SHARIA GOOD, BOMBAY BAD!

Tough one for the BBC. On the upside, those Mumbai folks have introduced a Sharia linked Index in their primary financial institution! But – gasp – they insist on calling it the BOMBAY Stock Exchange. Maybe the BBC should remind them that such references to their Imperial past are just..offensive to right thinking liberals?

COMMON PURPOSE AT THE BBC

I have begun to dig into BBC connections with a shadowy organisation called Common Purpose. This, according to some, is a sinister conspiratorial group – run by a scary woman called Julia Middleton – that is seeking to create an alternative government in the UK under the guise of a leadership programme. Opponents of CP have built interesting evidence that it has already managed to infiltrate many senior posts in organisations such as the police, and is busy consolidating that hold through more than 100 regional operations in the UK and many more abroad.

What are its goals? Broadly – as a perusal of the opponents’ website quickly shows – liberal-left elitist, pro-EU and strongly in favour of “sustainability”, a word used by greenies as shorthand for a left-wing agenda to destroy the capitalist system and the West.

Unsurprisingly for such a group, BBC connections are not hard to find. Bees to a honeypot. The corporation has spent more than £150,000 on sending dozens of its senior staff on CP “courses”, and business editor Robert Peston and International Development correspondent David Loyn are not only acolytes but serve on the board of what seems to be a CP subsidiary called the Media Standards Trust (alongside figures such as Amelia Fawcett, chairman of the Guardian Media Group and Baroness Helena Kennedy QC) which ostensibly aims to improve standards of journalism; in practice this means reporting in line with CP goals and policies.

Scratch the surface of the CP website and it quickly becomes apparent that one of its main goals is to ensure that we are all indoctrinated about the evils of climate change, through projects with names such as CHANGEit(sic). It works towards doing this with Deutsche Bank, an organisation that is so besotted by AGW that it publishes pamphlets on how to spot and root out sceptics.

CP was brought to my attention the other night by a journalist friend; I had never heard of it, but within seconds of digging was struck by the huge neon-lit signposts leading to the BBC. Is there nothing the corporation is not doing to foster its political agenda?

If B-BBC readers know anything first-hand about CP, or better still, have been on one of its courses (or knows someone who has), I’d love to hear from you: robinhorbury@gmail.com. I am not normally one for conspiracy theories, but this one is intriguing. Common Purpose may be completely harmless, but somehow, I doubt it.

CHINESE ENLIGHTENMENT

Happened to catch the seasonal “Woman’s Hour” programme this morning! (I’m in touch with my feminine side!)
Was intrigued to hear lavish praise being bestowed on China’s euphemistic “One Child” policy to the murmured approval of all. The sanitisation of this savage Chinese practise was complete with the consensus being it helped Chinese girls. You couldn’t make it up.

BBC MAN "FREEZING TO DEATH"…IN OZ

On the BBC website, there’s still not a shred of attempted analysis of why this winter has so far been so cold not just here but now in the US – and why their beloved Met Office has got it so wrong. Odd, perhaps, in the context of the BBC’s warming fervour? Elsewhere on the web, there’s acres of discussion, and the warmists themselves have gone into overdrive trying to tell us that this is not climate, it’s weather, and in any case, the severe cooling is actually warming because we might be cold but Greenland isn’t. What will it take, I wonder, for Richard Black or Roger Harrabin to spring into action?

Meanwhile, as the boys and girls of the BBC polish their silence in their nice warm offices, even the BBC’s leading cricket commentator, Jonathan Agnew, has filed this from Melbourne:

It seems a bit odd saying this but for summer it is very cold here. Temperatures have been down at around 13 degrees with a biting wind. It is not much fun sitting in a big ground like that with virtually no sunshine, freezing to death.

A whole army of Neros (back at base) fiddling while Rome burns?

Mark Mardell And The Golden Age

Mark Mardell is basking in The President’s glory in his latest blog post, and getting things completely wrong, as usual. Although Mardell is aware that He isn’t really as magical and all-powerful as He once was, he still wants his audience to know just how incredible His Rule has been for us all.

A Golden Age in the White House come to an end?

The only chink in His armor, to hear Mardell tell it, is the “horse trading” deal with the Republicans on extending the Bush tax cuts. That was the one where the President had to call in Bill Clinton to convince enough Dems to vote for it and not screw everyone over for purely ideological purposes. But what Mardell doesn’t want you to know is that this was such a problem for Him that He has now banned the use of of the word “triangulating” by His staff. How pathetic is that?

What’s really ridiculous here is that, while Mardell is preaching so enthusiastically about His accomplishments, it was only a week ago that he was clucking his tongue at how these same accomplishments he’s praising now were rammed through during the lame-duck session of Congress in a way that looked “unseemly” to outsiders like him.

But that’s all forgotten now, I suppose, while we bask in His glory. This has been a magical year for the US, one in which He brought us one step further out of the darkness.

Will you remember the 111th Congress as a Golden Age? I suspect Mr Obama wants the American people to learn to feel nostalgia for the past two years.

So do you, Mark, which is why you and your colleagues always promote the White House talking points.

Of course, Republicans regard it as a period of unmitigated disaster.

Only Republicans? Once again Mardell displays either his ignorance or his deliberate dishonesty. What about all those independents who regretted voting for Him the first time and went Republican in November? What about all those Democrat candidates who ran against ObamaCare and higher taxes? The Tea Party movement wasn’t an exclusively far-right Republican club the BBC kept trying to tell you it was. Yet Mardell is still stuck in hyper-partisan mode.

Many Americans will regard it as a period of much muddle and unnecessary politicking.

No, that’s only those on the far Left who supported even the most extreme parts of the President’s and Democrat leadership’s agenda. Much of the rest of the country hit the streets to protest it, and/or voted in November to kick many of them out. Only far-Left ideologues like Mark Mardell think that the Tea Party movement and politicians starting to listen to the people was “unnecessary”. As usual, the mindset is “Let’s all work together: when it’s my idea. When you want your way, that’s nasty politicking and bad for the country.” Mardell is speaking from one side of the argument.

Even die-hard Democrats don’t feel a huge amount of pride in its achievements.

Ah, so Mardell does remember his blog post from last week. But why wouldn’t they feel much pride? Because so much of it was ultimately bad for the country? Is it because the really far-Left voices are angry that the President hasn’t done enough to move the country further to the Left? Mardell isn’t going to tell you. He’s only projecting his own disappointment that it wasn’t all glorious and everyone is ecstatic about His Administration. Why isn’t Mardell asking if the President and Pelosi and Reid maybe went too far to the Left for the nation’s comfort? It’s because he agrees with the ideology behind all of it, and thinks that anyone against it is a Republican stooge.

Yet Mr Obama said that it was “the most productive two years that we’ve had in generations”. He wants the day to be remembered as a time when things got done, when people could agree, when progress could be made. It is going to be an interesting new year.

See? “When people could agree”. It was a Democrat-controlled Congress. They got their way a lot. Nobody in the country thinks the last two years were about bi-partisan loveliness. That’s an absolute joke. The President and His staff know perfectly well that they had to force everything through, and that they won’t be able to do it in a real bi-partisan atmosphere. It’s moronic to suggest otherwise. The President spent two years denigrating His “enemies”. And Mardell believes He wants everyone to think it was all friendly reaching across the aisle? The President wants everyone to realize how great He is, not how bi-partisan Washington has become. Mardell’s rewriting history at an alarming rate.

Even in the lame-duck session, the only thing besides the tax bill which was bi-partisan was the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and enough Republicans were happy to do it that He didn’t have to actually do anything. He passed the buck to Congress on this one, and they did it themselves. Yet we’re all supposed to think it’s one of His triumphs. He had very little to do with this, but don’t expect Mardell to tell you the truth.

No mention, of course, of the failed gargantuan spending bill, or the DREAM Act, which died because the Tea Party movement put Republicans and a few Dems on notice. No, we only hear about His successes. No mention of the defeat in November because that’s all been wiped away by the passage of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, right? Take that, hecklers! If the country voted overwhelmingly against so much of what the President and the Congress achieved these past two years, why would they remember it as a Golden Age? It’s silly to even think such a thing, unless one is a Democrat ideologue.

It’s echoes of St. Jon Stewart’s “Rally to Restore Smugness”: Let’s all work together – for the Democrat agenda. Working together is good – for the Democrat agenda. Mardell whines about it when he’s worried it doesn’t make his beloved Obamessiah look good, but then leaps at the chance to celebrate it when it suits his message.

SEASONAL HEADLIGHTS…


Here for your seasonal delectation is a nice BBC picture of AGW in action – the River Wharfe at Bolton Abbey near Skipton (one of my favourite childhood haunts)covered in that warming icing for the first time in a generation. Paul Hudson – perhaps the one BBC employee who is prepared to occasionally look outside the warming frame – also notes that the River Humber and Whitby Harbour are both freezing over (last recorded in 1962/3), and even the Nidd at Knaresborough is solid. Meanwhile, the rest of the BBC remains eerily silent about the causes. Rabbits caught in the headlights? A merry Christmas to everyone!

EVEN ON CHRISTMAS DAY

Compare and contrast. It’s the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Christmas sermon. According to the Telegraph he will use it to hold up the Royal Wedding as a symbol of hope even in austere times. But for the BBC, it’s about class war. “The Archbishop of Canterbury will use his Christmas sermon to question whether the richest people are bearing their share of the economic downturn.” Even on Christmas Day, the comrades in Broadcasting House never relent. Well, neither should we.

A VERY HAPPY CHRISTMAS TO YOU ALL

I just wanted to take a moment and wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Thank you all for coming here, I appreciate your support. A big thanks to all my fellow writers for their inestimable contributions these past twelve months. I know the BBC basically hates Christianity and so I leave you with one of the great Christmas carols. I know the BBC will love this. I’ll post a new Open Thread for you to post on anything that catches the eye and we will speak in a few days.

BBC TRUST

Leverhulme is a £50m charitable trust which supposedly fosters academic work. But like so many such bodies, it long since decided that AGW was a certainty, and in 2008 held a symposium on the theme. The blurb declared:

The anthropogenic forcing of climate will be one of the major issues faced by Human society over the rest of this century.

And last year, according to its annual report, one of its main grants went to a no-doubt delighted Dr Ings, who is researching the impact of hot winters (like this year?) on bumble bees in deepest Somerset:

The buzz of foraging bumblebees is a quintessential sound of summer, yet since the 1990s the familiar buff-tailed bumblebee (Bombus terrestris) has been observed visiting garden flowersin the depths of winter!

Well golly gosh. Almost poetic, and hold the front page; no doubt his work will fit in neatly (so that he can keep that grant money coming) with the latest warmist contortionist back-somersault pronouncements from the Postdam Climate Institute about cold winters, that they are definitively caused by global warming. Warming, it has now been established by these gurus, causes extreme cooling, and warming, and cooler warmer winters. All, of course, at the same time in our headlong, unstoppable rush to climate change doom.

So what’s the relevance of this to the BBC? Well, this morning, the website has a prominent story (front page when I looked) about a grant being awarded by the Trust to investigate the log books of discovery and whaling voyages to the Arctic in past centuries. The purpose, of course, in line with the blinkered science which the trust pursues, is already decided, namely “to see if they shed light on climate change”. Dr Wheeler, the very happy and newly enriched research director says:

“The Arctic environmentally is a hugely important area, but we need to know how it’s behaved in the past in order that we can assess how it’s going to behave in the future. You can’t look forward without looking back. This is no longer just a scientific issue – climate change is of global, political concern.”

So that’s it then: what we have is an overtly political exercise paid for by a warmist trust to confirm warmist objectives. All very cosy. And why do the BBC publicise it? Why is it remotely a news story? Dozens of research grants are awarded every day and this is a tiddler in comparison to many of them. Well, could it be that Sir Michael Perry, the chairman of the Leverhulme Trust, has worked for the BBC World Service (already a full advocate of the warmist cause), and also because anything to do with global warming is pushed as hard as possible by the BBC? Even when it’s a non-story.

Everywhere you look on the topic of AGW reveals deeper and deeper links between the BBC and the warmist cause.