Can anyone explain the difference in treatment that the BBC gave Tom Herndon whom they believe undermines the case for Austerity,  here on the Today programme (08:49): 

Last week Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff paper that showed that growth slows dramatically if a country’s debt goes over 90% of its GDP was found to contain significant errors. Tom Herndon, a student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, explains that he discovered the inaccuracies while he was doing his homework.

…And the way the BBC treated Steve McIntyre whose work proved that the climate lobby’s central pillar, the Hockey Stick, was wrong.

Whilst giving Herndon a highly respectful write up McIntyre’s work was buried under a deluge of insults and smears for climate change sceptics from Roger Harrabin who then tried to imply that in fact McIntyre didn’t think his own conclusion was correct somehow.

Climate sceptics rally to expose ‘myth’

Note the choice of wording,  all selected to convey a particular impression…rightwing, vegetarians endangered, wine and blood coursed, libertarian, oppress the people, ‘geologist and Republican’, small government, McIntyre ‘shambled…a retired mining engineer…climate a hobby….a lugubrious bear of a man…nervous, winced’,  one handed applause, this conference – part counter-orthodox science brainstorm, part political rally.

Rather than look at McIntyre’s debunking of the graph Harrabin gets personal. 

So an article by Harrabin about someone exposing the Hockey Stick myth didn’t actually deal with the claims made by McIntyre or his evidence that the graph was badly misleading.

Here is the only comment on the graph…..

‘Mr McIntyre then advised sceptics to stop insisting that the Hockey Stick is a fraud. It is understandable for scientists to present their data in a graphic way to “sell” their message, he said. He understood why they had done it. But their motives were irrelevant.

The standard of evidence required to prove fraud over the Hockey Stick was needlessly high, he said. All that was needed was an acknowledgement by the science authorities that the Hockey Stick was wrong.’

Harrabin is working hard to give the impression that McIntyre didn’t think the Hockey Stick was a fraud, that he couldn’t prove it was wrong, but he could understand the reasons for its conclusions.

I think it is almost a racing certainty that McIntyre said no such thing…or rather he said a lot more which would have made  a strong case against the Hockey Stick and that Harrabin has been highly selective in what he puts down on paper.

Harrabin is engaged in a campaign to undermine Sceptics with ridicule and accusations that their scepticism is based on politics not science.  He doesn’t examine McIntyre’s thesis because to do so would mean actually admitting that McIntyre was right and that the Hockey Stick was just ‘an illusion’.

Here is a good overview of Mcintyre’s Hockey Stick work.…

Steve McIntyre linked up with Ross McKitrick a Canadian economist specialising in environmental economics and policy analysis. Together McIntyre and McKitrick began to dig down into the data that Mann had used in his paper and the statistical techniques used to create the single blended average used to make the Hockey Stick. They immediately began to find problems.

Some of these problems just seemed the sort of errors that are caused by sloppy data handling concerning location labels, use of obsolete editions, unexplained truncations of available series, etc. Although such errors should have been spotted in the peer review process and they would adversely affect the quality of Mann’s conclusions they had a relatively small effect on the final results.

But McIntyre and McKitrick found one major error, an error so big that it invalidated the entire conclusion of the whole paper. A whopper of an error.

Shame once again it is a mere blogger who provides the credible and coherent examination whilst the BBC hack provides an almost invective laden diatribe intent solely on insulting and abusing Sceptics in an attempt to undermine their credibility.

Harrabin’s artricle is just as much a ‘fraud’ as the Hockey Stick graph he sought to defend.

In 2008 the BBC paid for a large truck to tour central London displaying a giant version of Mann’s Hockey Stick as part of the promotion of its very pro CO2 warming mini series called “Climate Wars”.

Romany Blythe, 45, a drama teacher, urged thousands to join in “demonstrations of disapproval” around the country after creating a Facebook group called The Witch is Dead.

“In normal circumstances celebrating someone’s death would be reprehensible. But we are generation X, upset people that left school to find hopelessness and despair.”

What she actually found was a council house that she bought and made a whacking great profit on when she sold it and a boob job on the NHS to help her with low esteem issues.

Apparently this was all forced on her by the tyrant Thatcher…..“She was a despot. They danced in the streets when Hitler died too.”

Hitler handed out Living Room, Mrs Thatcher handed out Live-in bras…so alike. 

Not sure why Victoria Derbyshire brought this woman onto her show (11:08)….this is old news…the ‘death threats’ were reported 10 days ago and the rest was nothing she hadn’t said before.

It just seemed an opportunity was given to her to bash the Daily Mail, the Sun and the ‘Right Wing’ Press in general…Derbyshire asking her encouragingly if she would be taking legal action against ‘certain newspapers’.

Blythe laughably bemoaned the fact that she was being ‘vilified and turned into a hate figure’ by the Right Wing Press.   Hmmmm….The woman who compared Thatcher to Hitler and Ian Duncan Smith to a criminal attacking disabled people.

Blythe was allowed to spout her well worn rhetoric about the Coalition for a couple of minutes without interruption…Welfare reform..the ruthless attack on disabled people being ‘criminal’….Derbyshire rapping up with a lame  ‘ Thank you very much for talking to us’.

Amusingly Blythe said she was glad to have created a political dialogue, a national, global conversation….because without her Thatcher’s legacy would have been whitewashed and no one would have spoken up about all the terrible things she did.

She clearly hasn’t listened to the BBC for the last 30 years.

According to the Associated Press  Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has admitted that his attack was motivated by religion:

‘Interrogators questioned him at the hospital, letting him write down his replies, and his answers led them to believe he and his brother were motivated by religious extremism but appeared to have no major terrorist group connections, said U.S. officials’

The Guardian thinks otherwise:

‘Can an act of violence be called ‘terrorism’ if the motive is unknown?’

The BBC probably still thinks it was some RedneckChristiananti-abortionistlowtaxgoodoldboys  in sleeveless tee shirts but they do worry about this fellow,  Mr Tsarnaev, who is being held in custody and wasn’t read his rights for a while:

‘Justice department officials said that in an effort to “gain critical intelligence”, they decided to question Mr Tsarnaev “extensively” before giving him the so-called “Miranda” warning of his right to remain silent and to have a lawyer present during questioning.’

Not a clue as to what he said when questioned…though they point out he couldn’t afford a lawyer: 

‘Mr Tsarnaev responded to questions mostly in writing. He nodded when asked if he was able to answer some questions and whether he understood his rights, the notes read.

He managed to say the word “no” when asked if he could afford a lawyer.’

Anyway, that’s one possible subject for the new open thread.

You choose the rest……….

The government wants nurses to have a year honing their caring skills before starting their training proper.

The BBC report that the Royal College of Nursing has ‘ridiculed’ this idea…and called it ‘really stupid’.

In fact the BBC seemed so pleased with that phrase, ‘A really stupid idea‘, that they couldn’t repeat it enough times today.

It probably is a really stupid idea but that’s by the by….if the RCN had said it was ‘A really  magnificent idea’ I doubt that would have got much air time on the BBC.

Here’s a really magnificent interview on ‘Morning Reports’ (5:05:30) with Unison’s Karen Jennings.

The interviewer does ask some relevant questions but also seems to feed her some easy ones that she easily bats away.

The worst point is a major failure by the interviewer.

Jennings claims that patient safety is at risk and that staff are stressed by the shortage of staff, and that this is caused by the ‘cuts’.

The interviewer feeds her a line…‘Is this a recent phenomenon?’

Well….what do you reckon she said?

The problems have only arisen in the last couple of years she claims…since 2010 ‘actually’….it’s a disaster in the making she tells us.

Really?  Who’d a thought a Union bod would come up with that?

Not the BBC because the interviewer didn’t have the obvious rejoinder ready for her….

‘What about Stafford Hospital….didn’t that occur under the Labour government long before 2010…you know..when over a thousand patients died  due to lack of care and money was being poured into the service?’

A disaster in the making indeed.

Doesn’t that one point completely undermine her narrative?  The service was obviously atrocious before 2010….but the BBC lets her get away with it…and Labour who seem to have escaped all culpability for the deaths.

Wonder what Karen Jennings and her Union buddies think of this:

Labour rules out ‘massive’ NHS spending increases

Labour has said it will seek to “protect” NHS funding if re-elected while acknowledging that increasing budgets is unlikely in the current economic climate.

So the same policy as the Coalition then?

The BBC has standards…they might be double standards but it has them.

It seems that for the BBC using social media or crowd sourcing news is bad practice leading to inaccuracy and potential dangers...Many are now asking: should “crowd-sourced investigations” be stopped?…unless of course it is done by a responsible news outlet….em…like the BBC perhaps who say about their own use of social media…’it helps us gather more, and sometimes better, material; we can find a wider ranges of voices, ideas and eyewitnesses quickly.’

Did enjoy reading this on the BBC website today:
Finding joy in the hypocrisy of others
How, too, are we to survive in this richly unfair world if we are to be robbed of the satisfaction of observing and detecting the hypocrisy of the high and the mighty?

Well it seems that the BBC haven‘t  yet been robbed of that satisfaction in observing and detecting the hypocrisy of others…..

Of course they only need look in the mirror to see the greatest example of that……

Justin Webb this morning lays into the US TV and social media (8:56) which ’crowd sourced’ information to be provided the police about the Boston bombs to help with their inquiries.

Webb says that in America the 24 hour TV channels went haywire and broadcast all sorts of things that weren’t true.

Does he mean much in the way that the BBC broadcast claims that the evidence was almost certainly pointing towards a ‘domestic’, that is, white, right wing terrorist?

Webb goes on to say  that ‘So much of this is very wrong and potentially very damaging to people.’

Of course this was the same BBC who was happy to report that Israel had killed a young Palestinian boy, Muhammed Al Durra using film taken by a Palestinian camera man.

The same BBC that broadcast false claims that the Israelis had massacred 3000 Palestinians in Jenin:

The BBC News and World Service gave the microphone to and quoted unchallenged the Palestinian Authority spokesman, Saeb Erekat and other Arab sources to talk on an ‘Israeli massacre’, starting with “data” of 3000 and switching later to 500 or 520 Palestinian civilian casualties. The BBC broadcasted very intensively the big story of the Israeli ‘massacre’ of Palestinian civilians, through reports, unchallenged quotations and  renewing reminders.

The same BBC that blamed Israel for the death of one of its own Palestinian employee’s son in Gaza recently….

The home of a BBC employee, Jihad Misharawi, was hit Wednesday by “what looks like a shell,” according to Danahar.  “It caused a huge fire,” Danahar says.  Jihad’s 11-month-old son, Omar, was badly burnt. He was taken to hospital, but died after about an hour. 

“I spoke to him myself today,” Danahar says, “and he said there was no fighting going on, there was nobody from (Hamas) there. It was just civilians.”

…a death in fact caused by a Hamas rocket.

 
The same BBC which used film of Palestinian casualties, again provided by ‘Pallywood’….only for  the casualties to suddenly reappear later on fit and healthy.

The same BBC that tweeted the picture of an injured Palestinian girl…only for it to be shown that she was in fact a casualty of the war in Syria.

Not to mention this bit of infamously emotive crowd sourcing by Jeremy Bowen:
‘In the last hours before a ceasefire, in a United Nations school in Gaza City that was packed with families who had fled from Israeli shelling, a girl of about 13 pushed a piece of cardboard torn from a biscuit wrapper into the hand of one my colleagues.
It was a checklist for the future, with one spelling mistake:
I hope to stop a war
I hope to live in a happy life
I hope to be pace [at peace] for ever
Happy dream
But this is Gaza, a place where nightmares can come true. ‘

But hang on…doesn’t the BBC make use of ‘Social media’ itself?  In fact isn’t ‘Social Media’ playing a central role in its news gathering now?

Justin Webb had better look out…he may not have a job unless he keeps up with the  new digital age:

BBC tells news staff to embrace social media
BBC journalists must keep up with technological change – or leave, the director of BBC Global News Peter Horrocks says

BBC news journalists have been told to use social media as a primary source of information by Peter Horrocks, the new director of BBC Global News who took over last week. He said it was important for editorial staff to make better use of social media and become more collaborative in producing stories.
“This isn’t just a kind of fad from someone who’s an enthusiast of technology. I’m afraid you’re not doing your job if you can’t do those things. It’s not discretionary”, he is quoted as saying in the BBC in-house weekly Ariel.

And from the Guardian:
The BBC, as an early presence on the web, also spotted the possibilities of social media quickly and it has become a highly important and fast-moving part of our multimedia newsroom- it helps us gather more, and sometimes better, material; we can find a wider ranges of voices, ideas and eyewitnesses quickly.

The BBC already has a fair track record of inviting the audience to get involved in our journalism – web forums; debates; blogs and comments, and most recently incorporating comment within our website story pages, particularly on the live pages.
We are proud of the standards we have set in processing, sifting and verifying material sent to us and sourced through social newsgathering, giving us a new dimension when telling some of the major stories of recent times – the Japan tsunami; the Arab Spring; the Burma uprisings; the Norway shootings; the riots in England.

Good old BBC…never let the facts get in the way of a good story…especially if it is about Israel…or the ‘Right’ in the USA.

What Jeff wants, he gets…a new open thread…..

The BBC is eager, as we have recently seen from its behaviour when covering the Boston Marathon bombings,  to suppress any speculation that Muslims may have been involved.

This is merely a continuation of a policy that it has adopted and carried out in the UK for a long time in the hope of breaking any association between Islam and terrorism or indeed any activities that would reflect badly upon the ideology in the minds of non-Muslims.

A similar exercise in news manipulation is seen in its reporting of immigration, or  when not reporting the damaging effects mass immigration has had on UK society and infrastructure.

However, as I noted in this previous post, when looking at other countries a more clear sighted and authentic picture appears of the effects of immigration and cultural tensions between different ethnic or religious groups.

One of the most recent such ventures was ‘Frank Gardner’s Return to Saudi Arabia.’.

This was followed by John Ware’s ‘Israel:  Facing The Future’ in which Ware examined the problems facing an Israel with increasing polarisation of its populations between extremes of religion and an increasing secularism.

One stand out comment was this:

‘The Palestinians have found that a more powerful weapon than guns is a receptive Media.’

Just how receptive we’ll never know until the BBC publishes the Balen Report…but Ware makes the point that Israel’s image was tarnished by the use of overwhelming force in Gaza in 2009 in which a watching world only saw dead Palestinians.

There is a reason for that…because that is what the likes of the BBC determinedly emphasized and focused on….and continued to publish the casualty figures for a couple of years after the conflict at the bottom of most reports about Israel.

How fair was this programme though?

Firstly Ware, avoiding upsetting the Arabs, called Jerusalem ‘Israel’s spiritual capital’…no it is its actual capital.

He told us that Israel had been fighting wars for 60 years…..well, only because they have been under attack for 60 years….it’s not a voluntary thing.

Although it accurately pictured the internal pressures upon Israeli society, though not detailing the very successful secular side much at all, it skated over the hardcore Muslim opposition that Israel faces.

Israelis were presented as the bigger part of the problem whilst Palestinians and Israeli Arabs were generally presented as reasonable, undogmatic people just looking for a peaceful life.

It was unfortunate that one Israeli Arab slipped out that ‘we are in a war’…against the Israelis…a comment that Ware left unremarked.

The Israeli Arabs were allowed to present a very one sided view of things, with likeminded, left wing Israelis agreeing.

However the main point about the programme that I want to make is that Ware looks closely at the effects on Israeli society of the rise of religious extremism amongst Jews themselves as well as the presence of Israeli Arabs who make up 1/5th of the population.

In the programme he describes what is going on as ‘religious nationalism’…i.e.  Zionism…though just as applicable to Hamas et al.

That’s interesting…he makes the link between religion and politics….Something that is taboo when discussing Islam in the UK or the West….. here we are told ‘Islamists’ are violent extremists who use Islam to further their political intentions whilst ‘Muslims’ are peace loving, spiritual people.

Ware expands on that comment later saying…..

‘Biblically inspired nationalism is challenging the secular and democratic values of Israel’s founding fathers.  Upon the outcome of this battle will depend the next chapter in the history of the Jewish people.’

Now that’s a pretty interesting comment….were the 7/7 bombings ‘Koranically inspired’? 

You’re not allowed to say they were, and the BBC will deny it till the cows come home.

Does Islam challenge the secular and democratic values of a liberal, secular Britain?

We know Christianity challenges it…on the matter of gay marriage and women’s rights for instance.   Islam also of course challenges the Christian Church itself…..but even the Church is too cowardly to stand up for itself in the face of an insurgent Islam….so perhaps you can’t expect the BBC to do so for it.

You have to ask why is Ware allowed to class the Bible as the driving force behind the politics in Israel when Muslims who express a similar view about the Koran, citing it as their inspiration and guide in life, are dismissed as criminals and madmen who pervert Islam?

And of course it isn’t just that differing approach to handling different religions but also the fact that Ware recognises and highlights that there is a ‘clash of values between secular liberals and the religious’…. and that tensions are growing, with ever more conflict.

That same view could equally be applied here in the UK with the rise of  Islam which is an ideology that opposes most of the values and culture of a secular/Christian Britain.

Or is there no ‘clash of values’ in Britain today between the religious and the secular….or Islam and Western values?

If there is shouldn’t someone be talking about it?  The BBC and the Establishment would prefer you didn’t.

If it is possible to talk about such ‘clashes of values’ in Saudi Arabia or Israel it should be possible to debate them here without the usual charges of racism or Islamophobia being bandied about in attempts to close down the debate.

It is a necessary debate to have.

Man made climate change is the result of fossil fuels burnt in Western Industrial nations……developing nations are to be ‘allowed’ to burn fossil fuels because it is only fair that they catch up on the ‘progress’ of the developed nations who otherwise would have an entrenched advantage for the foreseeable future.

Michael Mann’s ‘Hockey Stick’ graph was said to be the ‘smoking gun’ in the evidence draw that revealed just how guilty the West was in creating global warming.

Set aside the fact that the Hockey Stick was shown to be wrong you could be justified in asking what is the evidence that the industrialised West caused the rise in temperatures?  Are there any other possible causes?

One factor might be population.  Indeed the BBC itself recognised this, up to a point….making no cogent conclusions from the fact.

The question is which population has increased?

Population in the West has been declining rapidly for decades…but that of third world and developing nations is rising massively…..in 1800 the world population was 1 billion,  in 1930 it was still only 2 billion but by 1999 it reaches the staggering number of 6 billion.

What is interesting is the graph that illustrates this:

Notice anything?  Pretty similer to the infamous temperature ‘Hockey Stick.’

The vast, vast majority of population growth since the 1950’s has been in third world and developing countries…..they all need to cook food, warm their homes and heat water amongst a myriad of other uses, including their own industrial processes that burn fossil fuel….and with such an increase in population comes large scale deforestation…one of the biggest causes of climate change.

So who is to blame for climate change if you accept ‘man made’ causes?  Is it the West who began industrialising in the 1700’s or is it the Rest whose population increase coincides with the same increase in temperature?  We were told recently that it is  a mere 25 years before CO2 causes warming….and yet the climate lobby admit that only global warming since the 1940’s or so is caused by man.   For nearly 200 years of massive industrial activity there was little warming…in fact it often became very cold….but increase the population massively and bingo…almost instant temperature change on a massive scale.

If the West is not to blame why are we closing down our efficient and much cleaner industry to save the planet when other countries are continuing to pump out massive quantities of CO2?

If things are so urgent…how many times have we been told we have ‘X’ months to save the planet?….why is it then OK for massive ‘pollution’ from China and India and Brazil to continue?

What’s the theory behind that policy then…the planet is going to die…but at least the Chinese and Indians will die having had a little bit of wealth induced happiness?

As with other subjects the BBC’s reporting is coloured by its  own politics…anti-Western, anti-industry, anti-capitalist and pro-green, pro socialist world view.

It takes a simple measure…a coincidence? that temperature rises as CO2 levels rise (in fact temps rise usually before CO2…as CRU’s very own Phil Jones admitted)…and constructs a theory from that upon which we base our whole industrial and social policies.

But as shown here it must be equally valid to compare the rise in population with that of temperature and work out a theory from that…….but that would be pointing the finger of blame at ‘The Rest’ and not the West…which is a political no-no for the BBC.

And so it begins….Operation Smokescreen.

When the 7/7 bombs went off the BBC went into overdrive to blame British society for the actions of the bombers….asking ‘What turned such bright, young British Muslims into terrorists?’

They had to change their tune fairly rapidly when they realised that wasn’t playing well with a Public that had just seen 52 people murdered and over 700 injured by men claiming to be doing it in the name of Islam.

Guess they haven’t learnt that lesson….here they are doing the same…blaming America itself for turning such a decent, hardworking, young man into a terrorist.

Nice photo though…..

He was so good, hard working and determined to succeed

People who know Dzhokhar Tsarnaev are trying to understand what happened. How did a bright, ambitious teenager turn out so badly?

In a lifeguard-certification course at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had a hard time staying afloat – at least when he had to tread water while holding a heavy brick in his hands.

“That was his main struggle,” says his friend, Mark Faria, 19, who took the course with him. Still, Dzhokhar stuck with it – and passed the course.

Mr Faria says they took a violence-prevention class together in high school – STARS, which stands for Students Teaching and Advocating Respect. “He was a good student,” Mr Faria says.

Such a nice lad…someone must have forced him to do these things

People who know Dzhokhar cannot believe that he is responsible.

They say he must have been under the influence of someone – his brother, perhaps, or a terrorist group.

“My personal opinion is that those guys are just pawns and it’s a bigger thing than what we’re seeing,” Ms Aiguier says. “And it will someday be revealed.”

Heading toward the front steps of his house, Mr Faria tries to defend his friend. “I don’t know if he had an actual motive – or if he was kind of forced into it,” he says.

Mr Faria steps out of his apartment building to talk to me. He says he is “dumbfounded” about his friend.

“We’re watching the news all day and we see his face on TV,” he says. “It doesn’t sit.”

It’s  America’s fault

Dzhokhar came here in 2002 with his family – immigrants with a Chechen background – who had once lived in Central Asia.

Dzhokhar became an American citizen in 2012. At a certain point, though, he no longer seemed optimistic about the future.

“About a week and a half ago, I saw him walking kind of fast on our street,” says Ms Aiguier. “He looked sort of reclusive, inward, and he was wearing a hoodie.”

Another Russian immigrant, Konstantyn (“Costa”) Morozov, 27, points out that not everybody finds their way in the US.

Not everyone likes it here.

There is no consideration at all that he may have been influenced by Islam. 

He may have been influenced by a  ‘terrorist group’…OK…so which one, and what is their motivation, what is the end result that their terrorism is a means to attaining?

To avoid mentioning Islam and the attempt to spread its influence as a possible motivation here is once again not news but propaganda…by omission.

You couldn’t make it up……this from the BBC:

Boston bombing: How internet detectives got it very wrong

For the past 48 hours, internet users have been working with each other to piece together clues about the culprits of the Boston bombings. The result? They got it wrong – and left innocent people fearing for their safety. Many are now asking: should “crowd-sourced investigations” be stopped?

Is this the same BBC whose prestigious current affairs news programme ‘Today’ told us that the evidence was pointing towards  ‘domestic’ terrorists?

Is this the same BBC whose expert, specialist security correspondent told us this:

‘So what lines is the Boston investigation following and why?

A home-grown US operator with a domestic agenda

As of Wednesday, this is thought to be the most likely culprit.

And that: 

‘America has long been [Jihadists] favoured target, but there are reasons to question whether this was the work of jihadists.

There is no suicide element, the explosive used was relatively low power and, most importantly, there has been no claim of responsibility.’

Is this the news organisation which boasts of having more journalists than any organisation outside of China, that has billions of pounds to invest in indepth, accurate journalism but gets it badly wrong and then attacks the auld enemy…the Bloggers?

Guess the BBC’s new Director of News, James Harding, was right when he said the BBC doesn’t do investigative journalism.

No s**t Sherlock!

A final quote from the article:

“It’s been a kind of a media literacy seminar – people are learning to be less stupid. You don’t want to be the person who names a suspect who turns out not to be right.”

He added: “I doubt that when we write the history of this event that the intelligence services will be thanking social media over this.”

Won’t be sending the BBC a bunch of flowers either I’m guessing.