THE THINGS THEY DON'T SAY
>> THURSDAY, APRIL 07, 2011
As you know, I am currently on Biased BBC leave owing to the pressures of running an election campaign. One of the features of this is that the local BBC have been very quick to try and cherry-pick comments from my other blog, A Tangled Web, in order to try and damage my prospects. Oddly enough, they NEVER mention any comments made here on Biased BBC. I wonder why they are reluctant to mention any of the tens of thousands of comments and posts highlighting their relentless bias? ;-) Looking forward to discussing this with them...
MORE HOT AIR....
Spot what's missing and what's included in this BBC account of a damning, slamming report about the inadequacies of windpower. The report, by the John Muir Trust, a conservation organisation (so definitely not in the pockets of big oil or the nasty industrialists that greenies claim are behind anything that goes against their creed) concludes that windpower is not available when it's most needed, that windfarms routinely generate substantially less than their claimed capacity, and that peak demand for the output from the turbines usually happens when there's little or no wind. James Delingpole spells out here what the report actually means to the government's energy policies. Given that the government is spending billions on these monstrosities, not to mention moulding most of our energy strategy around them, you would think the BBC would treat the report as high priority, a subject that needs just as much scrutiny as - let's say - spending cuts. Well, er, no. First, the account of the John Muir report merits just 450 words, compared to the 1,200 words that were deployed earlier in the week when Roger Harrabin bust a gut to tell us why we should not exploit shale gas. Second, there is no quote from anyone involved in the preparation of the report, and only around 20 words from the report itself. Let me remedy this omission by spelling out what Stuart Young, the author of the report, actually said:
"Over the two-year period studied in this report, the metered windfarms in the U.K. consistently generated far less energy than wind proponents claim is typical. The intermittent nature of wind also gives rise to low wind coinciding with high energy demand. Sadly, wind power is not what it's cracked up to be and cannot contribute greatly to energy security in the UK. It was a surprise to find out just how disappointingly wind turbines perform in a supposedly wind-ridden country like Scotland. Based on the data, for one third of the time wind output is less than 10% of capacity, compared to the 30% that is commonly claimed".Rather interesting, and very relevant don't you think? Not to the BBC reporter, though. In addition, the press release about the report actually very lucidly spells out five main findings. With greenie press releases, Richard Black and his cohorts routinely regurgitate every single word and every nuance. Not so here, only two findings are referred to, and the rest are ignored. Finally, having thus glossed over most of the report's findings, a full 125 words (more than a quarter) of the BBC account are taken up by Jenny Hogan, ofScottish Renewables (no axe to grind there, then). By contrast, with pro-green creed reports, Black, Harrabin and company usually completely ignore any idea that there might be opposition to the nonsense being spouted. The said Ms Hogan actually tells us that "no form of electricity worked at 100% capacity, 100% of the time". The inclusion of such vapid drivel in a so-called serious piece of journalism defies belief. First because the Muir report does not mention anything about 100% delivery, it actually spells out that wind turbines are routinely working at less than the 30% that is claimed, and often only at 10%. The rest of her quote is simply green-creed propaganda and not related in any meaningful way to any of the report's findings at all. Overall, therefore, this feature adds up to a clumsily-contrived effort to actually bury the report. The contortions involved are par for the course. This is not journalism - it's lip service hot air.
The Inescapable Shadow of the BBC
>> WEDNESDAY, APRIL 06, 2011
I listened to Gavin Esler’s programme, radio 4 ‘Esler on Eichmann’, (a title which elevates ‘Esler’ to one-name status alongside Elvis and Eminem.) It was about BBC’s favourite Jews, holocaust victims. Accordingly, there was little to complain about in the programme itself, as it consisted mainly of interviews with witnesses of Eichmann’s trial, leaving little time for cynical speculation by BBC sages. The dodgy bits are in the printed material - the article on the website, and the content of the programme information. The latter bears little relation to the programme that I heard. Glad to see that Esler is ‘award-winning’ though. Well done!
“The kidnapping violated Argentina's sovereignty and was condemned by the UN. Questions were raised about whether it was appropriate to try Eichmann in Israel, and international Jewish leaders feared an anti-Semitic backlash.”What a nice touch! I always relish seeing the words ‘violated’ and ‘sovereignty’in a piece about Israel, especially when followed by ‘condemned by the UN.’ An acute attack of pedantry led me to look up ‘lead’ and ‘led’. Petty, I know. As for the web article, like familyjaffa in the open thread - I wondered what
“This 50th anniversary is, therefore, also a time of debate within Israel about whether the inescapable shadow of the past also makes it difficult to make peace in the present, and thrive in the future.”is doing there. It seemed to have no relevance to the actual programme. As for “thrive” - I regularly receive a newsletter entitled “Good News From Israel” (thanks to the Ordmans) It’s choc full of heartening tales of Israelisuccesses in technology, business, medicine, science and anything else one could think of, so Israel’s *thriving* in the future is more down to whether blindness, political recklessness and stupidity lets international governments sanction the genocidal behaviour of her neighbours than to any ‘inescapable shadows of the past.’ The same goes for the difficulties of making peace, settlement freeze or no settlement freeze.
PROPAGANDA PROTOCOL
Here we go again. Like a rat up a drainpipe, Richard Black gleefully regurgitates the outpourings of research scientists who are being paid - in this case indirectly by the EU - to find climate scare stories. This one is the old chestnut the ozone layer, a favourite of greenies the world over since the 1980s and the topic on which, as this post points out, they cut their teeth in their shamanism and political agitation, the warm-up, as it were, for the global warming and climate change activism that has ensued. Mr Black accepts unquestionably - as usual - claims from these grant-guzzling warmist zealots that there's a big new hole over the Arctic caused by a lethal mix of nasty industrial chemicals and climate change. The subtext of his every word is triumphant panic: "I told you so". There's a major problem with this theory, as Joseph D'Aleo ably points out in the link above from January. A paper (actually in the warmists' handbook Nature) has noted that much more research needs doing on this topic before conclusions can be reached, because the processes involved are highly complex and not yet understood. The basic problem is that the Antarctic hole in the ozone layer has not gone away, despite the Montreal Protocol ban on CFCs in 1987. Others have warned that much of the data on which the panic that led to the Montreal Protocol was based was crudely rigged to fan political activism. That doesn't stop Mr Black, and nor does he quote a smidgeon of doubt. I don't pretend to fully understand the science behind this highly complex subject. But I am sure that what Mr Black presents is one-sided, purposeful propaganda. Much is yet to be done before we understand the processes. So why the hell does he present it in the way he does?
Keep Taking the Pills
Now that the consequences of Muslim immigration have become apparent, the question is should we resist or allow ourselves to be soothed? Resistance sounds nasty and racist, so what to do? Tranquilize the entire UK population of course. Is this as deliberate as the the last government’s open doors policy turned out to be? The BBC is running a campaign to acclimatise the UK and maybe the world to the bizarre dogma of a cult which differs from fascism only by masquerading as a religion. Someone at the BBC thinks the way to deal with something antithetical to the UK in every imaginable manner is to sanctify it, bestow upon it special standards which apply to nothing else whatsoever, and introduce it to us at every opportunity, sprinkled with fairy dust. It seeps into all areas of the BBC’s output, drama, news, documentaries, children’s television, and even to the nitty gritty - religious broadcasting. Appointing a Muslim as head of BBC religious broadcasting caused a bit of a stir, but the BBC soothed us till we settled back down again. No matter what our lying eyes might observe, Islam will be portrayed as a force for good. When Jihad turned out to be another word for terrorism, the word terrorism itself was censored. The ‘holy war’ is re-branded as ‘militancy’. Ask someone who was blinded, who lost a a limb or a loved one in 9/11, 7/7, or Lockerbie to swallow that bitter pill. A B-BBC reader was alarmed by this BBC offering, for Lent. What has Lent got to do with Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, of the Cordoba Initiative Islamic Cultural Centre, near ground Zero in New York, one might ask. Is he about to appeal for funding for one of those gigantic Mosques? Or is he merely here to tell Christians all about universal human conditions such as temptation, betrayal, abandonment, greed, forgiveness and love? Hand me the valium. I am probably the only one who sat through two thirds of My Brother The Islamist because it was on BBC Three, a channel watched by hardly anyone. It was trailed quite a bit, so I switched it on to see if the BBC had conjured up a new way to make radical Islam look cuddly. Before getting the thumbs up, a filmmaker must pitch his idea to the BBC. What a doddle for Robb Leech. It was obviously the concept that got him the go-ahead, rather than his filmmaking ability. Poor old Rich the radical, what a sorry state he was in. He was so easily swayed by others that he appeared to be half sponge half man. His step brother Robb the filmmaker wasn’t far behind, because although the film began by conceding that radical Islam was a bit odd, we were quickly reassured that it wasn’t so bad after all. Poor Rich, though. Despite being a Weymouth lad, a few weeks in London had turned him into a multiculti patois-speaking alien in a shalwar kameez wha’evah, and what he had lost, accent-wise, he had gained in facial hair. Anjem Choudary featured prominently, what a nice moderate fellow he actually turns out to be. Who’d have thought? A group of would-be jihadis were shown watching emotive images of babies, supposedly victims of ‘Israeli chemical weapons,’ propaganda specially designed to whip them up into a frenzy. Where do they get such stuff? Is any of it authentic? Who cares? Not Robb the filmmaker and not Rich the radical. The BBC ‘s campaign to normalise Islam is becoming clunkingly obvious, but are you anaesthetised yet?
GREEN RACISM
Today, we have a corking example of the brazen articulation of the BBC green creed through one of their self-appointed "experts" and prophets. Step forward the totally self-regarding (see here) wildlife programme presenter Chris Packham who is telling us solemnly from his corporation eyrie that we must stop breeding, tax those who do not, buy local food, and Generally See The Error of Our Ways. Packham, in fact, is an interesting specimen of the BBC greenie zealot breed. This is how he describes himself on his website:
A precocious young scientist, swat and nerd in training he studied Kestrels, Shrews and Badgers in his teens and undergraduate days at the Zoology department of Southampton University. He also embraced Punk Rock and played in a band and the DIY ethos and determination to never take ‘no’ for an answer are forcefully retained. Post graduation and a cancelled PhD, (the Badgers were getting a bit much), he began taking still photographs and trained as a wildlife film cameraman.Well slap my thighs. And with those impeccable credentials in green activism, he's now taken on a new role at the head of the BBC green crusade. His main beef is that we are breeding too fast, and that leads this "cancelled PhD" expert to a call for sweeping new taxes to encourage those who, exactly as under Chinese state fascism, restrict themselves to one child. His message in morals and life management is coupled with an equally solemn intonation that we must buy and cook ourselves local food (and presumably therefore forget the Africans who rely on food exports to avoid starvation). It's clear that in Mr Packham's books, those who don't are plebeian oiks who don't know what is good for them. Mr Packham's message - passed from on high via the official BBC mouthpiece, the Radio Times - is liberally larded with the usual offical greenie-line claptrap. he says:
‘There’s no point bleating about the future of pandas, polar bears and tigers when we’re not addressing the one single factor that’s putting more pressure on the ecosystem than any other – namely the ever-increasing size of the world’s population.’I note, however, that Mr Packham's homily on the evils of mankind and its nasty proclivity to breed, does not mention a BBC unmentionable word - immigration. Actually, Britain's headlong hurtling towards a population of 70m+is being caused almost entirely by largely uncontrolled immigration, a tide that the government is powerless to stop because of their worship of the EU. And beautifully crafted as it may seem (in BBC green propaganda terms), on close inspection, I think Mr Packham's message may actually be strangely off-message. Tell me if I'm wrong, but I think there is a blatant racist slant in what he saying. Those who are breeding most in the UK are the so-called ethnic population. So his sermon is thus aimed directly and disproportionately at the said ethnic minorities. I thought that doing that was the biggest sin in the BBC right-on/Human Right manual. It's probably OK in this case, though, because the need for greenie propaganda, however clumsily formed, out-trumps everything else. Update: I see my post has attracted comment from a pro-Malthus acolyte. I deliberately did not analyse that part of the Packham message here, because I am so tired of it, but I will leave it to the very capable Willis Eschenbach to do so. Malthusian pessimism is bunk that is at at the heart - as well as a prime driver - of the greenie creed. If you doubt me, try this.
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