A Biased BBC reader writes;

“I would like to draw your attention to the Dawood Prison scandal in Kabul.

This week a US Congressional report was released detailing “Auschwitz-like” conditions in this US funded hospital in Afghanistan and a cover up by US military authorities – and one man in particular Lieutenant General William Caldwell In September of last year the Wall Street Journal reported: “There was evidence of horrifying scenes – amputees being left to defecate in their own beds, blood draining from patients into open vats, maggots feeding on infected wounds – and all embedded in deep corruption. According to the report, doctors and nurses routinely demanded bribes for food and basic care.”

“One of the stories the WSJ told was of Afghan policeman Ali Noor Hazrat, who was admitted to the hospital late in 2010 after being injured in a Taliban rocket attack. He then starved to death in the hospital on December 27, while his brother desperately tried to sell off the family’s land to pay the doctors to feed him.

The report also said US officers had recorded evidence of such stories at the hospital as early as 2006, and reported it to the Afghan Defense Ministry, who took no action.

I could link to any of another dozen such reports but I chose this from – yes – the Guardian dateline 24th July 2011. (There’s a reason for this) http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jul/24/us-officers-congress-kabul-hospital

I have not been able to trace a single mention of these horrors on the BBC – one of the news outlets that made Abu Ghraib a household name. Why? They must know about it. THEY READ THE GUARDIAN, don’t they?

Well here’s hint for their oversight: “One active-duty officer testified that the three-star general, Lieutenant General William Caldwell, who headed the training mission in Afghanistan, forced him to retract a request for an inspector general’s investigation into the Dawood national military hospital. Colonel Mark Fassl, said he was shocked when Caldwell brought up the 2010 congressional elections and said: “How could we do this or make this request WITH AN ELECTION COMING” Fassl, who was inspector general for the compound, said he believed it was a reference to President Barack Obama”

If any media reports (BBC?) have been muted because they would do harm to a sitting president then the media is charged with criminal neglect of their duty to inform the public. The standard for Abu Ghraib in Iraq and George W Bush should be the same for Dawood Hospital in Afghanistan and Barack Hussein Obama.”

BBC Today has this touching tribute to vile anti-Semite and left wing fantasist Gore Vidal this morning. Dear Gore, they guy who felt that Bush was behind 9/11 and who declared “that Anti-Semitism got poor Polanski”.

I suspect this may not bother some readers as much as it  bothers me but I was sickened by the way in which the BBC headlines the utterly loathsome PR spin from IRA commander Martin McGuinness re the Claudy atrocity. The fact is that the BBC has been to the fore in promoting a “peace process” which has enabled a man like McGuinness to reach the highest level of Government. For anyone who is interested, here is a view that you will NOT here on the BBC on this terrible terrible atrocity. I wrote it a few years ago.

Another day on the BBC, another opportunity to put the boot into the Coalition using the most spurious “news”.  Oh look, “Homelessness” is soaring. Guess what?  Disposable Incomes are at a nine year low. You know what you have to do? Yes, vote Labour.

A classic example of the BBC editing out voices that do not parrot the desired narrative….in this report the BBC give the floor to a disabled charity, Scope, to make claims which are completely unsubstantiated by any objective standards, and whilst in a very early morning radio report we heard a dissenting voice, that voice has been noticeable by its absence from any other reports as have any other people challenging Scope’s claims.

‘Many disabled people in Britain feel media coverage about benefit cheats has negatively affected attitudes towards them, a survey suggests.

Almost half of the 500 disabled people and carers polled for charity Scope said attitudes to them had worsened.

It comes after ministers released data suggesting 55% of sickness benefit claimants were no longer eligible for it.’

This is 5Live’s early report  (17 mins 40 secs) from ‘Morning Reports’ in which Ellis Cashmore, Professor of culture, media and sport at Staffordshire University pours cold water on the central claim.

He states that the survey result merely reveals disabled people’s thoughts about other people’s attitudes towards them… their own feelings with no objectivity.

He says that claiming media coverage of ‘disabled’ fraudsters makes people more distrusting and abusive towards disabled people is to make a dodgy link between the Media and their coverage of fraudsters…it is a leap of faith…. there is nothing in the research to make the link.

I would say that is pretty clear from him……the ‘survey’ isn’t based on any objective research and purely reproduces disabled people’s own feelings and perceptions about what they think other people are thinking rather than investigating whether there really has been an increase in negative impressions of genuinely disabled people.

Prof. Cashmore’s comments have not been repeated….the only side to this story we hear is Scope’s.

I might suggest, purely based my own subjective feeling, that the BBC are happy to give Scope free rein and publicise its claims because firstly, they amount to an attack on the government and its policies, so happy days there, and secondly, are intended to keep the welfare gravy train running by forcing the government to back down on its welfare rationalizations.

Once again the BBC is interfering in the politics of government and are aiding and abetting pressure groups in their own vested interests, i.e. shilling the government out of as much money as possible by making claims that are intended to pull at heart strings and generate guilt.

Any rational or objective analysis of the situation is unwelcome as it would detract from the response to the emotional blackmail that this ‘survey’ is designed to elicit….therefore no dissent is brooked.

I’m sure that you have read David’s post below on the treatment afforded Mitt Romney by the BBC. I see that  the BBC wanted to have the final word on the overseas visit by the GOP candidate by declaring “Romney wraps up overseas tour amid tensions with media..”  Do have a read, I particularly liked the way they keep a sting to the last sentence. Let’s face it – the BBC are in the Obama camp and have been for years now. No matter what he does do (or doesn’t) he’s still their hero so WHOEVER the GOP put up was going to get the cold treatment from the State Broadcaster. Mark Mardell has put bias on a whole new level with his regular drooling over President Hubris. Romney has stood up for Israel and Poland, two Nations that Obama was quick to cold shoulder and in doing so he attracts the predicable opprobrium of the BBC.

Mardell strikes again raining on Romney’s parade in Israel…far from just reporting he adds into the mix a few of his own moralising comments which seem based more on a partiality towards Palestinians  than a desire to reveal any truths.

‘Mr Romney was talking about what he called “the dramatically stark difference in economic vitality” between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. He said that in Israel, the gross domestic product was $21,000 per capita compared to $10,000 in the Palestinian territories.

He said, says if you can learn anything it is that “culture makes all the difference”.

And when he looked at the accomplishments of the people of Israel he recognised the power of culture and a few other things.

It does seem at least odd that Mr Romney did not also reflect on the “few other things” that might have an impact on economic dynamism.

This is not to suggest that he should shy away from the argument in general, which is an interesting one.

But many would argue the recent history of the Palestinians has had a bigger impact on their economic prospects than anything else.’

Indeed….but whose fault is that?  Who has attacked the Israelis day in day out for over 60 years?…the Palestinians and other Muslims.

Had the Palestinians not gone on the warpath they would have undoubtedly had a far more successful economy, a thriving society and a good future.  Instead they chose to fight a war.

It’s about time the BBC recognised a few truths and admitted Israel is under constant attack from Muslims who wish to destroy Israel and the Jews….they are not interested in a two state solution…they want it all.

When the BBC start broadcasting such truths perhaps we will have fewer people mindlessly supporting the ‘Palestinian cause’….which is one of ethnic cleansing and annihilation of the Jews.

A cause the BBC seems to support with every report that rushes to condemn Israel at every move.

One of ‘those other things’ perhaps? ……BBC News kills Jews.

And it’s interesting o see their moderation policy in work…just what offends their policy?

256. Zap Pow We have seen the damage caused by America to the rest of the world, Romney is a crooked liability, if it wasn’t for GOP wars for OIL and GOP financial crises the world would have progressed

265. Britainsnotpleased Just now  Israel with the backing of the USA is wiping the Palestinians off the planet,

239.FarAway  18 Minutes ago     Another Racist Uneducated Religious Fanatic

259.indian mathematician
2 Minutes ago    This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the house rules. Explain.

“I do not see the results of Muller et al as being scientifically important.  However, their result may be politically important.”   Ken Caldeira, AGW advocate

No other word can describe this article, presumably by Richard Black as it bears his inimitable style of half truths and missing information, other than FRAUD.

This is a deliberate attempt to mislead the readers and induce them into swallowing the man made global warming scam using the device of a fake conversion to the cause combined with dodgy, unproven ‘science’ and all wrapped up in half truths and half baked theories unsupported even by some of the scientists involved in the research.

It is quite evident that who ever authored this BBC article had a specific aim…to ‘sell’ AGW to us…they have ignored easily available information that shows clearly that Muller was never a Sceptic and that his ‘research’ is highly questionable and the conclusions drawn from it improbable.

None of this has stopped the BBC confidently asserting, and deliberately distorting the truth,  that Muller is a convert from scepticism and that his work is a validation of other climate scientists who proclaim CO2 is the cause of climate change.

The BBC claims that Muller is a newly converted believer in global warming from having been a sceptic.

But has he ever been a sceptic?  He certainly wasn’t  a year ago when he said this in 2011 in an article for the Wall Street Journal. ‘The case against global warming scepticism……there were good reasons for doubt until now’

He’s always believed in global warming…and now declares it’s all definitely man made…..but he gives no proof…..the only ‘proof’ is that he claims CO2 rises in correlation with temperature….therefore must be the cause of warming.

Hang on….even Prof Phil Jones of the CRU admitted that temperatures rose up to 800 years before CO2 levels did…….and now we have increasing CO2 but no temperature rise for over a decade….explain that to me.

And it seems that Muller was in fact a fully paid up member of the man made global warming fraternity in 2004: (page 2)

“If you are concerned about global warming (as I am) and think that human-created carbon dioxide may contribute (as I do), then you still should agree that we are much better off having broken the hockey stick.”

And how about this: 

“Let me be clear. My own reading of the literature and study of paleoclimate suggests strongly that carbon dioxide from burning of fossil fuels will prove to be the greatest pollutant of human history. It is likely to have severe and detrimental effects on global climate.” – Richard Muller, 2003

The BBC got its scoop from the New York Times….but it hasn’t told you everything that Muller said….you can believe or not what he claims for temperature rises over 250 years…Judith Curry herself is sceptical of his results and refuses to be associated with them (for more of her see later).

Odd that the BBC missed out this rather big paragraph from Muller:

‘It’s a scientist’s duty to be properly skeptical. I still find that much, if not most, of what is attributed to climate change is speculative, exaggerated or just plain wrong.

Hurricane Katrina cannot be attributed to global warming. The number of hurricanes hitting the United States has been going down, not up; likewise for intense tornadoes. Polar bears aren’t dying from receding ice, and the Himalayan glaciers aren’t going to melt by 2035. And it’s possible that we are currently no warmer than we were a thousand years ago, during the “Medieval Warm Period” or “Medieval Optimum,” an interval of warm conditions known from historical records and indirect evidence like tree rings. And the recent warm spell in the United States happens to be more than offset by cooling elsewhere in the world, so its link to “global” warming is weaker than tenuous.’

What other interesting and telling bits of information did the BBC miss out….as it would detract from the ‘truth’ of this story?

For a start it misses out this review of his work:

‘His latest BEST claims are, in my view, an embarrassment. The statement that he makes in his op-ed  is easily refuted.’

The BBC mentions Judith Curry…but fails to say why she didn’t back Muller’s last effort at massaging the figures……

Here is the BBC:

‘However, one collaborator on the previous tranche of Berkeley Earth project papers, Judith Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology, declined to be included as an author on the latest one.

Commenting on the paper, Prof Curry said: “Their latest paper on the 250-year record concludes that the best explanation for the observed warming is greenhouse gas emissions. Their analysis is way oversimplistic and not at all convincing in my opinion.”‘

And here is the original story in all its glory:

‘A leading member of Prof Muller’s team has accused him of trying to mislead the public by hiding the fact that BEST’s research shows global warming has stopped.

Prof Judith Curry, who chairs the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at America’s prestigious Georgia Institute of Technology, said that Prof Muller’s claim that he has proven global warming sceptics wrong was also a ‘huge mistake’, with no scientific basis.

Prof Curry is a distinguished climate researcher with more than 30 years experience and the second named co-author of the BEST project’s four research papers.  Like the scientists exposed then by leaked emails from East Anglia University’s Climatic Research Unit, her colleagues from the BEST project seem to be trying to ‘hide the decline’ in rates of global warming.
A report to be published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation includes a graph of world average temperatures over the past ten years, drawn from the BEST project’s data and revealed on its website.

This graph shows that the trend of the last decade is absolutely flat, with no increase at all – though the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have carried on rising relentlessly.

‘This is nowhere near what the climate models were predicting,’ Prof Curry said. ‘Whatever it is that’s going on here, it doesn’t look like it’s being dominated by CO2.’

In a 2004 Technology Review article,[9] Muller supported the findings of Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick in which they criticized the research, led by Michael E. Mann, which produced the so-called “hockey stick graph” of global temperatures over the past millennium, on the grounds that it did not do proper principal component analysis (PCA).[10] In the article, Richard Muller stated:

McIntyre and McKitrick obtained part of the program that Mann used, and they found serious problems. Not only does the program not do conventional PCA, but it handles data normalization in a way that can only be described as mistaken.

Now comes the real shocker. This improper normalization procedure tends to emphasize any data that do have the hockey stick shape, and to suppress all data that do not. To demonstrate this effect, McIntyre and McKitrick created some meaningless test data that had, on average, no trends. This method of generating random data is called “Monte Carlo” analysis, after the famous casino, and it is widely used in statistical analysis to test procedures. When McIntyre and McKitrick fed these random data into the Mann procedure, out popped a hockey stick shape!

That discovery hit me like a bombshell, and I suspect it is having the same effect on many others. Suddenly the hockey stick, the poster-child of the global warming community, turns out to be an artifact of poor mathematics. How could it happen?[9]

He went on to state “If you are concerned about global warming (as I am) and think that human-created carbon dioxide may contribute (as I do), then you still should agree that we are much better off having broken the hockey stick.’

One last thing about Muller….he has a dog in this fight….

‘Muller is President and Chief Scientist of Muller & Associates, an international consulting group specializing in energy-related issues

‘We know that in order to be effective, solutions must be sustainable… and we know that for businesses, sustainable solutions must be profitable as well.‘

Sustainable?  We all know what that means…..wind turbines and solar power….all funded with heavy  subsidies to the companies.

Odd that the BBC’s environmental correspondent doesn’t mention that Muller runs a company dependent on the energy sector…..as does Tim Yeo, as does Al Gore….funny how these climate crusaders all tell us how much we need to stop global warming by buying the very kit they just happen to sell.

Odd. Very odd.

Corrupt some might say.

Oh yes…how very funny that the Koch Foundation are funding this ‘research’……Black would have written that with gritted teeth!

Post Script:

Via WUWT:

http://www.rossmckitrick.com/

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/30/new-data-old-claims-about-volcanoes/#more-68323

Seems that BEST is short for ‘Best Guess’ when it comes to climate science.

I am sure you may have come across this story. It concerns a G4S employee who allegedly called a soldier a ‘baby killer’ as they worked at a Games venue. The Asian civilian guard, who faces the sack, is said to have spat at the serviceman and made the abusive remark at the archery contest at Lord’s Cricket Ground.

Well, when I say you “may” have come across it, that would be if you read The Mail here. Or the Telegraph here. But the BBC don’t seem to have decided this particular G4S story is not  a story, or, if they have, I can’t readily find it. Bit of a surprise given their hitherto intense interest in all things G4S.

Also…as regards this “Asian” – hands up all who think it is Chinese guy? No. How about a Thai? No? How about a Muslim….?

The Telegraph’s Met Office expert tells us (no link yet) that 1948 had similar weather patterns to ours this year…..with high temperatures and heavy rainfall.

In 1948 the highest temperature recorded was 35° c with rainfall of over 1200 mm for the year.(one of the highest)….and the driest year since 1910 was in 1933.

The early summer was very wet followed by a heat wave which was then followed by a very wet August……apart from August it’s sounding remarkably familiar.

And yet we are told this is a year of records and we’re still going to fry if we don’t build more windmills…Christopher Booker in the Telegraph calculates to meet the Ed Miliband inspired CO2 reduction  requirements we will need to build another 32,000 wind turbines.

We are also told that man made global warming didn’t start before the 1970’s….so what caused the heatwave in 1948 and in previous years?…and if it didn’t start until the 1970’s why are we supposed to be guilty about the Industrial Revolution?

Looking at the previously quoted Guardian rainfall record rainfall has stayed pretty consistent throughout the last 100 years…and you will find if you dig out temperature records that temperatures are pretty consistent over the last 100 years also.

And let’s look at how the BBC’s Harrabin has been reporting the latest revelations about the wind farm subsidies only being cut by 10%….

‘On the face of it this is a win for Ed Davey – angrily fighting off the chancellor who was under pressure from right-wing rural conservatives who don’t like wind turbines in the countryside.

Uncertainty over the direction of government energy policy has been criticised by the industry and has lead to delays in investment.

Wind farm company RES, which generates about 10% of the UK’s onshore wind energy, said the subsidy announcement showed the government’s commitment to renewables.’

Nothing perjorative about that then…and look…the government is committed to renewables?…despite evidence to the contrary…it’s the Liberals and Tim Yeo…the man with many ‘renewable industry’ financial interests, who are banging the drum.

In this report  Harrabin tells us that the UK body that represents the wind farm industry here will take the government to court if it cuts the subsidy by more than 10%….but nowhere does he mention that it is foreign firms that are getting the biggest slice of the cake when it comes to handouts of tax payers money…..which goes abroad to fill their government’s coffers whilst emptying ours.

Here’s the Telegraph being somewhat more honest and open:

Foreign energy firms pressured ministers to keep wind farm subsidies high

Ministers were “bounced” into retaining large subsidies for controversial on-shore wind farms by foreign-based energy companies who threatened to pull jobs and cash out of Britain.