FOR BETTER FOR WORSE

FOR BETTER FOR WORSE

>> SUNDAY, AUGUST 28, 2011

I love this one. According to BBC eco-warrior Matt McGrath, the number of mosquitoes is in sharp decline in parts of Africa because "climate change" has (without question) changed rainfall patterns and "disrupted" (poor darlings!) their breeding cycle. Could this be a cause for celebration - a positive outcome despite our wicked carbon dioxide emitting ways? Er, no. He's dug out a quote from a gloom merchant who warns that children growing up in mosquito-free areas will suffer all the more in future epidemics when the blood suckers return. So to the BBC, "climate change" makes things worse even when it makes things better. I note that Richard Black is back, and is adding to the BBC's propaganda drive by the bucketload. I can't face discussing the totally predictable drivel he has written about Arctic ice melting and climate change causing civil war. My conclusion? There is no climate change without Richard Black.

The BBC Solicits Advice On The US Economy

>> SATURDAY, AUGUST 27, 2011

BBC News Online has a little piece entitled "US economy: What can be done to stimulate growth?" It's actually not so bad, with two of the four economists interviewed taking positions which aren't 100% in favor of more borrowing and spending. Although, there is an obvious bias on the part of the online editor who chose them. The first up, Robert di Clemente (a generally sharp guy) speaks more truth than the other three combined, and makes real points about why we are where we are. The other three either say "Please, sir, may I have some more QE", or suggest that we may as well get around to doing more of it. Naturally, one of them is the BBC's favorite far-Left economists not named Paul Krugman, one David Blanchflower. I'm sure many people here have seen him over and over again on the BBC (type his name in the search field on this blog). What's interesting is that only di Clemente says outright that Government policies on jobs and growth have failed. He also tells us something that nobody has ever said on the BBC before: 40% of jobs losses have come from three industries: housing, automotive, and finance. Think for a second about what this means, as two out of three are very relevant to the UK. The reason for all those job losses in the housing industry is obvious: the whole thing was bloated way, way out of proportion, to an unsustainable level, by specific Government policies. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the Government-sponsored sub-prime mortgage scheme all led to houses being far overvalued, and a massive construction boom by developers in the hopes of everyone getting to buy and sell and flip houses and buy-to-let, and all that. Does that sound familiar? It should. So when that bubble burst, of course there were going to be an awful lot of people out of work. That doesn't mean that we need to do something to raise the industry back up again to unsustainable levels so all those people can have jobs again, either. It means that many of those jobs should never have existed in the first place, and were actually based on an ethereal foundation. Things never should have gotten so out of hand. If many of those jobs hadn't existed, it's quite possible many of those now unemployed would have found work in other, more sustainable sectors, and would still have jobs now. The automotive industry has been bleeding jobs for ages, and the bailout didn't stop it from continuing. The loans and what amounted to taxpayer funding of union pensions didn't add a single job, and hasn't put a single person back to work. Nor can any QE scheme return the automotive industry to its former, unsustainable level. So again, Government policies did not and cannot bring back jobs.

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Questions and Answers

Last night’s Any Questions panel spoke for multiculturalism, women, and the Arab Spring. The solitary male member, if you’ll excuse the expression, was Jehangir Malik OBE, UK Director of Islamic Relief, who was roped in to opine on behalf of the Arab World. The panellists still spoke elegiacally of the Arab Spring, which, for them still heralds the dawning of a new age of enlightenment. It’s just as if they’d never heard of the disconcerting rise of Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, or listened to any of the creeping doubts that are beginning to emerge everywhere but in their own consciousness. They seem a bit like the befuddled fugitive who hasn’t discovered that the war he’s been hiding from for the last decade ended years ago. In this vein, they expressed undiluted optimism over the Arab Spring, and deep joy at the diversity and multiculturalism in the UK. The thing that was omitted from the discourse was, of course, Islam. Diversity is undoubtedly beneficial. I myself am diverse. Variety is the spice of life, and variegated skin-colour, racial origin, a multiplicity of traditions and customs are all jolly good ingredients when added to the mix in correct, proportional measure. But political correctness ignores the essential truth, which is that the benefits immigration might bring to the UK must outweigh and not overwhelm the very things that make it an attractive destination. There comes a point where those who ‘flock’ from far and wide to partake, begin to resemble tourists who, by sheer numbers, wreck the beauty and tranquility of the tourist attractions they visit, robbing them of their attractiveness in the process. Before people recognise what is happening, too many are profiting from the status quo, so don’t want to admit there’s a problem. The Islamic faith may well be beneficial in potentially volatile Islamic regimes which are kept on an even keel by people we consider tyrants and despots. They control populations by fear, as do religious leaders who stunt the imagination by persuading vulnerable people that this life is a mere preparation for the next. Refusing to get to grips with the fact that a functioning democratic society requires the population to be reasonably free from constraints that interfere with the ability to think, is a huge handicap. That’s what political correctness does to us. It won’t permit open discussion, and explains the puzzling tyranny of the P.C. edict, which proclaims " to be good, one must be non-judgmental." That leads to moral equivalence, which in turn might explain the frequent appearance on our screens, courtesy of the BBC, of Abdel al-Bari Atwan. Mr. Atwan has been endorsing last week’s attacks near Eilat in which Israelis were murdered.

‘The Eilat operation, as I see it, corrected the course of the Arab revolutions and refocused them on the most dangerous disease, namely the Israeli tyranny. This disease is the cause of all the defects that have afflicted the region for the past 65 years…’

CiFWatch, the watchdog website that monitors the Guardian’s increasingly overt antisemitism, is concerned about Atwan’s frequent contributions to Comment is Free. The Guardian represents the intelligentsia, many of whom have travelled so far to the left that they’ve gone right round the back and out the other side, having picked up radical Islam along the way, like a burr on your woolly jumper. How did that happen? It's inexplicable to many of us, and apparently to them. At least, I haven’t heard a convincing explanation so far. The BBC’s fondness for hiring Abdel al-Bari Atwan is clear. He’s never off our screens. Opining on this and that, his eyes bulging preternaturally, he’s regarded as an authority on all things Arab. Springs, Uprisings, and Resistance? Ask Abdel. His speciality is demonising Israel and fantasising about it being nuked. Is he impartial? Is he sane? Are his prejudices balanced on the air, in the short term or the long term, by opposing views? Are his views given undue respect and credibility? Why does the BBC give inflammatory, racist, antisemitic and warmongering individuals the oxygen of publicity on programmes like Dateline or Newsnight? We know the BBC is mischievous and likes a bit of a barney for the ratings. But this is serious. They might want to try and make sparks fly, but sparks have a habit of getting out of control if they’re given free rein. Any Questions? Here’s one. Does the panel think the BBC is after a conflagration? A caller has phoned in to Any Answers to self-flagellate over our colonial past, and has invented a new despot named ‘Dugaffi.” I despair.