Perhaps this post should have been titled ‘Stones and Glasshouses’.

More than 850 BBC employees have come forward to raise their concerns about bullying and sexual harassment at the corporation, fueling fears about the broadcaster’s culture.

A “staggering” number of staff members have contacted private consultants brought in by the BBC in the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal. Their feedback has been shared with Dinah Rose, QC, the barrister brought in to investigate the internal culture of the BBC.

In an email to staff, the BBC’s director of human resources Lucy Adams told colleagues that some of the testimony is “uncomfortable to hear”.

One member of the BBC’s staff described the scale of the response as “staggering”. They told The Independent: “These are people with real stories and details of harassment and bullying who are living with the scars of an abusive management culture.”

I have absolutely no doubt the BBC will carry on chastising and berating  other organisations for their failures whilst burying the bad news about their own.

Perhaps we should have a little competition….who can write the best ‘If the BBC were running the XXXX’  essay.

….running the Afghan War perhaps, or the Police…or the economy…..you would be forgiven for imagining the BBC already has an overly powerful control and influence over such things.

In light of the previous post by DB I thought this was appropriate along with a look at what turned David Attenborough into an advocate for climate change:

So says… *rubs eyes in disbelief* The Guardian’s Leo Hickman (h/t George R).

US bracing for ‘historic’ blizzard

A blizzard of potentially historic proportions threatened to strike the Northeast with a vengeance Friday, with up to two feet of snow forecast along the densely populated corridor from the New York City area to Boston and beyond.

I suppose there is no better time than now to amuse oneself with a look back in time at what the Met. Office in 2008 forecast  the climate had in store for us in the future:
‘This long-term warming trend is set to continue as the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere continues to increase. Inevitably this will lead to further impacts on our lives and the world’s natural ecosystems. Heatwaves and droughts are likely to become more prevalent; snow cover is projected to continue to diminish.’

They also suggested that their long term forecasting was of such quality and reliability that it provided a sound basis for many organisations to base their future planning upon:

‘Predictions of future conditions, such as the seasonal, decadal and centennial forecasts provided by the Met Office, can help considerably in dealing with the challenges of our changing climate. For example, the emerging science of decadal forecasting has exciting potential to provide water companies, emergency responders and local authorities with information that can help them in planning for future droughts and floods.‘

Of course we know now that the Met. Office has had to abandon its long term forecasts because  they got it wrong so often.

You might ask how that can be with so many resources and endless amounts of money invested in massive arrays of powerful computers.

You might also ask if the computer models are so obviously unreliable why governments, industries and other agencies rely on these models to shape their economic, social, political, industrial and military policies.

Why have we essentially handed over the running of our lives to a few lumps of machinery that fail again and again to accurately predict the climate?

Have you ever heard such a discussion on the BBC?  A discussion that is surely of prime importance…the consequences of handing over decision making to error prone machines are frightening and horrendously damaging…all the more so because it is not just our own economy alone, or the French or US that gets damaged by decisions  taken by some hopeless homegrown politician…these computer driven decisions are global……effecting everything from the economy, industry, planning and land use to the food we eat and the way we travel to work…..‘determining the new twenty-first century wealth of nations.’

The BBC does a huge disservice, putting it mildly, in not challenging the ‘consensus’.  The consequences of getting it wrong are so serious, so damaging, that to come down so heavily in favour of AGW and then not to change or consider change as evidence mounts telling a different tale is extraordinarily foolish.

The BBC of course claim the opposite…the consensus is that man made climate change is so serious and damaging that not to do anything about it is almost criminal…..but where’s the proof?  There still isn’t anything remotely conclusive.

The evidence on the ground is telling a different story…..that for 16 years global warming has slowed to negligible amounts…statistically insignificant, to use a favourite phrase of Phil Jones.

The models predicted droughts, no snow  and increasing temperatures…..well you know…that ain’t happening is it….it may but for years now it hasn’t.

At the very least that should be raising some very serious doubts about the climate models and their predictions…but the BBC sails merrily on producing programme after programme selling the ‘nightmare’….only recently churning out programmes on archaeology in South America….repeatedly mentioning ‘extreme weather’, ‘catastrophic events’ and ‘catastrophic consequences of extreme weather’…..this is intentional…it is meant for you to pick up the cues and make that association in the future, in the real world of today…extreme weather events mean catastrophic consequences.  We know that the climate seminars held by Harrabin set out this way of programming…introducing almost subliminal doom mongering about climate into every type of programme from comedy, children’s,  drama, history and documentaries and news.

By coincidence in the Guardian of all places (thanks to George R and DB in the next post for highlighting this) we see the result of Harrabin and Dr Joe Smith’s handiwork in action…inserting spurious and exaggerated claims about climate into a programme fronted by the Nation’s favourite TV ‘uncle’:

I was also curious about why Attenborough would have used a somewhat obscure factoid buried deep within a report published by an NGO as long ago as 2006 to make such an arresting statement within a primetime BBC natural history programme in 2013. And what of the source report’s strange reliance on the term “maximum temperatures” rather than the more normal (and comprehensible) “average temperatures”?

But again it all comes back to those computer models controlling your lives and the politicians who make decisions based upon those few computers….as stated below for the likes of the BBC  ‘climate becomes the one ‘known’ variable in an otherwise unknowable future.’…...which of course we know is utter and complete nonsense….the climatologists have not the faintest idea of what the climate will be in 10 years let alone 100.  The Future is almost totally unknowable…even your own day to day existence can be turned upside down by the slightest thing…to claim to be able to predict climate a 100 years hence is no less than a lie of the grandest order.

Here is Mike Hulme, ironically, as he comes from the UEA climate change department and is a hard core advocate of AGW.  But here he outlines the dangers of handing over ‘authority’ to a computer model:

First telling us why the BBC et al love to scare us:

“Expected risks are the whip to keep the present in line. The more threatening the shadows that fall on the present because a terrible future is impending, the more believed are the headlines provoked by the dramatisation of risk today”

Reducing the Future to Climate: a Story of Climate Determinism and Reductionism
Mike Hulme

Simulations of future climate from climate models are inappropriately elevated as universal predictors of future social performance and human destiny.

The argument put forward here is that the new climate reductionism  is driven by the hegemony exercised  by the predictive natural sciences(climate computer models) over the contingent, imaginative and humanistic accounts of  social life and visions of the future.  It is a hegemony which lends disproportionate power in political and social discourse to model based descriptions of putative future climates.

It is a hegemony manifest in the pivotal role held by climate (and related) modelling in shaping climate change discourses. Because of the epistemological authority over the future claimed, either implicitly or explicitly, by such modelling activities , climate becomes the one ‘known’ variable in an otherwise unknowable future. The openness, contingency and multiple possibilities of the future are closed off as these predicted virtual climates assert their influence over everything from future ecology, economic activity and social mobility, to human behaviour, cultural evolution and geosecurity.

I conclude the paper by placing this reductionist tendency within a wider cultural context of Western pessimism and loss of confidence about the future and by pointing towards some correctives which involve restructuring ideas about how the future can be imagined and made known.

This transfer of predictive authority (to climate models), an almost accidental transfer one might suggest rather than one necessarily driven by any theoretical or ideological stance, is what I earlier defined as “epistemological slippage”……it offers a future written in the unyielding language of mathematics and computer code.

These models and calculations allow for little human agency, little recognition of evolving, adapting and innovating societies, and little attempt to consider the changing values, cultures and practices of humanity. The contingencies of the future are whitewashed out of the future. Humans are depicted as “dumb farmers”, passively awaiting their climate fate. The possibilities of human agency are relegated to footnotes, the changing cultural norms and practices made invisible, the creative potential of the human imagination ignored.

The consequence of such reductionism is expressed clearly in Karl Popper’s attack from a generation ago on historicism and its deterministic roots: “Every vision of historicism expresses the feeling of being swept into the future by irresistible forces”.  

I suggest that the climate reductionism I have described here is nurtured by elements of a Western cultural pessimism which promote the pathologies of vulnerability, fatalism and fear.

“Expected risks are the whip to keep the present in line. The more threatening the shadows that fall on the present because a terrible future is impending, the more believed are the headlines provoked by the dramatisation of risk today” The epistemological pathways offered by climate models and their derived analyses are only one way of believing what the future may hold.

Some of these futures may be better; some may be worse. But they will not be determined by climate, not by climate alone, and these worlds will condition – perhaps remarkably, certainly unexpectedly – the consequences of climate change.

In this new mood of climate-driven destiny the human hand of climate change has replaced the divine hand of God as being responsible for the collapse of civilisations, for visitations of extreme weather and for determining the new twenty-first century wealth of nations.

Been away all week so no chance to detail BBC bias myself BUT the floor is yours! Off you go…let them have it if they have been annoying you with their bias.

Interesting piece from Guido this morning in which he highlights Leftwing attempts to launch a politically motivated muzzling of certain media providers…notably Murdoch.

EU Lefties Trying to Ban Murdoch, Axel Springer and Berlusconi

‘Their real goal is betrayed in the ‘about’ section of their website: “Some, notably the UK, suffer from problems of excessive concentration leading to undue influence of certain economic groups, notably Murdoch’s media empire, over political processes”. Arguably Berlusconi’s media empire has more influence over political processes.  By coincidence all three media groups are, to varying degrees, right-of-centre and sceptical of Brussels…’

We all know who wields the real Media power and influence in the UK… the BBC with its massive unearned resources, its enormous media footprint…from TV to national and local radio, to the web and on into its immensely powerful commercial side which crushes all genuinely commercial rivals with its state provided advantages.

The BBC plays its part in manipulating politics on many fronts…from immigration, religion, Europe, our response to terrorism and war.

Perhaps the biggest effect has been its malign influence on politics itself….We used to have separate political parties which each had a definable set of policies…not any longer….it is hard to tell the Parties apart in reality and that has effectively meant the death of politics and the death of Democracy as they all fight for, or posture on, what they are told is the centre ground….but is in fact a left of centre place that the BBC et al define as the new ‘normal’.

The reality is that probably the majority of the population are right of centre on all of the things that the BBC holds dear….and yet Cameron has abandoned any attempt to appeal to those voters as he fears the BBC’s reaction.   Cameron merely pays lip service to limiting immigration, European influence or multi-culturalism with his fine speeches which get the headlines and plaudits but result in little effective action…probably intentionally.

Charles Moore in the Telegraph in 2004 spelt it out for the Tories about the BBC’s damaging influence:

‘Having to pay to support the “soft left” BBC bias – “is like compulsory tithes to the Church of England in the 18th century.”
Michael Portillo correctly observed that the BBC subjects Tories to a sort of continuous character test much more harsh than that applied to other parties.
The assumption behind this test is that there is something defective, even almost perverted, about being Conservative, or indeed conservative. You are therefore guilty of racism, homophobia, selfishness etc. until proved innocent.
It seems to me that the BBC today is the enemy of conservative culture in Britain. This is not immediately obvious….The few glorious programmes are used as the camouflage behind which political correctness can advance.
How does the BBC approach subjects such as American power, organised religion, marriage, the EU, the Middle East, the actions of the Armed Forces, the rights of householders to defend their property against burglars, public spending, choice of schools, or any perceived inequality?
Who will be more politely treated – Gerry Adams or Norman Tebbit, a spokesman for Hizbollah or Paul Wolfowitz? If someone appears on a programme described as a “property developer” with someone described as a “green activist”, who will get the rougher ride? If a detective drama features a feisty lesbian and a chilly aristocrat, which is more likely to be the murderer?
None of these attitudes is unique to the BBC, but what is unique is the BBC’s power to impose them.

In order legally to have a television in your home, you have to pay the BBC £116 a year. This allows it to dominate virtually all forms of broadcast media, many of which have nothing to do with any idea of “public service broadcasting”.

Out of the deference that this power instils, senior BBC executives are paid more than anyone else in the entire British public service. Greg Dyke, the now ex-director-general and editor-in-chief who seems to have been too busy to edit, got £464,000 last year. BBC executives are like the princes of the Church of England before the commutation of the tithes. They are rich and powerful, and no doubt they mean well, but there comes a time when non-conformists get fed up with paying for their sermons and their privileges.
That time is surely near. We must find a way of abolishing or hugely reducing the licence fee while reviving the core of public service broadcasting. How half-witted of Tory Britain to hand this chance to Tony Blair, instead of claiming it for itself.’

The sensitivity of the climate to the effects of CO2 may have been exaggerated admits a climate change scientist:

Staggering Admission By James Annan: “High Climate Sensitivity Increasingly Untenable”

‘Several recent papers showing much the same – numerous factors including: the increase in positive forcing (CO2 and the recent work on black carbon), decrease in estimated negative forcing (aerosols), combined with the stubborn refusal of the planet to warm as had been predicted over the last decade, all makes a high climate sensitivity increasingly untenable. A value (slightly) under 2[°C] is certainly looking a whole lot more plausible than anything above 4.5[°C].’

Roger Harrabin was tipped off about the new thoughts:

Barry Woods ‏@BarryJWoods

. @RHarrabin @davidshukmanbbc James Anaan: “makes a high climate sensitivity increasingly untenable. ” http://notrickszone.com/2013/02/01/staggering-admission-by-james-annan-high-climate-sensitivity-increasingly-untenable/ …

and said he was already on the case:

roger harrabin ‏@RHarrabin

@BarryJWoods @davidshukmanbbc Thanks Barry. It’s in the queue

That was on February 4th.

It’s now February 7th.

So where oh where is Harrabin’s, or any other BBC environmental journos’, article on this?

Ah..here it is:

Elsewhere on the web

Forbes.com / 5 February 2013Most of the science in this areas seems to be saying under 4.5 oC. And the estimates keep getting a little lower. As James Annan, one of the experts

but not on the BBC?

It is absolutely astounding that BBC journalists seem completely free to run their own private fiefdom, their own private news agency that puts out only what they want to put out.  They seem to be completely untroubled by any restrictions supposedly imposed by the BBC charter, the law or indeed by journalistic ethics (bit optimistic with that one I suppose).

I think they could teach the evil Fox News a thing or two about partiality.

Keep paying the license fee.

The BBC showed a distinct reluctance to report the emergence of these racist ‘Muslim Patrols’….and when eventually getting around to it they emphasised how the perpetrators, and especially their beliefs, were not representative of the Muslim community or religion.

Many people might dispute that….whilst most Muslims would not ‘patrol’ the streets they would endorse the beliefs….as they are integral to Islam….as one Muslim woman said on the Asian Network in response to the below…‘We cannot sacrifice our religion to integrate.’

(It is hardly impartial of the BBC to have an Asian, a Hindu not a Muslim, Nihal, ask on the Asian Network whether Asians should integrate more…you can guess the general drift of the programme)

Here Jane Kelly reports her experiences with a neighbourhood becoming ever more Islamic:

‘I feel like a stranger where I live…As new figures show ‘white flight’ from cities is rising, one Londoner writes a provocative personal piece about how immigration has drastically changed the borough where she has lived for 17 years:

‘Worryingly, I feel that public spaces are becoming contested. One food store has recently installed a sign banning alcohol on the premises. Fair enough. But it also says: “No alcohol allowed on the streets near this shop.”

No alcohol allowed on the public street outside a Muslim shop?….that is no different from the Muslim Patrols in intention and effect….is that shop keeper not ‘representative of the community’?

And here you see the effect of Labour’s immigration policy…the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of whites, especially working class ones who don’t vote Labour,  as intended:

‘I see London turning into a place almost exclusively for poor immigrants and the very rich.’

Here is what a Muslim seeking reform says of the Muslim Patrols:

“The Muslim patrols could become a lot more dangerous and, perhaps willing to maim or kill if they are joined by battle-hardened jihadis,” he wrote.
He compared the Islamist vigilantes to extremists like the far-right Golden Dawn supporters in Greece and right-wing vigilantes in France who ran Roma families out of a Marseilles estate and burnt down their camp.
Countries such as Denmark and Spain have also seen Islamist extremists trying to enforce their own sharia law, he noted.
All were imitating Hitler’s Brownshirts by “enforcing with threats and violence their version of the law in neighbourhoods,” said Mr Nawaz, who spent years in his youth as a leadership member of a global Islamist group.‘
Mr Nawaz is now a leading critic of his former Islamist ideological dogma, while remaining a Muslim.

So the result of  multi-culturalism is in effect that we have an ideology loose on the streets of Britain similar to that which gave rise to Hitler.

The BBC, as I have mentioned before, is hyper-active in its efforts to issue ‘warnings from history’ about the possible rise of the Far Right, in other words another Hitler, in the midst of Europe, due to Austerity economics….clearly they will never issue such a warning about the rise of an ideology that even Churchill thought Fascist…they don’t even do so for the ‘Far Left’ which is on the march once more.

Many programmes and articles have been broadcast and published by the BBC solely to link the hated ‘Austerity’ to the rise of the Far Right in a highly political smear….senior BBC journalists such as Stephanie Flanders and Paul Mason have eagerly pushed this black propaganda benefitting the Labour Party by readily maligning the Tories, the BBC’s scaremongering out to spread fear and anger…even digging out decades old documentaries to back up their legend.

But no such ‘warnings from history’ for the Stalinists rising again in Europe.

Amusingly the BBC do warn us that UKIP’s Nigel Farage has Stalinist tendencies:

Nigel Farage a Stalinist dictator, says UKIP MEP

Never mind the real Stalinists roaming the streets of Greece…or indeed the Islamist Fascists on British streets.

During the highly successful Olympics last year Labour’s Tessa Jowell was a constant guest on the BBC being Labour’s ‘Olympics Minister’.

The BBC presumably keen to let the success of the Olympics rub off on Labour and for Tessa Jowell  to take the plaudits.

From 2005-2009 possibly over 1000 patients died because of negligence and appalling lack of care at an NHS hospital.

From 2005-2009 Labour was in power and these were the Secretary’s of State For Health:

John Reid

Patricia Hewitt

Alan Johnson

Andy Burnham (Labour’s current Shadow Health Minister)

Have we heard much from any of them on the BBC?

The BBC not so keen to hand out the brickbats along with the plaudits to its favoured political party?

What does Labour man Dan Hodges think?

Where is the liberal outrage over Mid Staffs? The Left is killing the NHS by putting it on a pedestal

So now we know. Britain’s nurses and doctors are as bad as Britain’s bankers. Our angels in white are just as selfish, just as arrogant and manipulative and secretive, as the barrow-boys in pinstripes.

In fact, in many ways they’re worse. The bankers bled the country dry, but to my knowledge they didn’t kill anybody. The death toll at Mid Staffs is placed at 1,200 victims.

And what has been the response to this institutionalised carnage? Or more specifically, the response from the radical left, the self appointed guardians of the National Health Service? Nothing but deflection or silence.

Read this BBC report and you would be given the distinct impression that the utter shambles of the NHS PFI schemes are in fact a Tory led Coalition (To use the preferred BBC moniker) disaster….and you would also not realise that Hinchingbrooke Hospital would have closed had it not been privatised.

You would have no idea that Peterborough Hospital was a Labour Government plan, read the article and it deliberately places all the blame within the last two years….in other words …nothing to do with Labour.

This is nothing less than a highly politicised attempt to protect Labour and smear the Tories.

We all know of course that the NHS is safe in Labour hands…despite hospitals being ‘immune to the sound of pain’ under them.

The Independent tells it like it is:

‘A hospital now losing £44m a year was allowed to go ahead with a private finance deal to build new premises despite the Government being warned that the project was unsustainable.’

‘It is embarrassing for Labour because, at the time of the approval, Andy Burnham was a Minister of State in the Department of Health. He is now shadow Health Secretary.’

“This was a disastrous Labour PFI blunder. Labour was warned repeatedly by their own regulator that this PFI deal could bankrupt Peterborough Hospital but they pressed on regardless.”

This  BBC report…not a mention of Labour or a Labour politician…however it does say:

‘In response to the inquiry, Prime Minister David Cameron apologised for the “truly dreadful” mistreatment and neglect.’

This BBC report also gives virtually no clue that Stafford Hospital was a case of massive Labour government neglect and incompetence.

This BBC report…which mentions Labour but only to pass the buck to the hospital management….

‘It also achieved the elite foundation trust status, which is given to the best-performing parts of the health service.

Its bid was approved by another regulator Monitor and signed off in June 2007 by Andy Burnham, who was then a junior minister but later became health secretary and now holds the shadow post in opposition.

In fact, it was the decision by the board to go for foundation trust status that contributed to much of the cost-cutting drive that undermined care.’

I imagine that if you look at many of the BBC’s reports a pattern might emerge….Labour involvement is quietly sidelined with minimal comment whilst any Tory involvement is twisted to turn responsibility onto them.