that makes climate change so unattractive:

‘Climate change must break out of its left-wing ghetto. Communicators need to drop the language and narratives of environmentalism that have only ever appealed to a minority of people.’

Richard Black tells us that it is the revelations of scientific bad behaviour that has driven scepticism about the science…..talking about the CRU emails….

‘Here was a crime with international ramifications – the theft and release of more than 6,000 e-mails and other documents that lit a fire under mainstream climate science, perhaps contributing to the torpor in the UN climate process and raising the level of doubt in public minds…… the tsunami of doubt that “ClimateGate” spewed into the court of public opinion on climate change……in the folklore of the sceptical blogosphere, it’s achieved cult status; no doubt about that.‘

Possibly scepticism might just be the result of climate sceptics coming to realise that the climate scientists just don’t have a clue what is going on……the BBC’s Roger Bolton on Feedback said this:

Roger Bolton: Hello. BBC journalists are required to be impartial, as is the presenter of Feedback. But should one be impartial where the facts are clear?

Well that’s one question but another might be ‘are the facts clear?’ Is the science really settled?
Harrabin and Joe Smith of the CMEP have worked out  a devious scheme to sideline sceptics…don’t talk about the science…talk about risk or how to stop the world warming…..

Climate change should not be responded to as a body of ‘facts’ to be acted upon (with the IPCC acting as prime arbiter). Instead it should be considered as a substantial and urgent collective risk management problem. Projecting climate change as a risk problem rather than a communication-of-fact problem helpfully deflates ‘debates’ about whether climate change is or is not a scientific fact.

My point is: lets not get stuck on the science. Climate change is a vast and widening body of investigation and debate: science is now barely the half of it, and in terms of political outcomes it is not the thing that counts.….a line that is designed to work for people who have ideological wax blocking their ears: ‘don’t get het up about communicating science – talk about clean American energy and jobs in a new efficient, competitive economy’.

But that’s the whole problem…..the facts are far from clear and becoming less clear as more is known…..the newspaper cutting illustrated at the top of the page shows that there was warming in the Arctic in the 1920’s, we also know that there was ‘Global cooling’ in the 1970’s….and then we have these types of claims….such as we’ll never see snow again….

This from 2012:

Met Office: Arctic sea-ice loss linked to colder, drier UK winters

Decreasing amounts of ice in the far north is contributing to colder winters and drought, chief scientist Julia Slingo tells MPs
She added that more cold winters mean less water, and could exacerbate future droughts. “The replenishment of aquifers generally happens in winter and spring … a wet summer does not replenish aquifers. So we are concerned if we have a sequence of cold winters that could be much more damaging,” she told the committee.
Last month the environment secretary, Caroline Spelman, warned farmers that drought might become “the new normal” for the UK, because of climate change.

“Two very dry winters – this may be the new norm,” the secretary of state for environment, food and rural affairs.

Laughably Harrabin doubts the Met. Office when they don’t toe the Green line:

“The trouble is that we simply don’t know how much to trust the Met Office.”

And then there’s this:

The ice is growing.

And today from WUWT we have this from the Green scientist’s Bible, ‘Nature’:

The journal Nature embraces ‘the pause’ and ocean cycles as the cause, Trenberth still betting his heat will show up

Read the article and you will see they smash the CO2 link to climate change…..but they can’t agree….one scientist claims one thing…others the complete, dare I say Polar, opposite:

‘There are two potential holes in his assessment. First, the historical ocean-temperature data are notoriously imprecise, leading many researchers to dispute Cane’s assertion that the equatorial Pacific shifted towards a more La Niña-like state during the past century. Second, many researchers have found the opposite pattern in simulations with full climate models, which factor in the suite of atmospheric and oceanic interactions beyond the equatorial Pacific.’

Here is that feedback programme with Roger Bolton…where the presenter is happy to label sceptics as ‘Deniers’…Bishop Hill was not impressed:

Worst BBC programme of all time?

BBC Radio 4’s Feedback programme looked at the space given to global warming sceptics in the period covering the release of the Fifth Assessment Report.
The programme was shameless, stupid and dishonest.

What was so dishonest about the programme?…well for a start the so-called ‘callers’ were in fact people with vested interests in maintaining the green hoax…not mentioned by the BBC……merely calling them….‘some Feedback listeners’.

Source: BBC Radio 4: FeedbackURL: N/A
Date: 18/10/2013Event: Steve Jones about “passionate climate deniers” – “no point in talking to them”Attribution: BBC Radio 4Also see: Sep 27, 2013: BBC Radio 4: Bob Carter: the IPCC’s 95% probability is “hocus-pocus science”
People:
Dr. Anjana Ahuja: Science writer and author
Roger Bolton: Presenter, BBC Radio 4: Feedback
Professor Bob Carter: Palaeontologist, stratigrapher and marine geologist
Roger Harrabin: BBC’s Environment Analyst
Professor Steve Jones: Emeritus Professor of Genetics, University College London
Simon Sharp [?]: Feedback listener
Peter Verney [?]: Feedback listener

Roger Bolton: Hello. BBC journalists are required to be impartial, as is the presenter of Feedback. But should one be impartial where the facts are clear? The World at One gave airtime to a climate change sceptic, a geologist. Right or wrong decision? Many Feedback listeners think: the latter.
Male listener: This person was not a climate scientist, and he was clearly not qualified to speak on the subject.

Roger Bolton: The author of a BBC Trust report into accuracy and balance in science reporting, Professor Steve Jones, is also critical of the World at One’s decision. But should voices which challenge the consensus be silenced? Isn’t that censorship?
Steve Jones: The problem with passionate climate change deniers out there is that whatever the evidence, they will not accept that they are wrong. So, under those circumstances, there’s no real point in talking to them.

So just who were those ‘Feedback listeners’?

Peter Verney, “Darfur’s Manmade Disaster,” Middle East Report Online, 22 July 2004.
Simon Sharp   ‘I am the Director of Green Route Energy and have been working in the renewable energy sector for over 10 years.  We take great pride in giving honest, jargon free advice on the various products and services on the market.‘

Hardly what you might call impartial callers….highly dishonest of the BBC to present them as such.

The whole point of the CMEP seminars and other work was to ‘improve the communication of climate change’….not to help you understand…but to get you to believe….to change the public’s behaviour…here we are explicitly told why:

Nick Pidgeon, Professor of Environmental Psychology at Cardiff University, told us that ‘communication is vital for the narrative. If the emerging evidence  about the impacts of climate change – extreme weather events, floods, heat waves etc – are not communicated and not connected to climate change, then it won’t be possible to change behaviour or the public will not see it as a priority to adapt.
If the communication isn’t there, the lifestyle changes won’t happen.

Far from being ‘silent’ the BBC has been working hard to push that narrative…happily linking the floods to climate change…..

 
Battered Britain: Storms, Tides and Floods
After weeks of devastating weather across the UK, Sophie Raworth presents a special programme in which BBC News correspondents report on the scale of the damage, what caused it, and how those affected by it are coping.

Well..it wasn’t weeks of devastating weather…. a few days of powerful storms followed up by many days of rain….much of the damage was actually done by high tides.

‘The oldest man living does not remember such great floods and so much water. Everything beyond Bridgwater is like a sea.’ 1809

Here the BBC dishonestly concentrates on the Somerset Levels…a clue in the name there…just why do they flood?  The BBC didn’t bother to reveal that they always flood, and have done for thousands of years.

Muchelney on Somerset Levels still cut off by floods

From Wikipedia……
The Somerset Levels, or the Somerset Levels and Moors as they are less commonly but more correctly known, is a sparsely populated coastal plain and wetland area of central Somerset, South West England, running south from the Mendip Hills to the Blackdown Hills.

One explanation for the county of Somerset’s name is that, in prehistory, because of winter flooding people restricted their use of the Levels to the summer, leading to a derivation from Sumorsaete, meaning land of the summer people.

We have had the new narrative from Harrabin about why we get more floods now apparently….we get the same rainfall but it comes in shorter more intense bursts….

‘The issue is the way it falls in sudden bursts not the amount of rain.‘

The BBC’s own ‘sceptic’ Paul Hudson asks…..

Is the perceived rise in flooding real?

‘Could it be that this is more a function of urbanisation and flood plain development, than any significant increase in high intensity rainfall events?

And the media could have played their part in making us think that flooding is on the increase.

100 years ago we would have no idea if there had been flash floods in some parts of the country, but 24 news has changed all that and within hours pictures of floods from around the world are beamed into our living rooms.

This all adds to the perception that the frequency of serious floods are on the increase when it could be that its simply the awareness of flooding that has changed – coupled with the extensive flood plain development that we have witnessed in the last few decades.’

As this official plot shows there doesn’t seem to have been much change in rainfall patterns at all…and the earliest date must be around 1720…there is a distinct 50 year pattern:

The BBC continues to make dramatic headline linking floods and climate change:

Lack of research linking climate change and floods is a ‘scandal’

But hang on the BBC’s Matt McGrath says this:

Scientists expect rising emissions of carbon dioxide to weaken the temperature contrast between the Poles and the Equator leading to potentially weaker storms.

But aren’t the floods caused by global warming, caused by CO2,  and which forced extreme cold air down from the Pole to meet very warm air from the South…the contrast generating the Polar Vortex in the US and the ‘extreme’ storms here? Now we’re told global warming will bring us weaker storms.

Very complicated all this.  Just can’t keep up with all the great ideas.

‘Is the BBC biased’ picked up on this Harry’s Place look at a Newsnight interview with a far right associate,  Alain Soral,  of Anelka’s good mate Dieudonne……..

BBC Newsnight presents Far Right Holocaust denier as “writer and film-maker”

An example of Soral’s writing.

Harry’s Place concludes:

Neither Paxman nor Newsnight reveal the fascist and antisemitic background of Soral – he is simply a “close friend” of Dieudonné who helped him “popularise the quenelle.” This is a real shame, considering the BBC’s trusted role as a credible and authoritative public broadcaster.

Paxman does not challenge Soral for suggesting “a deep link between the system of domination that Mr. Dieudonné is challenging, and the organised Jewish community.” Neither does Paxman challenge Soral’s conspiracy theory about a “very powerful Zionist lobby in France”. Paxman also lets Soral’s claim go unchallenged, that the “annual CRIF dinner” (Jewish community dinner) proves the French government is “entirely under the influence of the Zionist lobby.

Paxman ends simply by saying “Thankyou very much indeed” to Soral.

What exactly went on during the editing process at BBC Newsnight that allowed a Far Right Holocaust denier to be presented credibly as a “writer and film-maker”, and allowed to promote his own antisemitic views unchallenged?

All quite extraordinary….if someone is brought on to explain, or excuse, a close associate’s behaviour perhaps it might be relevant to know the views of that person so that we can judge just how the things he says are coloured by his views…..especially if those views are of an extreme nature.

It seems that if you happen to be a Muslim footballer then the BBC turns a blind eye to you making gestures that are deemed anti-Semitic and concentrates instead on other issues, distracting attention from the anti-Semitism and the religion, and instead pretending it is an issue about free speech.

When footballer Thomas Hitzlsperger came out as gay the BBC went to town….5Live practically gave the station over to the story……but hardly a peep about Anelka.

Strange….just how important was Miliband’s announcement that he wanted to cap Banks’ market share?

It was the BBC’s top Frontpage story at 02:43 last night……

….But now it has vanished…relegated to a small line on the UK page…whilst ‘Rates of gout in UK ‘soaring’ remains frontpage news.

Could it have anything to do with the Treasury boss’s put down of Miliband?

From the Telegraph:

Mark Carney rejects Ed Miliband’s bank shake-up plan

Also frontpage in the FT (£):

Carney deals blow to Labour bank plan

Miliband must be busily rewriting his scheme for Friday’s big speech…and the BBC can rewrite its own script and give him the headlines again.

The BBC reports:

Ed Miliband to call for banking competition inquiry

A Labour government would tell regulators to investigate whether there is adequate competition between High Street banks, the BBC understands.

Ed Miliband is due to say on Friday that the authorities should look into whether breaking up banks would benefit customers.

The question ‘What should the Treasury do?’ actually refers to bank bonuses and not competition despite the way it looks in the headlines there:

Should the Treasury approve big banker bonuses?

Funny really…Miliband wants to know what the ‘authorities’ think about capping retail bank’s market share….and the Treasury provides the answer…Miliband is a fool basically…and the BBC ignores it…

From the Telegraph:

Mark Carney rejects Ed Miliband’s bank shake-up plan

Labour’s proposals to limit market share were also rejected by Lord Lawson, former Chancellor and member of the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards, who said: “I think there are probably enough domestic banks for there to be competition.”

‘A blow to Miliband’s plan’…..why would the BBC ignore that?

Also frontpage in the FT (£):

Carney deals blow to Labour bank plan

Where oh where is the BBC report?…the BBC being the biggest news provider in the UK if not the world.

Competition?

The BBC gives us this list of banks implying a miniscule market:

On Friday, Mr Miliband is expected to say that forcing the major High Street banks to sell off branches would promote the growth of new firms able to challenge the dominance of the “big five” – RBS, HSBC, Lloyds, Barclays, and Santander.

“We’ve got to give customers more choice,”

The big five?

What about the Halifax, or the Co-op, or Tescos, or Sainsburys, or Standard Chartered, or Clydesdale? The Post Office has a basic banking service as well….amongst numerous other smaller banks.

As with the energy companies which despite there being a ‘big six’ numerous smaller companies provide an alternative supply…as Miliband knows because he switched to one of them himself, the banks also provide more than enough competition.

Anything else?…from the FT:

The Post Office is one of several “challenger” banks vying to break up the UK’s highly concentrated banking sector by offering a current account, considered the cornerstone of a bank’s relationship with customers.

These providers have stepped up their plans to launch accounts following the introduction of a new switching service, which enables customers to move their current accounts within seven working days.

Tesco declared at the end of last year that it would start providing current accounts in the first half of 2014. The retailer plans to offer rewards to banking customers, using its existing Clubcard points system.

Virgin Money, which took over parts of Northern Rock, also aims to launch current accounts early this year, starting with a basic account aimed at people who do not have a bank account.

Another bit of tilting at windmills to generate headlines by Miliband and his spinners.

And oh yes:

In 2009, the Labour government attempted to create a new “people’s bank” through the Post Office, but the plans were scrapped a year later after they were deemed too expensive.

Shame the BBC regurgitates it all without question once again.

Just listening to 5Live Sport (still on air now) talking to Lord Herman Ouseley, Chair of Kick It Out about Anelka and what is an anti-Semitic salute.

The FA has been taking a long time to come up with a verdict…the BBC presenter, Mark Pougatch probably, said that ‘cultural differences would have to be considered’ when Lord Ouseley said that a lot of information was coming back from France on the background to this.

‘Cultural differences’?  Really?  In which culture is it acceptable to give an anti-Semitic salute…and why should that then be acceptable here if it was a ‘cultural thing’?

As the BBC has already reported this:

The French government’s Sports Minister, Valerie Fourneyron, described the gesture as “anti-semitic”.

…you might think it was cut and dried as to the meaning of the ‘salute’….in France, or anywhere.

The BBC loathed the EDL which campaigned against an ideology that incites homophobia, misogyny, apartheid, death to apostates and anti-Semitism.

But the BBC praises those who chase Neo-Nazis out of town:

The North Dakota town that thwarted a neo-Nazi takeover

[The Neo-Nazi’s ] plans for Leith were exposed in August last year by the Southern Poverty Law Center, an Alabama-based civil rights organisation.

The Southern Poverty Law Center counted 1,007 groups as active hate groups in the United States in 2012….of that…only 3 are Muslim….a religion of peace indeed.

Has the BBC published a map of Muslim ‘hate groups’ in the UK?  Surely there must be some of concern?

Imagine the outcry if non-Muslims in Tower Hamlets were to ‘thwart a fundamentalist Muslim takeover’….too late for that anyway.

Lutfur Rahman can be described as ‘extremist-backed,’ rules Press Complaints Commission (but we will publish his denials)

Since April Lutfur Rahman, the extremist-backed mayor of Tower Hamlets, has been pursuing a PCC campaign against the Telegraph. He has over the last eight months made four complaints, all of which were finally resolved to our satisfaction last week.

It is notable the joyous glee that the BBC hunts down White people who express extremist views….or tries desperately to blame them for something they hope wasn’t done by a Muslim…the Boston bombs for instance…..curious that the BBC avoided tackling politics in Tower Hamlets or indeed the so-called ‘Muslim patrols’ as they hit the headlines everywhere else.

There’s hardly a day goes by without a sneer or a derogatory remark about the Daily Mail from a BBC presenter.

Now that Murdoch has been somewhat neutered the Mail is the next in the firing line for the relentless barrage of criticism that is intended to close it down….either literally or by making life so difficult for the owners that they backdown and give in to what amounts to control by the Left as to what is ‘acceptable’ content.

Scary huh? A Free Press anyone?

The assault has begun already in the New Statesman:

Paul Dacre of the Daily Mail: The man who hates liberal Britain

He’s the most successful and most feared newspaperman of his generation. But after a bad year in which he was forced to defend his methods, how much longer can Dacre survive as editor-in-chief of the Daily Mail?

Politicians no longer fear Murdoch as they once did. They still fear Dacre.

But Murdoch’s decline leaves the Mail under more scrutiny than ever. Is Dacre at last running out of road?

Rumours circulate in the national newspaper industry that members of the Rothermere family, owners of the Daily Mail, are increasingly nervous of the controversy that Dacre stirs up.

Dacre attracts visceral loathing. His enemies see the Mail, to quote the Huffington Post writer and NS columnist Mehdi Hasan (who was duly monstered in the Mail’s pages), as “immigrant-bashing, woman-hating, Muslim-smearing, NHS-undermining, gay-baiting”.

Curiously the New Statesman doesn’t give us the full facts here:

Nor that Hasan has admitted that…As a Muslim, I struggle with the idea of homosexuality… because of his religion…which by the way is also misogynistic, never mind the calls to kill the unbeliever or gay people…..or apostates as illustrated by the atheist Afghan given asylum here in fear of his life.

The NS continues:

In Dacre’s mind, the country is run, in effect, by affluent metropolitan liberals who dominate Whitehall, the leadership of the main political parties, the universities, the BBC and most public-sector professions. As he once said, “. . . no day is too busy or too short not to find time to tweak the noses of the liberal­ocracy”.

The Mail, in his view, speaks for ordinary people, working hard and struggling with their bills, conventional in their views, ambitious for their children, loyal to their country, proud of owning their home, determined to stand on their own feet. These people, Dacre believes, are not given a fair hearing in the national media and the Mail alone fights for them. It is incomprehensible to him – a gross category error – that critics should be obsessed by the Mail’s power and influence when the BBC, funded by a compulsory poll tax, dominates the news market. It uses this position, he argues, to push a dogmatically liberal agenda, hidden behind supposed neutrality.

[The Mail’s ] trick is to make the world seem more threatening than it is: crime is rising, migrants flooding the country, benefit scroungers swindling the taxpayer, standards of education falling, wind turbines taking over the countryside.

While his views are mostly right-wing, he is not a reliable ally for the Conservative Party, or for anyone else. This aspect of his way of working is little understood. More than most editors, it can be said of him that he is in nobody’s pocket, not even his proprietor’s.

Today, it is resolutely – some would say hysterically – Euro­sceptic and a far higher proportion of its readership is from Scotland and the English north and midlands. [No wonder the cosmopolitan media luvvies hate it]

The New Statesman’s main complaint, or should I say charge, against the Daily Mail is:

To its critics, however, the Mail is as biased as it’s possible to be, and none too fussy about the facts.

[Next week the New Statesman looks at the BBC…and then itself]

The NS gives numerous examples of the Mail being ‘none too fussy about the facts‘, the Mehdi Hasan one above for instance…but like that just how many of the NS’s claims are really true?

This for example…In the past ten years, the Mail has reported that the dean of RAF College Cranwell [Joel Hayward…a Muslim] showed undue favouritism to Muslim students (false)

Indeed the Mail published this story for which they had to pay damages:

‘Ayatollah of the RAF’

The main source for the Mail‘s witch-hunt is a letter headed “The Air Force Ayatollah”, which was sent to the paper by anonymous RAF officers. Apparently students at Cranwell “are in fear” of expressing anti-Muslim sentiments in front of Hayward. Worst of all: “Anyone who fails to follow the line that Islam is a peace-loving religion is hauled into his office for re-education”….The sole “Islamist” connection that the Mail can come up with is the fact that Hayward wrote a paper for the Cordoba Foundation, “described by David Cameron as a front for the Islamist group, the Muslim Brotherhood”.

But when you look at the man they were reporting on perhaps the RAF should have asked some questions:

“Hayward’s thesis is that the Nazis did not attempt the systematic extermination of Jews during the Second World War. In particular, he finds the evidence that gas chambers were built and used for this purpose unconvincing.”

An Islamic website says this about his thoughts on Libya:

To the dismay of defence chiefs, he has cast doubt on the widely held belief that the Nato actions averted the mass killing of civilians in Benghazi. He also warned against the RAF becoming ‘the air corps of a rebel army’….I worry that the rush to intervene again in a Muslim land without a well-reasoned strategy, even ostensibly to stop a bad man from misbehaving, may yet convince observers that there is more going on behind the scenes than at first there appears.

Dr Hayward has previously expressed remorse after appearing to claim that far fewer Jews were killed by the Nazis than generally thought and that the gas chambers of the Holocaust were British propaganda.

Hayward describes himself as “a moderate and politically liberal revert who chose to embrace the faith of Islam because of its powerful spiritual truths, its emphasis on peace and justice, its racial and ethnic inclusiveness and its charitable spirit towards the poor and needy.”

The usual people that use the term ‘revert’ are fundamentalist Muslims…the term is essentially an insult to all non-Muslims…people who use it mean that all people are born Muslims and if they take up the faith they don’t convert, they revert back to their original state as a Muslim.

Hayward compares Muhammed to Churchill:

On 4 June 1940 Churchill gave a magnificent speech to inspire the British people to continue their struggle against the undoubted evils of Nazism, even though the German armed forces then seemed stronger and better in battle. His speech includes the fabulous warlike lines:

We shall fight on the seas and oceans
We shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be
We shall fight on the beaches
We shall fight on the landing grounds
We shall fight in the fields and in the streets
We shall fight in the hills
We shall never surrender.

No-one would dream of calling Churchill warmongering, much less murderous.

Well actually the Left call Churchill a murderous warmonger all the time….the Labour Party and the Daily Mirror leading the charge:

The Conservative leader, Winston Churchill, has wound up his election campaign with a hard-hitting speech in which he vigorously denied accusations of warmongering.

Labour has concentrated its attack on Mr Churchill and the Conseratives saying their return to government would make a third world war more likely.

“Whose finger on the trigger?” has become the slogan for this campaign after the Daily Mirror coined the phrase for a front-page headline.

Trouble is of course Churchill didn’t produce a book that goes onto to call for the death of all Germans or non-Britons etc etc

Jihad Watch has published the Mail’s story...it seems pretty harmless…Hayward has been given the right of reply in it….’Last night Dr Hayward said he did not ‘recognise’ the allegations’……and the Mail is only reporting what it has been told by other RAF officers.

The Mail was forced to withdraw the article and pay damages to Hayward:

Libel damages for RAF professor branded Ayatollah by Associated Newspapers

Remember when the New Statesman had to apologise for its anti-Semitic front cover?:

Dacre and the Daily Mail are now enemy Number One…no doubt we can expect far more of this from the usual suspects.

Free Press anyone?

And to finish…some fine words from Joel Hayward……

Eminent scholar Robert Pape demonstrates that most terrorist attacks by Muslims (and almost all suicide attacks, by whoever) are motivated by perceived grievances that relate to foreign occupation or exploitation. These include Palestinian attacks and most of those in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even many bombings in Pakistan relate to the government’s actions in support of the West’s counter-insurgency war in Afghanistan.

It is also clear that western and other nations can increase their own security by leaving Muslim lands to carve out their own futures. Bin Laden may be gone, but some of the claimed grievances that he railed against—albeit through evil action—still fuel tremendous resentment.

Oh…and Murdoch may be part of a pro-Israel conspiracy:

The scandals linked to NoTW raise questions pertaining to truth, objectivity and bias.

[Robert] Fisk believes that at least one international media organisation with excessive influence throughout the western world is steering opinion towards Israel.

 I do not know if Fisk is correct but let’s say, for the sake of argument, that he is.

I am not a conspiracy theorist and rather than attributing this observation to the influence of any malevolent individuals or groups, I tend to attribute the apparent bias and absence of balance mainly to the legacy of Orientalism and a widespread lack of knowledge about Islam.

So Fisk may not be right but……

SamCam’s father nets £350,000 a year from subsidised wind farm

The BBC and their pet scientists frequently lament the fact that so many people are sceptical about global warming and the attendant political policies forced upon them.

Why oh why they ask in despair does no one believe them?

Could it be for instance the inconvenient revelations in the CRU emails?  Could it be the rigged ‘inquiries’ into those emails? Could it be that both scientists and the BBC are not keen to let the public see the data or who is saying what in their secret seminars? Could it be the lack of any real ‘science’ that proves CO2 is the actual driver of climate change?

Could it be as mentioned in the last post that in the quest for a carbon free energy policy it seems that all morality and common sense has gone out of the window as illustrated by Lord Smith’s desire to deny cheap energy to the masses and impose hugely expensive renewable energy upon them instead…

Coal on the global market is so cheap that it threatens government attempts to tackle climate change, the chairman of the Environment Agency has warned.

“The government must ensure it doesn’t continue.”

Or could it be something like this example, Via Bishop Hill, of the arrogant desire to hide yet more inconvenient and very awkward truths about wind turbines….that they are wearing out much faster than claimed…and thereby also losing efficiency as well…and costing us even more?

The Government’s scientific advisor, Prof. Mackay is in full denial mode:

Readers will no doubt recall the study by Gordon Hughes, which suggested that wind farms are wearing out much more quickly than previously thought. This was the subject of a bit of to and fro at BH the other day, when Prof David Mackay, the chief scientist at DECC, appeared in the comments to dispute the findings.

Renewable Energy Foundation published some background, explaining that the two sides had in fact been discussing the issue since the original Hughes paper appeared in 2012. Hughes had apparently met with Mackay and had at that time apparently persuaded him that the model was in fact identifiable. Mackay had then shifted position somewhat, claiming only that the decline in performance was overstated (he suggested 2% per annum compared to Hughes’ 5%). However, by May Mackay had apparently reverted to his earlier position, namely that Hughes’ model was non-identifiable.

The REF’s summary of the story to date ended with this strikingly robust statement:

Professor Mackay has made considerable efforts, first to persuade us to withdraw Professor Hughes’ paper, and now publicly, and on dubious grounds, to discredit work which is obviously original and draws attention to a previously undiscussed phenomenon, the decline in load factor over time, that was not acknowledged, for example, in the Department of Energy and Climate Change’s own levelised cost estimates for wind power. This is extraordinary behaviour for a Chief Scientific Advisor to government. Rather than shooting the messenger, Professor Mackay might more fruitfully be advising government on how best to ensure that consumer gets better value for their subsidy, and that we present a more economically compelling example of the low carbon economy to the developing world. 

 

Ensuring the consumer gets better value for their subsidy?

Pull the other one…never happen…not as long as Cameron’s father-in-law, and his ilk, are raking in the dosh from the windfarms.

Wonder just how many investments the good Tim Yeo, Chair of the DECC, has?

Is the BBC investigating any of this?  Is it heck as like!

As Christopher Booker says:

The BBC,  now has a “narrative” shaping its coverage in only one direction on almost every issue, from global warming and wind farms to the EU and the activities of what they call our “brave” social workers. And the most telling giveaway of anyone who has passed into the grip of a “narrative” is how they instantly fall back on denigration of anyone who questions it, dismissing them as “flat-earthers”, “idiots”, “cranks”, “Right-wingers”, “creationists”, “in the pay of Big Oil”, and so on.

Also, more detail on the wind turbines from Roger Helme:

A paper  by distinguished environmental economist Professor Gordon Hughes of Edinburgh University shows that in the UK, on-shore wind farm relative output (actual output as a percent of rated maximum) declined from an average 24% at the outset to 15% after ten years and 11% after fifteen years.  Danish offshore wind farms declined even more catastrophically, from 39% initially to 15% at age ten.  The output of larger turbines (now favoured by the industry) declined more rapidly than that of smaller turbines.

This decline may be attributable to wear and tear on the mechanical parts and bearings, plus degradation of the aerodynamic surfaces of the blades (I daresay those clots of eagles’ blood and feathers don’t help).  Degradation of the blades can create instability and vibration, in turn leading to mechanical wear, damage and failure.  And offshore, the strong winds and harsh conditions constitute an extraordinarily challenging environment for wind turbines.

These findings have important implications for policy towards wind generation in the UK. First, they suggest that the subsidy regime is extremely generous if investment in new wind farms is profitable despite the decline in performance due to age and over time. Second, meeting the UK Government’s targets for wind generation will require a much higher level of wind capacity – and, thus, capital investment – than current projections imply. Third, the structure of contracts offered to wind generators under the proposed reform of the electricity market should be modified since few wind farms will operate for more than 12–15 years.

The BBC’s Ethical Man laments the ineffectiveness of wind turbines  (cheap energy is only possible at the moment thanks to fossil fuels):

Professor David MacKay, the new chief scientist at the Department for Energy and Climate Change, has done the maths on this. Instead of kW, he calculates power in kWh, and he estimates that if we put wind turbines across the windiest 10% of the country, we would generate only 20 kWh per day per person in Britain.

According to MacKay, it takes 40 kWh to drive the average car 50km.

Add in offshore turbines covering a third of the available shallow water locations (44,000 turbines) and installing deep water turbines in a 9km-wide strip all round the entire British coast and you get an additional 48kWh day per person.

That’s a lot of power, but even on quite conservative estimates the average UK resident uses 125 kWh day.

It leads to a dispiriting conclusion. Wind is, at best, only a very partial solution to the problem of how to generate low-carbon energy.

Some prices to consider: