Muslim rapists must get special protection from capture
A police force withdrew plans for a televised appeal to help catch an Afghan suspected of sexually assaulting women after a race watchdog warned that it might spark a violent backlash.
The decision to cancel the appeal was criticised by victim support organisations. Yvonne Traynor, of the Rape and Sexual Abuse Support Centre, said the case set a dangerous precedent. "I think that everybody is so afraid of being labelled a racist that no one's taking into consideration the crimes that have allegedly been committed here," she said. "The fact that this man was originally from Afghanistan is beside the point. The police obviously need to be sensitive to issues of race, but they also need to be able to get on with their jobs."
Sonia Francis-Mills, the director of the Devon Racial Equality Council, said police officers had been angered when she asked them to withdraw from Manhunt, which profiled 10 of the country's most wanted criminals. "I don't think they were happy," she said. "In the end it had to go to the Chief Constable to make the decision. I think the police often just want to feel collars. "If they had contacted us earlier we may have been able to help track him down through people within the community." She said previous public appeals for information on the case had led to ethnic minority taxi drivers in Exeter, where Seddiqi was suspected of committing the crimes, being subjected to verbal and physical abuse.
Mr Otter, a former chief superintendent in the Metropolitan Police, is known to be sensitive to issues of race since the publication of a book, Not One of Us, documented his falling out with the Iranian officer Ali Dizaei.
A CRE spokesman said it was not policy to stop the police from televising appeals for information and the racial equality council had acted independently. "If it is relevant to the investigation, we don't have a problem with the police describing people's skin colour and or ethnicity," she said.
Seddiqi went on the run in January. His alleged victims got into taxis in Exeter between October 2005 and October 2006. Formerly a resident of Wonford, Exeter, he was arrested on Nov 12 last year over the alleged offences. The four alleged victims were all in their 20s and 30s. They had been drinking when they got lifts in a taxi. Devon and Cornwall police confirmed that they were still searching for Seddiqi but declined to comment further. Police say that Seddiqi may go by other names. He is 5ft 10in tall and slim
Source
Cancer risk: Will the statin fad now come to an end?
The British government recently decided that statins should be given even to healthy people if their serum cholesterol is high. Will they now back down? One hopes that they will. Amusing that the report below says that the cancer risk is low so don't worry. Similar risks elsewhere -- e.g. with HRT -- have led to loud cries for the medication concerned to be withdrawn from use. So we have another example of a "scientific" recommendation that is agenda-driven rather than fact driven. As it happens, the recommendation attached to this research is right. It is just a pity that similar recommendations are not routinely offered for low probability risks. They often are not. Note however that there are substantial other reasons not to take statins: Muscle-wasting anybody?
Lowering cholesterol with statins may slightly increase the risk of cancer, a study suggests. It is not clear whether the cancer cases are caused by the drugs, or are a consequence of the low levels of "bad" LDL cholesterol produced by taking them. The result, which amounts to one extra case of cancer for every 1,000 patients treated, surprised the researchers who discovered it. They were looking for new evidence on the known side-effects of statins on the liver and muscle wasting.
"This analysis doesn't implicate the statin in increasing the risk of cancer," said the study leader, Professor Richard Karas, of Tufts University School of Medicine, in Boston. "The demonstrated benefits of statins in lowering the risk of heart disease remain clear. However, certain aspects of lowering LDL with statins remain controversial and merit further research." The team reviewed the results of 13 previous trials, involving more than 41,000 patients and all published before November 2005. They detected higher rates of cancer among the patients whose use of statins achieved the lowest levels of LDL cholesterol.
This may be important because recent statin trials have shown that a more aggressive lowering of LDL produces greater benefits to the heart. There are moves to lower the cholesterol targets aimed at by GPs, on the assumption that doing so will do no harm. But there have been suggestions that there may be a greater risk of side-effects if a more aggressive statin treatment is used.
The researchers, who published their findings in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, found that the degree of damage to the liver increased with greater statin doses, but that there was no such effect in muscle wastage. They said the best strategy may be to combine statins at moderate doses with other drugs.
As for cancer, conclusions are difficult to draw. No single form of cancer predominated, so if there is a side-effect of having a very low level of LDL, it would have to apply to all types of cancer. And previous statin trials have not shown any direct effect on cancer risk. But those trials did not compare cancer risk with the degree of lowering of LDL cholesterol.
John LaRosa, of the State University of New York, cast doubt on the findings. If they were caused by a lowering of cholesterol, the effect must have been very rapid, as the trials lasted five years or less. Other explanations, he said, were chance, or simply that people who would otherwise have died of heart disease were living longer, and dying of cancer.
June Davison, cardiac nurse for the British Heart Foundation, said: "We have known about the association between low cholesterol levels and cancer for some time now. While this [research] highlights an association between low levels of LDL and cancer, this is not the same as saying that low LDL or statin use increases the risk of cancer. There is overwhelming evidence that lowering LDL cholesterol through statins saves lives by preventing heart attacks and strokes. These findings do not change the message that the benefits of taking statins greatly outweigh any potential risks. People should not stop taking statin treatment on the basis of this research."
Source
Another wonderful triumph for goodwill -- but no thanks to NHS bungling: "A couple were advised to abort their unborn child amid fears he would be severely disabled - but he was born healthy. Heather O'Connor, 19, and Jamie Bramley, 24, from Stockport, were told by St Mary's Hospital, Manchester, that scans indicated part of baby Jake's brain could be missing. But after seeking a second opinion the couple continued with the pregnancy. The Central Manchester and Manchester Children's University Hospitals NHS Trust said it would "not actively recommend or dissuade" patients from choosing a termination."
Thursday, July 26, 2007
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
The British floods
The wise heads were adamant that the recent British "drought" was caused by global warming. So the huge floods now happening must be caused by global cooling according to their logic! But it is of course hatred of their fellow citizens rather than logic which lies behind their views. The article below puts British weather into a factual perspective -- showing that it has always had ups and downs
What on earth is going on with our weather? Three months' worth of rain fell in a few places last week, Britain is drowning under floods of biblical proportions and nothing like it has been seen since Noah got his sea legs. In a wave of hysteria, the cry goes out for millions of sandbags, better drains and more flood defences. And fingers of blame are pointing at global warming.
But a simple fact has been overlooked: Britain is a wet country. Yes, it comes as a shock. Over the past few years we've become so used to years of scorching, Mediterranean-like summers, when hosepipe bans were the norm, vines were bursting with vintage grapes and water diviners were doing big business. But the truth is that our summers are supposed to be wet: it's our climate.
The accoutrements of the British summer holiday were thick pullovers and waterproofs. You expected to shiver on wet promenades, "Rain stopped play" was the national mantra and sunblock cream was something for film stars and models. That is why the August Bank Holiday was shunted to the end of the month, because the beginning of August was so awful.
Of course, British summers weren't always as wet as this year's, but some were certainly worse. 1912 was the wettest and dullest summer on record, far ahead of this summer's downpours. It pretty much rained all summer, reaching a peak in late August, when a seven-inch downpour in one day in Norfolk left Norwich completely marooned in a sea of mud and devastation. Even that deluge is overshadowed by the 11 inches of rain that fell in less than a day on Dorset in July 1955 - about half of London's yearly average rainfall. The longest nonstop rainfall record in the UK was more than 58 hours in London during June 1903, in a summer when there was an epidemic of lung disease in farmworkers caused by mouldy hay and grain.
Farther back still were the sodden summers of 1845 to 1850, when jungle-like humidity and relentless rains triggered the potato blight outbreak that led to the great Irish potato famine, in which a million people died and another million emigrated from Ireland.
Rain is only the half of it. The abysmal summer of 1956 was an assault course of monsoonal rains, big floods, giant hail, houses set ablaze by lightning, howling gales and miserable cold. Just to rub it in, August was one of the coldest and wettest on record across Britain.
It is a very human tendency to blame someone for the vagaries of the weather. A run of bad summers in the 1950s was blamed on nuclear bomb tests, the rains during the First World War were blamed on artillery going off on the Western Front and two centuries ago it was the battles of the Napoleonic Wars that were blamed for upsetting nature. And now it's global warming.
But climate change was supposed to be making our summers drier, not wetter. Leaving that aside, even if we accept that the recent downpours are a sign of global warming, then a single wet summer hardly adds up to any particular trend. No, it's far more plausible to explain this latest wet spell as a natural blip in the climate.
If so, then which politician or minister is going to have the courage to propose spending billions of pounds on building new river walls, embankments, ditches and other flood defences? How will we feel about spending large sums of money on such big projects when next year may bring another drought - and the inevitable demands for more reservoirs, leak-proof pipes and desalination plants?
And let's not forget that an even greater threat comes from the sea. A recent study reveals that London and the Thames Estuary is subsiding faster than anyone had estimated; and with sea levels rising relentlessly, the Thames Barrier is looking increasingly vulnerable. We need to fix that problem before London disappears under a storm surge like New Orleans.
The hysteria over this summer reveals more about our education. The daily forecasts and news reports are all facts and no explanation about why the weather is behaving the way it is. The explanation for the past few days of drama is that Britain lies in a part of the world that is finely balanced between wet and dry, warm and cold weather. The dividing line is the jet stream, a river of wind rushing overhead a few miles high. This summer the jet stream has been very sluggish and buckled into big loops, leaving Britain drenched on the wet side of one of those loops. However, on the other side of the jet stream large parts of Europe are roasting in a ferocious heatwave that has killed dozens of people and brought wildfires blazing across Greece.
This European split has happened before. In the summer of 2002, a large swath of Central Europe was battered by rains that set off huge floods along the Elbe and Danube, drowning more than 100 people.
But there is another story about this summer that has gone virtually unnoticed. Despite all the gloom and doom, temperatures are fairly normal for the time of year. In days gone by, a wet summer would invariably be cold, even with snow in July and frost in August.
The prize for the most diabolical summer of rain and cold should be awarded to that of 1816. Not for nothing was it called "the year without summer" - this time of great storms, massive rains and appalling cold led to the crops rotting, the price of bread soaring and food riots breaking out. Some 200,000 people died of famine across Europe, which was then followed by a typhus epidemic. So, let's look on the bright side. At least we haven't got any hosepipe bans - and the reservoirs are full.
Source
The warmists have hides like rhinoceroses
Here it is: The expected claim that the floods in Britain are a result of global warming -- quite unembarrassed by their previous claims that global warming caused the "drought" that affected Britain up until recently
Global warming is generating heavier rainfall over Britain of the sort that has triggered this week’s floods, scientists have confirmed for the first time. While it has long been suspected that climate change is contributing to increased precipitation over midlatitude countries such as Britain, research has now conclusively linked greenhouse gases to heavier downpours.
The findings, from an international team including several British scientists, do not prove that this week’s flooding is the direct result of global warming: it is linked to weather patterns that have been known before. It is consistent, however, with a much broader trend towards more rainfall, on which researchers have now found an unambiguously human fingerprint. “The paper is saying there is a significant human influence on global rainfall patterns and this includes an increase of precipitation north of 50 degrees northern latitude, an area that includes the UK,” said Peter Stott, a climate scientist at the University of Reading who took part in the study.
In the study, which is to be published in the journal Nature, the scientists compared recorded changes in rain and snowfall over land with changes that are predicted by climate models that account for global warming caused by greenhouse gases. The actual pattern of changes, with increased precipitation in latitudes north of 50 degrees, corresponds remarkably closely with the patterns that emerged from 14 different models. This suggests strongly that human-induced climate change has been responsible.
For the European region that includes Britain, the research team estimates that human activity has accounted for about two thirds of the observed trend. Other natural factors, such as volcanic activity, have also had an influence, but this is much smaller than that from people. Dr Stott said that the study did not examine seasonal trends, but that other predictions suggest Britain will in general suffer wetter winters and drier summers, rather than multiple repeats of this year’s summer downpours, though significant uncertainties remain.
It is currently impossible to say whether the current bad weather is a result of global warming, and more research is needed into the origins of such extreme events. “We looked at annual rainfall trends rather than any particular season,” Dr Stott said. “In the UK wetter winters are expected which will lead to more extreme rainfall, whereas summers are expected to get drier. However, it is possible under climate change that there could be an increase of extreme rainfall even under general drying.”
Source
Dubious logic behind the proposed British "Fat tax"
Britain is in the midst of an epidemic of chronic ill-health and obesity. Something Must Be Done. Already, the school canteen has been the battleground for Jamie’s jihad on junk. Everything on the supermarket shelf must be labelled for calories, fat, salt and sugar so we can make ‘informed choices’. (And heaven help us if we make the wrong choices, because the National Health Service won’t.) And now the idea of making the ‘wrong’ foods more expensive - the so-called ‘fat tax’ - has been revived as a way of saving us from ourselves.
And yet, critics of the fat tax have generally failed to make the most important point about this latest wheeze: regardless of whether a ‘fat tax’ would have the desired effect of making some people eat healthier, we simply should not allow the government to micro-manage our lives in this way. We should tell the food- and fat-obsessed authorities to get stuffed.
Researchers from Oxford and Nottingham, writing in the latest issue of the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, looked into the possible effect of applying value added tax (VAT) to some items of food that are currently not subject to this tax (1). Using an economic model (actually an Excel spreadsheet), the researchers tested the effect of adding VAT to the main sources of saturated fat in our diets, like whole milk, butter, cakes and pastries, and cheese. They then went further and applied a scale of how ‘unhealthy’ a range of foods were, experimenting with their data to find out what would be the best way of applying the tax to decrease cholesterol levels and lower salt and sugar intake amongst the population. Based on various studies into cardiovascular disease in the past, they have concluded that an optimum application of VAT on fatty foodstuffs could avert ‘up to 3,200 cardiovascular deaths’ per year.
Their idea may have provided some food for thought - or fodder for phone-in shows at least - but the results of the report were not nearly as impressive as the news stories suggested. The researchers estimated that the total reduction in deaths from cardiovascular disease would be 1.7 per cent. Or, as the researchers themselves put it in their conclusions: ‘The potential changes in nutrition that would result from an extension of VAT to further categories of food would be modest.’
So modest, in fact, that the only sensible conclusion is not to bother with such a tax at all. The only reason that the researchers’ work generated such dramatic headline figures is that a large number of people die from cardiovascular disease in the UK. If you multiply this death toll by the tiny percentage the researchers found, you get quite an impressively high number of lives allegedly ‘saved’ by the tax. The problem is that in terms of any individual‘s risk from disease or ill-health, a ‘fat tax’ will make as much difference as urinating in the ocean.
Actually, it’s worse than that. The researchers treat the results of epidemiological studies as if they produced accurate measurements of the effect of a risk factor. However, correlation does not equal causation. There are so many confounding factors and built-in inaccuracies in such studies that to treat the figures produced as anything more than very rough estimates is totally inappropriate. Even a broad conclusion that X causes Y should only be drawn if the correlation is strong, consistent and biologically plausible (see An epidemic of epidemiology, by Rob Lyons).
The trouble is that when there have been big studies on the effect of changing diets, the results have been extremely disappointing. To give a recent example: in February 2006, a massive American study found that those put on a low-fat diet had the same death rates as those who ate what they pleased. As the lead researcher, Barbara V Howard, told the New York Times: ‘We are not going to reverse any of the chronic diseases in this country by changing the composition of the diet.’
The authors of the ‘fat tax’ report also make assumptions about how people might react to such a tax. They don’t believe that everyone will start eating salad and oily fish every day just because their usual fare is slightly more expensive. But they do believe that some people will change their behaviour a bit, enough to have an effect on disease rates. But what if they overestimate people’s sensitivity to such things? Perhaps people will react in unexpected ways: there’s evidence that many people react to such taxes by cutting down on ‘healthy’ food rather than junk, in order to balance their budgets. The results of a simple model of economic behaviour and the behaviour of people in the real world are two very different things.
So, it is far from clear that a ‘fat tax’ would work at all (3). But is it even legitimate to try to tinker with our food choices in this way? Many people point to the apparently similar case of applying swingeing taxes to cigarettes and alcohol. Yet, ‘health’ is often the spurious justification for taxes which are really more about balancing government budgets than improving the nation’s health. And if such taxes really did work, surely we would all be non-smoking teetotallers by now?
Efficacy aside, should we really allow the government to determine, through fiscal nudges and prods, how we choose to conduct our private lives? Who are they to tell us whether we should eat broccoli or burgers, chickpeas or cheddar cheese? It’s one thing for your parents to nag you as a child to eat your greens; it’s quite another for the health authorities to nag us when we’ve reached adulthood, and in the process to infantilise us all. Maybe campaigners for liberty should recognise that defending freedom in the twenty-first century will involve standing up for the freedom to choose what passes our lips as well as traditional issues like free speech.
A more active defence of our personal autonomy is a pre-requisite for maintaining a healthy body politic. Instead of a fat tax, the best thing would be to give the meddling health fanatics a big fat finger.
Source
Immigration into Britain so high that BritGov has lost count
The clues are there if you know where to find them. Walk around Slough's estates and look in the back gardens. There are buildings here you are unlikely to see anywhere else in the country. These are Slough's 'sheds with beds'. In some areas, row upon row of them. Lines of small houses tucked away behind the main homes. And inside them are the people who are transforming this place. A new workforce. So many that these illegally rented out sheds and garages are needed to house them all. They have been swept here by border changes across Europe and are now testing how we deal with mass immigration.
Slough is a success story. A manufacturing town with a booming economy. Positioned just outside London and down the M4 from Heathrow. It's factories and production plants have always attracted a large number of immigrant workers. "I came here in 1948. I wanted to work in Britain, and I got a job in the brickworks," said Fred Szymaczack, a Pole who says things were very different when he came to Slough. "When I arrived it was much stricter. The government knew how many people were coming to work here. Now, there's too many. The town can't cope."
The expansion of the European Union in 2004 has had an enormous effect here as it has across Britain. Local Polish community leaders say as many as 10,000 Poles have arrived in Slough in three years. Walk down the High Street and you can literally hear the languages and accents that are changing the make up of this town.
The problem is there is no accurate way of recording that change. When it comes to migrants arriving in our towns, it seems we've lost the ability to count. The government's estimates show Slough's population is decreasing, while the council in Slough reckons it is growing so fast that about one in ten people here are simply missing from the books, not accounted for. And that has a direct consequence for everyone living here. That is because the government uses the population figure to decide how much money it gives the local council every year. That money funds three quarters of the services provided by the council. If the population estimate is not accurate, then neither is the pay-out.
Andrew Blake-Herbert, director of finance for Slough council said: "Over the last three years, we've already lost 5 million pounds worth of funding and if the inaccurate population statistics aren't corrected before the next census, we stand to lose up to 15 million worth of funding" Of course, most of the migrants are working and paying tax but all that money goes to the exchequer, it does not come to Slough. All that does comes here is an increased pressure on services. So, that means the Council Tax in the town is as high as it can be. Cuts are on the cards and people are not happy.
But there is a bigger danger. This is a town that has known decades of tolerance. New communities have always been accepted but now some of the older migrants are saying things have to change. I went for a walk through Chalvey, an area of Slough that has become home to hundreds of new arrivals. One resident, Mohammed Choudary Sr told me if more money does not come from the government, the council has to get tough. "Chuck them out. It's simple. Just don't let them come in. Don't give them housing. Tell them to go to other places".
The stakes are high and the government accepts there is a problem. The Immigration Minister, Liam Byrne issued this statement to Panorama.
"We think it's utterly important that the wider - often social impacts - are taken into account before decisions are made. Next year we're introducing an Australian style points system which has worked well there. Before we decide how many points would-be immigrants need to come to Britain, we'll be looking at independent evidence from the Migration Impacts Forum on these wider impacts. Migration is important to the British business community, but businesses shouldn't be the only voice in the debates. Communities count too."
Of course, any points based system would not apply to migrants from Europe, like Slough's Poles. The current flawed system means people living here, hear the government say the town's population is falling while all around - from housing and packed schools, through to increased refuse collection and rising crime rates - the signs are it is on the up. And what is happening in Slough is being repeated across the country. In towns and cities across the land we simply do not know how many migrants are arriving. For more and more communities the numbers no longer add up.
Source
British journalists back down over Israel: "The National Union of Journalists will take "no further action" on implementing the controversial resolution by its members to boycott Israeli goods and services. The NUJ's national executive council (NEC) took the decision and called for members to unite instead behind the union's "key workplace priorities". It unanimously backed a motion that recognised the NUJ would take no further action on the call for an Israeli boycott because the Trades Union Congress has rejected it. The motion was tabled by the NUJ general secretary, Jeremy Dear, and seconded by the union president, Michelle Stanistreet, at a NEC meeting on Friday. It recognised the concerns expressed by some members, chapels and branches about the proposed boycott and said that it had met the terms of the original delegate vote in favour of the boycott at its annual meeting earlier this year by informing the TUC of the conference vote."
The wise heads were adamant that the recent British "drought" was caused by global warming. So the huge floods now happening must be caused by global cooling according to their logic! But it is of course hatred of their fellow citizens rather than logic which lies behind their views. The article below puts British weather into a factual perspective -- showing that it has always had ups and downs
What on earth is going on with our weather? Three months' worth of rain fell in a few places last week, Britain is drowning under floods of biblical proportions and nothing like it has been seen since Noah got his sea legs. In a wave of hysteria, the cry goes out for millions of sandbags, better drains and more flood defences. And fingers of blame are pointing at global warming.
But a simple fact has been overlooked: Britain is a wet country. Yes, it comes as a shock. Over the past few years we've become so used to years of scorching, Mediterranean-like summers, when hosepipe bans were the norm, vines were bursting with vintage grapes and water diviners were doing big business. But the truth is that our summers are supposed to be wet: it's our climate.
The accoutrements of the British summer holiday were thick pullovers and waterproofs. You expected to shiver on wet promenades, "Rain stopped play" was the national mantra and sunblock cream was something for film stars and models. That is why the August Bank Holiday was shunted to the end of the month, because the beginning of August was so awful.
Of course, British summers weren't always as wet as this year's, but some were certainly worse. 1912 was the wettest and dullest summer on record, far ahead of this summer's downpours. It pretty much rained all summer, reaching a peak in late August, when a seven-inch downpour in one day in Norfolk left Norwich completely marooned in a sea of mud and devastation. Even that deluge is overshadowed by the 11 inches of rain that fell in less than a day on Dorset in July 1955 - about half of London's yearly average rainfall. The longest nonstop rainfall record in the UK was more than 58 hours in London during June 1903, in a summer when there was an epidemic of lung disease in farmworkers caused by mouldy hay and grain.
Farther back still were the sodden summers of 1845 to 1850, when jungle-like humidity and relentless rains triggered the potato blight outbreak that led to the great Irish potato famine, in which a million people died and another million emigrated from Ireland.
Rain is only the half of it. The abysmal summer of 1956 was an assault course of monsoonal rains, big floods, giant hail, houses set ablaze by lightning, howling gales and miserable cold. Just to rub it in, August was one of the coldest and wettest on record across Britain.
It is a very human tendency to blame someone for the vagaries of the weather. A run of bad summers in the 1950s was blamed on nuclear bomb tests, the rains during the First World War were blamed on artillery going off on the Western Front and two centuries ago it was the battles of the Napoleonic Wars that were blamed for upsetting nature. And now it's global warming.
But climate change was supposed to be making our summers drier, not wetter. Leaving that aside, even if we accept that the recent downpours are a sign of global warming, then a single wet summer hardly adds up to any particular trend. No, it's far more plausible to explain this latest wet spell as a natural blip in the climate.
If so, then which politician or minister is going to have the courage to propose spending billions of pounds on building new river walls, embankments, ditches and other flood defences? How will we feel about spending large sums of money on such big projects when next year may bring another drought - and the inevitable demands for more reservoirs, leak-proof pipes and desalination plants?
And let's not forget that an even greater threat comes from the sea. A recent study reveals that London and the Thames Estuary is subsiding faster than anyone had estimated; and with sea levels rising relentlessly, the Thames Barrier is looking increasingly vulnerable. We need to fix that problem before London disappears under a storm surge like New Orleans.
The hysteria over this summer reveals more about our education. The daily forecasts and news reports are all facts and no explanation about why the weather is behaving the way it is. The explanation for the past few days of drama is that Britain lies in a part of the world that is finely balanced between wet and dry, warm and cold weather. The dividing line is the jet stream, a river of wind rushing overhead a few miles high. This summer the jet stream has been very sluggish and buckled into big loops, leaving Britain drenched on the wet side of one of those loops. However, on the other side of the jet stream large parts of Europe are roasting in a ferocious heatwave that has killed dozens of people and brought wildfires blazing across Greece.
This European split has happened before. In the summer of 2002, a large swath of Central Europe was battered by rains that set off huge floods along the Elbe and Danube, drowning more than 100 people.
But there is another story about this summer that has gone virtually unnoticed. Despite all the gloom and doom, temperatures are fairly normal for the time of year. In days gone by, a wet summer would invariably be cold, even with snow in July and frost in August.
The prize for the most diabolical summer of rain and cold should be awarded to that of 1816. Not for nothing was it called "the year without summer" - this time of great storms, massive rains and appalling cold led to the crops rotting, the price of bread soaring and food riots breaking out. Some 200,000 people died of famine across Europe, which was then followed by a typhus epidemic. So, let's look on the bright side. At least we haven't got any hosepipe bans - and the reservoirs are full.
Source
The warmists have hides like rhinoceroses
Here it is: The expected claim that the floods in Britain are a result of global warming -- quite unembarrassed by their previous claims that global warming caused the "drought" that affected Britain up until recently
Global warming is generating heavier rainfall over Britain of the sort that has triggered this week’s floods, scientists have confirmed for the first time. While it has long been suspected that climate change is contributing to increased precipitation over midlatitude countries such as Britain, research has now conclusively linked greenhouse gases to heavier downpours.
The findings, from an international team including several British scientists, do not prove that this week’s flooding is the direct result of global warming: it is linked to weather patterns that have been known before. It is consistent, however, with a much broader trend towards more rainfall, on which researchers have now found an unambiguously human fingerprint. “The paper is saying there is a significant human influence on global rainfall patterns and this includes an increase of precipitation north of 50 degrees northern latitude, an area that includes the UK,” said Peter Stott, a climate scientist at the University of Reading who took part in the study.
In the study, which is to be published in the journal Nature, the scientists compared recorded changes in rain and snowfall over land with changes that are predicted by climate models that account for global warming caused by greenhouse gases. The actual pattern of changes, with increased precipitation in latitudes north of 50 degrees, corresponds remarkably closely with the patterns that emerged from 14 different models. This suggests strongly that human-induced climate change has been responsible.
For the European region that includes Britain, the research team estimates that human activity has accounted for about two thirds of the observed trend. Other natural factors, such as volcanic activity, have also had an influence, but this is much smaller than that from people. Dr Stott said that the study did not examine seasonal trends, but that other predictions suggest Britain will in general suffer wetter winters and drier summers, rather than multiple repeats of this year’s summer downpours, though significant uncertainties remain.
It is currently impossible to say whether the current bad weather is a result of global warming, and more research is needed into the origins of such extreme events. “We looked at annual rainfall trends rather than any particular season,” Dr Stott said. “In the UK wetter winters are expected which will lead to more extreme rainfall, whereas summers are expected to get drier. However, it is possible under climate change that there could be an increase of extreme rainfall even under general drying.”
Source
Dubious logic behind the proposed British "Fat tax"
Britain is in the midst of an epidemic of chronic ill-health and obesity. Something Must Be Done. Already, the school canteen has been the battleground for Jamie’s jihad on junk. Everything on the supermarket shelf must be labelled for calories, fat, salt and sugar so we can make ‘informed choices’. (And heaven help us if we make the wrong choices, because the National Health Service won’t.) And now the idea of making the ‘wrong’ foods more expensive - the so-called ‘fat tax’ - has been revived as a way of saving us from ourselves.
And yet, critics of the fat tax have generally failed to make the most important point about this latest wheeze: regardless of whether a ‘fat tax’ would have the desired effect of making some people eat healthier, we simply should not allow the government to micro-manage our lives in this way. We should tell the food- and fat-obsessed authorities to get stuffed.
Researchers from Oxford and Nottingham, writing in the latest issue of the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, looked into the possible effect of applying value added tax (VAT) to some items of food that are currently not subject to this tax (1). Using an economic model (actually an Excel spreadsheet), the researchers tested the effect of adding VAT to the main sources of saturated fat in our diets, like whole milk, butter, cakes and pastries, and cheese. They then went further and applied a scale of how ‘unhealthy’ a range of foods were, experimenting with their data to find out what would be the best way of applying the tax to decrease cholesterol levels and lower salt and sugar intake amongst the population. Based on various studies into cardiovascular disease in the past, they have concluded that an optimum application of VAT on fatty foodstuffs could avert ‘up to 3,200 cardiovascular deaths’ per year.
Their idea may have provided some food for thought - or fodder for phone-in shows at least - but the results of the report were not nearly as impressive as the news stories suggested. The researchers estimated that the total reduction in deaths from cardiovascular disease would be 1.7 per cent. Or, as the researchers themselves put it in their conclusions: ‘The potential changes in nutrition that would result from an extension of VAT to further categories of food would be modest.’
So modest, in fact, that the only sensible conclusion is not to bother with such a tax at all. The only reason that the researchers’ work generated such dramatic headline figures is that a large number of people die from cardiovascular disease in the UK. If you multiply this death toll by the tiny percentage the researchers found, you get quite an impressively high number of lives allegedly ‘saved’ by the tax. The problem is that in terms of any individual‘s risk from disease or ill-health, a ‘fat tax’ will make as much difference as urinating in the ocean.
Actually, it’s worse than that. The researchers treat the results of epidemiological studies as if they produced accurate measurements of the effect of a risk factor. However, correlation does not equal causation. There are so many confounding factors and built-in inaccuracies in such studies that to treat the figures produced as anything more than very rough estimates is totally inappropriate. Even a broad conclusion that X causes Y should only be drawn if the correlation is strong, consistent and biologically plausible (see An epidemic of epidemiology, by Rob Lyons).
The trouble is that when there have been big studies on the effect of changing diets, the results have been extremely disappointing. To give a recent example: in February 2006, a massive American study found that those put on a low-fat diet had the same death rates as those who ate what they pleased. As the lead researcher, Barbara V Howard, told the New York Times: ‘We are not going to reverse any of the chronic diseases in this country by changing the composition of the diet.’
The authors of the ‘fat tax’ report also make assumptions about how people might react to such a tax. They don’t believe that everyone will start eating salad and oily fish every day just because their usual fare is slightly more expensive. But they do believe that some people will change their behaviour a bit, enough to have an effect on disease rates. But what if they overestimate people’s sensitivity to such things? Perhaps people will react in unexpected ways: there’s evidence that many people react to such taxes by cutting down on ‘healthy’ food rather than junk, in order to balance their budgets. The results of a simple model of economic behaviour and the behaviour of people in the real world are two very different things.
So, it is far from clear that a ‘fat tax’ would work at all (3). But is it even legitimate to try to tinker with our food choices in this way? Many people point to the apparently similar case of applying swingeing taxes to cigarettes and alcohol. Yet, ‘health’ is often the spurious justification for taxes which are really more about balancing government budgets than improving the nation’s health. And if such taxes really did work, surely we would all be non-smoking teetotallers by now?
Efficacy aside, should we really allow the government to determine, through fiscal nudges and prods, how we choose to conduct our private lives? Who are they to tell us whether we should eat broccoli or burgers, chickpeas or cheddar cheese? It’s one thing for your parents to nag you as a child to eat your greens; it’s quite another for the health authorities to nag us when we’ve reached adulthood, and in the process to infantilise us all. Maybe campaigners for liberty should recognise that defending freedom in the twenty-first century will involve standing up for the freedom to choose what passes our lips as well as traditional issues like free speech.
A more active defence of our personal autonomy is a pre-requisite for maintaining a healthy body politic. Instead of a fat tax, the best thing would be to give the meddling health fanatics a big fat finger.
Source
Immigration into Britain so high that BritGov has lost count
The clues are there if you know where to find them. Walk around Slough's estates and look in the back gardens. There are buildings here you are unlikely to see anywhere else in the country. These are Slough's 'sheds with beds'. In some areas, row upon row of them. Lines of small houses tucked away behind the main homes. And inside them are the people who are transforming this place. A new workforce. So many that these illegally rented out sheds and garages are needed to house them all. They have been swept here by border changes across Europe and are now testing how we deal with mass immigration.
Slough is a success story. A manufacturing town with a booming economy. Positioned just outside London and down the M4 from Heathrow. It's factories and production plants have always attracted a large number of immigrant workers. "I came here in 1948. I wanted to work in Britain, and I got a job in the brickworks," said Fred Szymaczack, a Pole who says things were very different when he came to Slough. "When I arrived it was much stricter. The government knew how many people were coming to work here. Now, there's too many. The town can't cope."
The expansion of the European Union in 2004 has had an enormous effect here as it has across Britain. Local Polish community leaders say as many as 10,000 Poles have arrived in Slough in three years. Walk down the High Street and you can literally hear the languages and accents that are changing the make up of this town.
The problem is there is no accurate way of recording that change. When it comes to migrants arriving in our towns, it seems we've lost the ability to count. The government's estimates show Slough's population is decreasing, while the council in Slough reckons it is growing so fast that about one in ten people here are simply missing from the books, not accounted for. And that has a direct consequence for everyone living here. That is because the government uses the population figure to decide how much money it gives the local council every year. That money funds three quarters of the services provided by the council. If the population estimate is not accurate, then neither is the pay-out.
Andrew Blake-Herbert, director of finance for Slough council said: "Over the last three years, we've already lost 5 million pounds worth of funding and if the inaccurate population statistics aren't corrected before the next census, we stand to lose up to 15 million worth of funding" Of course, most of the migrants are working and paying tax but all that money goes to the exchequer, it does not come to Slough. All that does comes here is an increased pressure on services. So, that means the Council Tax in the town is as high as it can be. Cuts are on the cards and people are not happy.
But there is a bigger danger. This is a town that has known decades of tolerance. New communities have always been accepted but now some of the older migrants are saying things have to change. I went for a walk through Chalvey, an area of Slough that has become home to hundreds of new arrivals. One resident, Mohammed Choudary Sr told me if more money does not come from the government, the council has to get tough. "Chuck them out. It's simple. Just don't let them come in. Don't give them housing. Tell them to go to other places".
The stakes are high and the government accepts there is a problem. The Immigration Minister, Liam Byrne issued this statement to Panorama.
"We think it's utterly important that the wider - often social impacts - are taken into account before decisions are made. Next year we're introducing an Australian style points system which has worked well there. Before we decide how many points would-be immigrants need to come to Britain, we'll be looking at independent evidence from the Migration Impacts Forum on these wider impacts. Migration is important to the British business community, but businesses shouldn't be the only voice in the debates. Communities count too."
Of course, any points based system would not apply to migrants from Europe, like Slough's Poles. The current flawed system means people living here, hear the government say the town's population is falling while all around - from housing and packed schools, through to increased refuse collection and rising crime rates - the signs are it is on the up. And what is happening in Slough is being repeated across the country. In towns and cities across the land we simply do not know how many migrants are arriving. For more and more communities the numbers no longer add up.
Source
British journalists back down over Israel: "The National Union of Journalists will take "no further action" on implementing the controversial resolution by its members to boycott Israeli goods and services. The NUJ's national executive council (NEC) took the decision and called for members to unite instead behind the union's "key workplace priorities". It unanimously backed a motion that recognised the NUJ would take no further action on the call for an Israeli boycott because the Trades Union Congress has rejected it. The motion was tabled by the NUJ general secretary, Jeremy Dear, and seconded by the union president, Michelle Stanistreet, at a NEC meeting on Friday. It recognised the concerns expressed by some members, chapels and branches about the proposed boycott and said that it had met the terms of the original delegate vote in favour of the boycott at its annual meeting earlier this year by informing the TUC of the conference vote."
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
NHS negligence kills little boy
A hospital has apologised to the parents of a baby who died when doctors failed to spot a serious heart condition after mixing up his X-rays. Staff at the Royal Cornwall Hospital in Truro thought that one-year-old Jack Garland was teething and sent him home with painkillers. After a second X-ray two weeks later, they realised that he had mitochondrial respiratory complex, a rare genetic complaint. He was taken immediately to Great Ormond Street Hospital, but died 16 days later of heart failure and a brain haemorrhage.
Jack’s father, Ben Garland, 31, from Truro, said: “Those two weeks when he was first sent home were crucial. The hospital’s mistake cost my son his fighting chance. To hold him while they turned the machines off is something I will never forget. All we want is someone to be honest and say they will take responsibility.”
John Watkins, chief executive of the Royal Cornwall Hospitals Trust, said in a letter to Jack’s parents that a senior doctor had reviewed the first X-ray and could “clearly” see that the child had an enlarged heart. Mr Watkins wrote: “The doctor is at a loss to explain how this happened and can only deduce that the person who reported Jack’s X-ray reported on the wrong film. The conclusion is that it was a failure of the system that caused Jack’s X-ray to be overlooked and not attributable to one individual.” The trust said that a thorough review was under way. The hospital had a 31million pound deficit at the time and had cut 300 staff, although the trust said that no jobs had been cut that would have compromised clinical care.
Source
THE BBC IS JUST ONE FACE OF THE LOCKSTEP LEFTIST MEDIA
The mass media age may have increased our freedom of speech but our mass-mediated perception of reality has arguably stifled our freedom of thought. In times past people may have known only what was going on in their own neck of the woods but at least they knew it intimately, which perhaps provided some reality check. Also one community was relatively free from the influence of another. Not anymore. Now, thanks to the likes of the BBC you know so much more - and have an opinion on so much more.
Now you know that some brutal murders merit grief on a national scale whilst others deserve barely a passing mention. You know that jumping up and down at rock concerts will help to save the world from poverty. You know that man made global warming is threatening to destroy the planet and it's all the fault of capitalism. Just like you know that capitalism was virtually brought down on the stroke of midnight in 2000 by something called the Millenium Bug. Older people know that the world was very nearly overwhelmed in the 1970's by The Next Ice Age. You know that if you have ever stood next to someone smoking a cigarette it might one day kill you. Best of all you know what the most important thing going on in the world at any one time is because it is the thing that headlines the news. Thus has the mass media deluged people's consciousness with trashy certainties at huge cost to their freedom of spirit. Killing off The Age of Reason and replacing it with the Age of Feeling.
It is not even that the BBC and its like are deliberately trying to present a distorted perspective on current affairs or anything else. It is worse than that; the distortion is so embedded in media culture that it collectively fails to comprehend that there are other perspectives. The BBC and its hinterland of favoured contributors teems with champagne lefties, celebrity poseurs and assorted other have-your-cake-and-eat-it fellow travellers of the liberal establishment elite.
And it is a veritable honey pot for the not so big wide world of the arts and academia. The joke is that they all think of themselves as radicals and guardians of freedom. Funny business radicalism; the word suggests boldness, independent mindedness, freethinking. The reality is the opposite. It is a me- too mentality of fitting in with the prevailing ethos, often first absorbed during student days. I remember when I was at university in the 1970's, one or two lonely guys in tweeds and sports jackets flitting furtively across the psychedelic bead strewn quadrangle clutching their briefcases. I remember thinking those guys are the real radicals here. The thoroughly predictable `radical' offerings from the BBC in-crowd are invariably dripping with media establishment mythology and the depressing fact that the BBC is often hailed as a great bastion of intellectual independence merely demonstrates the overwhelming brainwashing power that the little box in the corner now has on our intellectual horizons.
The last half-century was so dominated by the spectre of the totalitarian state that no one foresaw what was really coming down the line. George Orwell partly saw the future that we now inhabit - but with one crucial difference. In his nightmare 1984, a political elite controlled the television in the corner of the room and used it to brainwash the citizenry. Whereas in the real post 1984 nightmare, a pervasive mass media - a cancerous organism out of the control of anyone, even its own media elite - brainwashes everyone, politicians included. It is not that anyone is actively trying to brainwash you; it is more that a powerful tendency to group-think is the very nature of mass broadcasting.
But the most insidious brainwashing happens at a more subtle level than this. The most insidious brainwashing lies in the power of storytelling. It is at this subliminal level that the great soft-left crusades - moral relativism and the cult of victimhood have been won. More than anywhere it is in radio and television film, drama and soap opera.
Try these tests next time you are watching your favourite BBC drama or Hollywood movie: If the characters happen to include - say - a white middle class guy and a non-white working class guy, who is going to turn out to have surprising hidden qualities and who is going to turn out to have a surprising hidden dark side? Or compare the proportion homosexual characters on your tv screen with that in your own real life. Try and find the drama where the `right wing' character turns out to be full of compassion and the `left wing' character full of bile or where the successful business executive turns out to be rather a nice chap. This sort of myth making has underpinned so much of Western story telling for at least fifty years now and has been more corrosive of freedom than any political regime.
More here
A REAL climate denier
Post lifted from Prof. Brignell. See the original for links
Over a quarter of a century ago, your bending author was immensely proud to be offered a chair at the University of Southampton. Like much else in modern Britain, the honour now seems somewhat tarnished. Here is an apologia for that paper as a Letter in the Sunday Telegraph, which tells you more about the state of peer review than it does about anything else, and has a second paragraph that is a collectors' item:
I think I now get where the Lockwood paper fits in to our understanding of climate and there is no doubt that it is an absolute gift to climate atheists. What it said was of course all well-known already but the concession from a Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven climate change for all but the last 20 years really is invaluable. And the one fact that the paper documents so well -- that solar output is on the downturn -- is also hilarious, given its source. Surely even a crazed Greenie mind must see that reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! This month's unprecedented cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even be the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got the danger exactly backwards -- JR
Another crooked British "public service" broadcaster
TO LIVE up to his public image of a rugged, ex-SAS adventurer, it must have seemed essential for Bear Grylls to appear at ease sleeping rough and catching his own food in his television survival series. But it has emerged that Grylls, 33, was enjoying a far more conventional form of comfort, retreating some nights from filming in mountains and on desert islands to nearby lodges and hotels. Now Channel 4 has launched an investigation into whether Grylls, who has conquered Everest and the Arctic, deceived the public in his series Born Survivor.
The series, screened in March and April and watched by 1.4m viewers, built up Grylls's credentials as a tough outdoorsman. In a question and answer session on Channel 4's website, he recalls how station bosses pitched the venture to him stating: "We just drop you into a lot of different hellholes equipped with nothing, and you do what you have to do to survive."
But an adviser to Born Survivor has disclosed that at one location where the adventurer claimed to be a "real life Robin-son Crusoe" trapped on "a desert island", he was actually on an outlying part of the Hawaiian archipelago and spent nights at a motel. On another occasion in California's Sierra Nevada mountains where he was filmed biting off the head of a snake for breakfast and struggling for survival "with just a water bottle, a cup and a flint for making fire", he actually slept some nights with the crew in a lodge fitted with television and internet access. The Pines Resort at Bass Lake is advertised as "a cosy getaway for families" with blueberry pancakes for breakfast.
In one episode Grylls, son of the late Tory MP Sir Michael Grylls, was shown apparently building a Polynesian-style raft using only materials around him, including bamboo, hibiscus twine and palm leaves for a sail. But according to Mark Weinert, an Oregon-based survival consultant brought in for the job, it was he who led the team that built the raft. It was then dismantled so that Grylls could be shown building it on camera.
In another episode viewers watched as Grylls tried to coax an apparently wild mustang into a lasso in the Sierra Nevada. "I'm in luck," he told viewers, apparently coming across four wild horses grazing in a meadow. "A chance to use an old native American mode of transport comes my way. This is one of the few places in the whole of the US where horses still roam wild." In fact, Weinert said, the horses were not wild but were brought in by trailer from a nearby trekking station for the "choreographed" feature. "If you really believe everything happens the way it is shown on TV, you are being a little bit naive," he said.
Channel 4 confirmed that Grylls had used hotels during expeditions and has now asked Diverse, the Bristol-based production company that made the programme, to look into the other claims. "We take any allegations of misleading our audiences seriously," said a spokeswoman for the channel.
The latest suggestion that Channel 4 may have breached viewer trust comes as the broad-caster's supervisory board prepares to issue new editorial guidelines to suppliers in order to stamp out alleged sharp practices that mislead viewers. "Born Survivor is not an observational documentary series but a `how to' guide to basic survival techniques in extreme environments," the spokeswoman said. "The programme explicitly does not claim that presenter Bear Grylls's experience is one of unaided solo survival."
Nevertheless, the disclosure is likely to disappoint fans of the Eton-educated adventurer, who at the age of 23 became the youngest Briton to scale Everest. Just two years before that he had broken his back in three places after his parachute ripped during a military exercise. On screen he has emerged as a natural performer, with stunts such as squeezing water from animal dung and sucking the fluid from fish eyeballs. Grylls could not be contacted for comment this weekend as he was trekking in the Brecon Beacons with his four-year-old son.
Source
Michael Winner salutes a brilliant, politically incorrect, British comedian
Bernard Manning died recently. Michael Winner is an English film director and producer
To say I was fan of Bernard Manning is a gross understatement. If a stand-up comedian could be a genius, then Manning was a genius. He may have offended people, but since when has that been a crime? Comics have caused offence since the dawn of time. And not only did he offend with brilliant gags, he did it to anyone. No one was safe from his jokes - they always cut close to the bone and that is why the audiences loved him.
In my opinion, he died twice. Not just this week, but also on that day many years ago when those crackpot, sourfaced, people known as The Politically-Correct Brigade forced him off television because they considered his jokes to be racist. He wasn't racist. If Bernard wanted to make fun of any race, he did so without discrimination. And why shouldn't he? His job was to make us laugh, and that he did brilliantly.
I met Bernard a few years ago, when, with a friend, I paid for him to come from his beloved Manchester and do a cabaret in a private banqueting room for Marco Pierre White's 40th birthday. He sat like an out-of-breath walrus - even then his skin colour was a shade of grey, indicating severe heart problems. But when he took the microphone, everything changed. He was alert, sharp, his delivery and nuances were impeccable, his timing perfection. I introduced him to the distinguished dinner crowd, which included Madonna, with the usual words - "Ladies and gentlemen ... Bernard Manning".
Bernard took the microphone, his pause was perfect, then in that marvellous, gravelly voice he said: "Michael Winner, the most hated Jew in Europe." That was funny. That, as the old saying goes "brought the house down". None of us considered that racist. Least of all me, the one who should have been most insulted.
Some years ago, I remember one of those undercover TV programmes secretly filmed a private dinner. Manning was speaking. He came out with another of his great jokes: "I lost a relation in Auschwitz. Fell off the guard tower." There was indignant uproar from the chattering classes. The politically correct brigade said it was just disgraceful. I remember thinking: "What are they going on about? That was funny. It made me laugh." And I actually lost relatives in Auschwitz.
Why shouldn't we poke fun at Jews, Muslims, the Irish, Scotsmen, the French, the Italians, Catholics, Seventh Day Adventists, Mormons, blacks, Chinese... I could go on. Another saying, one of my favourites, goes: "If you can't take a joke you shouldn't have joined."
I remember once attending a TV special, An Evening With Jackie Mason - the Jewish American comedian. The jokes he told were hysterical. Many of them deriding Jews in a dry, very funny, observational way. At the end of the evening, Pamela Stephenson came over to me, white with rage. "No wonder the Jews hate him," she said of Mason. "He's so anti-Semitic." Nonsense. Jackie was, and still is, extremely funny. And believe me, when Jews are talking among themselves, it's not at all uncommon for them to refer to "Yid" and "Yidden". Try that in a joke today and you wouldn't just be off television, you'd be banned from the planet!
When Lenny Henry, one of our wonderful black comics, started out, he had a terrific line in his act. He'd say: "If you don't laugh, I'll come and live next door to you." Funny, funny, funny. Later, I seem to remember Lenny apologising for that. Silly, silly, silly.
Where do these politically correct people live? Do they have their own special world. Do they not realise that in the real world people speak a different language to theirs? I was for many years on the Council of the Directors Guild Of Great Britain. Suddenly I saw on their notepaper the word "Chair" and then the name. "I never voted for James Cellan-Jones to be a chair," I protested. "I voted for him as our Chairman." "Can't use 'Chairman' any more," I was told. "It's not politically correct because it discriminates against women."
As far as I'm concerned, our world today is being controlled by this tiny group of out-of-touch loonies who'd prefer to see The Merchant Of Venice's finest lines disappear because a wonderfully written and beautifully spoken Jewish character is shown to be a greedy villain. And what about Othello, which might suggest that black soldiers are capable of strangling their wives in a fit of unfounded jealousy? Or Hamlet, which could offend Danes by suggesting that one of their countrymen could poison his brother in order to gain a throne?
These are the people who forced Benny Hill off TV and want topless girl pictures banned from newspapers. Don't they go to art galleries, these blinkered buffoons? There, they'd see picture after picture of topless (and some times bottomless) nymphs and ladies, many of them painted for their patrons' titillation - from Lucas Cranach in the 16th century, through Rubens and Goya, to Lucian Freud today.
Then Bernard Manning comes along, speaking the language of the British people, brilliantly phrased, exquisitely delivered, wittily composed, and above all unbelievably funny - and he's suddenly too rough for TV! Who do these idiots think watches TV? Bernard Manning spoke as his audience spoke. Except that he honed and perfected his jokes until they were gems. His humour came from the spirit of England. Brave, tolerant, welcoming to all races - a land that is rightly proud of Shakespeare, even though some of his writing is of such vulgarity that Bernard Manning is a churchwarden by comparison. Do these tight-bottomed idiots not realise laughter is a release? The day we cannot laugh at ourselves, and other people, without fear of censure is a sad day indeed.
Tragically, that day has come and it may get worse. I'm glad I'm old enough to have visited the music halls, still thriving in the Fifties and Sixties, and saw our great comics perform their art. And, yes, they made wonderfully ribald jokes about sex and gender and race and religion - all subjects that are taboo today. Now, the music halls are shopping malls and comedy has been replaced by smart, utterly unfunny political parody performed by nonentities who think the F-word is funny, while the old-timers who could stand up and enthral an audience for two hours single-handed are buried in English soil.
In a few days, Bernard Manning will join them. Make no mistake, he was a great and noble Englishman with a glorious sense of humour. I could, and should, have enjoyed him on TV for the last many years. But those arrogant enough to think they know better than everyone else decided he was not fit for mass consumption. This is not only a crazy world. It is a politically correct, tyrannical world where we let an intolerant minority tell us what to think. Goodbye Bernard. I salute you and I thank you. At least you'll be laughing at our lunatic world from on high.
Source
A hospital has apologised to the parents of a baby who died when doctors failed to spot a serious heart condition after mixing up his X-rays. Staff at the Royal Cornwall Hospital in Truro thought that one-year-old Jack Garland was teething and sent him home with painkillers. After a second X-ray two weeks later, they realised that he had mitochondrial respiratory complex, a rare genetic complaint. He was taken immediately to Great Ormond Street Hospital, but died 16 days later of heart failure and a brain haemorrhage.
Jack’s father, Ben Garland, 31, from Truro, said: “Those two weeks when he was first sent home were crucial. The hospital’s mistake cost my son his fighting chance. To hold him while they turned the machines off is something I will never forget. All we want is someone to be honest and say they will take responsibility.”
John Watkins, chief executive of the Royal Cornwall Hospitals Trust, said in a letter to Jack’s parents that a senior doctor had reviewed the first X-ray and could “clearly” see that the child had an enlarged heart. Mr Watkins wrote: “The doctor is at a loss to explain how this happened and can only deduce that the person who reported Jack’s X-ray reported on the wrong film. The conclusion is that it was a failure of the system that caused Jack’s X-ray to be overlooked and not attributable to one individual.” The trust said that a thorough review was under way. The hospital had a 31million pound deficit at the time and had cut 300 staff, although the trust said that no jobs had been cut that would have compromised clinical care.
Source
THE BBC IS JUST ONE FACE OF THE LOCKSTEP LEFTIST MEDIA
The mass media age may have increased our freedom of speech but our mass-mediated perception of reality has arguably stifled our freedom of thought. In times past people may have known only what was going on in their own neck of the woods but at least they knew it intimately, which perhaps provided some reality check. Also one community was relatively free from the influence of another. Not anymore. Now, thanks to the likes of the BBC you know so much more - and have an opinion on so much more.
Now you know that some brutal murders merit grief on a national scale whilst others deserve barely a passing mention. You know that jumping up and down at rock concerts will help to save the world from poverty. You know that man made global warming is threatening to destroy the planet and it's all the fault of capitalism. Just like you know that capitalism was virtually brought down on the stroke of midnight in 2000 by something called the Millenium Bug. Older people know that the world was very nearly overwhelmed in the 1970's by The Next Ice Age. You know that if you have ever stood next to someone smoking a cigarette it might one day kill you. Best of all you know what the most important thing going on in the world at any one time is because it is the thing that headlines the news. Thus has the mass media deluged people's consciousness with trashy certainties at huge cost to their freedom of spirit. Killing off The Age of Reason and replacing it with the Age of Feeling.
It is not even that the BBC and its like are deliberately trying to present a distorted perspective on current affairs or anything else. It is worse than that; the distortion is so embedded in media culture that it collectively fails to comprehend that there are other perspectives. The BBC and its hinterland of favoured contributors teems with champagne lefties, celebrity poseurs and assorted other have-your-cake-and-eat-it fellow travellers of the liberal establishment elite.
And it is a veritable honey pot for the not so big wide world of the arts and academia. The joke is that they all think of themselves as radicals and guardians of freedom. Funny business radicalism; the word suggests boldness, independent mindedness, freethinking. The reality is the opposite. It is a me- too mentality of fitting in with the prevailing ethos, often first absorbed during student days. I remember when I was at university in the 1970's, one or two lonely guys in tweeds and sports jackets flitting furtively across the psychedelic bead strewn quadrangle clutching their briefcases. I remember thinking those guys are the real radicals here. The thoroughly predictable `radical' offerings from the BBC in-crowd are invariably dripping with media establishment mythology and the depressing fact that the BBC is often hailed as a great bastion of intellectual independence merely demonstrates the overwhelming brainwashing power that the little box in the corner now has on our intellectual horizons.
The last half-century was so dominated by the spectre of the totalitarian state that no one foresaw what was really coming down the line. George Orwell partly saw the future that we now inhabit - but with one crucial difference. In his nightmare 1984, a political elite controlled the television in the corner of the room and used it to brainwash the citizenry. Whereas in the real post 1984 nightmare, a pervasive mass media - a cancerous organism out of the control of anyone, even its own media elite - brainwashes everyone, politicians included. It is not that anyone is actively trying to brainwash you; it is more that a powerful tendency to group-think is the very nature of mass broadcasting.
But the most insidious brainwashing happens at a more subtle level than this. The most insidious brainwashing lies in the power of storytelling. It is at this subliminal level that the great soft-left crusades - moral relativism and the cult of victimhood have been won. More than anywhere it is in radio and television film, drama and soap opera.
Try these tests next time you are watching your favourite BBC drama or Hollywood movie: If the characters happen to include - say - a white middle class guy and a non-white working class guy, who is going to turn out to have surprising hidden qualities and who is going to turn out to have a surprising hidden dark side? Or compare the proportion homosexual characters on your tv screen with that in your own real life. Try and find the drama where the `right wing' character turns out to be full of compassion and the `left wing' character full of bile or where the successful business executive turns out to be rather a nice chap. This sort of myth making has underpinned so much of Western story telling for at least fifty years now and has been more corrosive of freedom than any political regime.
More here
A REAL climate denier
Post lifted from Prof. Brignell. See the original for links
Over a quarter of a century ago, your bending author was immensely proud to be offered a chair at the University of Southampton. Like much else in modern Britain, the honour now seems somewhat tarnished. Here is an apologia for that paper as a Letter in the Sunday Telegraph, which tells you more about the state of peer review than it does about anything else, and has a second paragraph that is a collectors' item:
No spinning here
I am one of the authors of the Royal Society global warming paper that you say is simple and fundamentally flawed (Comment, July 15). Simple? The idea was to present a straightforward demonstration, without recourse to complex climate models. Flawed? None of the three academic referees the paper was subjected to found any flaws.
Climate change is by far the greatest threat to everyone's standard of living. Unlike political parties, companies, media stars, works of art, consumer products and even social trends and national economies, a scientific reality is immune to spin.
(Prof) Mike Lockwood, Southampton University
I think I now get where the Lockwood paper fits in to our understanding of climate and there is no doubt that it is an absolute gift to climate atheists. What it said was of course all well-known already but the concession from a Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven climate change for all but the last 20 years really is invaluable. And the one fact that the paper documents so well -- that solar output is on the downturn -- is also hilarious, given its source. Surely even a crazed Greenie mind must see that reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! This month's unprecedented cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even be the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got the danger exactly backwards -- JR
Another crooked British "public service" broadcaster
TO LIVE up to his public image of a rugged, ex-SAS adventurer, it must have seemed essential for Bear Grylls to appear at ease sleeping rough and catching his own food in his television survival series. But it has emerged that Grylls, 33, was enjoying a far more conventional form of comfort, retreating some nights from filming in mountains and on desert islands to nearby lodges and hotels. Now Channel 4 has launched an investigation into whether Grylls, who has conquered Everest and the Arctic, deceived the public in his series Born Survivor.
The series, screened in March and April and watched by 1.4m viewers, built up Grylls's credentials as a tough outdoorsman. In a question and answer session on Channel 4's website, he recalls how station bosses pitched the venture to him stating: "We just drop you into a lot of different hellholes equipped with nothing, and you do what you have to do to survive."
But an adviser to Born Survivor has disclosed that at one location where the adventurer claimed to be a "real life Robin-son Crusoe" trapped on "a desert island", he was actually on an outlying part of the Hawaiian archipelago and spent nights at a motel. On another occasion in California's Sierra Nevada mountains where he was filmed biting off the head of a snake for breakfast and struggling for survival "with just a water bottle, a cup and a flint for making fire", he actually slept some nights with the crew in a lodge fitted with television and internet access. The Pines Resort at Bass Lake is advertised as "a cosy getaway for families" with blueberry pancakes for breakfast.
In one episode Grylls, son of the late Tory MP Sir Michael Grylls, was shown apparently building a Polynesian-style raft using only materials around him, including bamboo, hibiscus twine and palm leaves for a sail. But according to Mark Weinert, an Oregon-based survival consultant brought in for the job, it was he who led the team that built the raft. It was then dismantled so that Grylls could be shown building it on camera.
In another episode viewers watched as Grylls tried to coax an apparently wild mustang into a lasso in the Sierra Nevada. "I'm in luck," he told viewers, apparently coming across four wild horses grazing in a meadow. "A chance to use an old native American mode of transport comes my way. This is one of the few places in the whole of the US where horses still roam wild." In fact, Weinert said, the horses were not wild but were brought in by trailer from a nearby trekking station for the "choreographed" feature. "If you really believe everything happens the way it is shown on TV, you are being a little bit naive," he said.
Channel 4 confirmed that Grylls had used hotels during expeditions and has now asked Diverse, the Bristol-based production company that made the programme, to look into the other claims. "We take any allegations of misleading our audiences seriously," said a spokeswoman for the channel.
The latest suggestion that Channel 4 may have breached viewer trust comes as the broad-caster's supervisory board prepares to issue new editorial guidelines to suppliers in order to stamp out alleged sharp practices that mislead viewers. "Born Survivor is not an observational documentary series but a `how to' guide to basic survival techniques in extreme environments," the spokeswoman said. "The programme explicitly does not claim that presenter Bear Grylls's experience is one of unaided solo survival."
Nevertheless, the disclosure is likely to disappoint fans of the Eton-educated adventurer, who at the age of 23 became the youngest Briton to scale Everest. Just two years before that he had broken his back in three places after his parachute ripped during a military exercise. On screen he has emerged as a natural performer, with stunts such as squeezing water from animal dung and sucking the fluid from fish eyeballs. Grylls could not be contacted for comment this weekend as he was trekking in the Brecon Beacons with his four-year-old son.
Source
Michael Winner salutes a brilliant, politically incorrect, British comedian
Bernard Manning died recently. Michael Winner is an English film director and producer
To say I was fan of Bernard Manning is a gross understatement. If a stand-up comedian could be a genius, then Manning was a genius. He may have offended people, but since when has that been a crime? Comics have caused offence since the dawn of time. And not only did he offend with brilliant gags, he did it to anyone. No one was safe from his jokes - they always cut close to the bone and that is why the audiences loved him.
In my opinion, he died twice. Not just this week, but also on that day many years ago when those crackpot, sourfaced, people known as The Politically-Correct Brigade forced him off television because they considered his jokes to be racist. He wasn't racist. If Bernard wanted to make fun of any race, he did so without discrimination. And why shouldn't he? His job was to make us laugh, and that he did brilliantly.
I met Bernard a few years ago, when, with a friend, I paid for him to come from his beloved Manchester and do a cabaret in a private banqueting room for Marco Pierre White's 40th birthday. He sat like an out-of-breath walrus - even then his skin colour was a shade of grey, indicating severe heart problems. But when he took the microphone, everything changed. He was alert, sharp, his delivery and nuances were impeccable, his timing perfection. I introduced him to the distinguished dinner crowd, which included Madonna, with the usual words - "Ladies and gentlemen ... Bernard Manning".
Bernard took the microphone, his pause was perfect, then in that marvellous, gravelly voice he said: "Michael Winner, the most hated Jew in Europe." That was funny. That, as the old saying goes "brought the house down". None of us considered that racist. Least of all me, the one who should have been most insulted.
Some years ago, I remember one of those undercover TV programmes secretly filmed a private dinner. Manning was speaking. He came out with another of his great jokes: "I lost a relation in Auschwitz. Fell off the guard tower." There was indignant uproar from the chattering classes. The politically correct brigade said it was just disgraceful. I remember thinking: "What are they going on about? That was funny. It made me laugh." And I actually lost relatives in Auschwitz.
Why shouldn't we poke fun at Jews, Muslims, the Irish, Scotsmen, the French, the Italians, Catholics, Seventh Day Adventists, Mormons, blacks, Chinese... I could go on. Another saying, one of my favourites, goes: "If you can't take a joke you shouldn't have joined."
I remember once attending a TV special, An Evening With Jackie Mason - the Jewish American comedian. The jokes he told were hysterical. Many of them deriding Jews in a dry, very funny, observational way. At the end of the evening, Pamela Stephenson came over to me, white with rage. "No wonder the Jews hate him," she said of Mason. "He's so anti-Semitic." Nonsense. Jackie was, and still is, extremely funny. And believe me, when Jews are talking among themselves, it's not at all uncommon for them to refer to "Yid" and "Yidden". Try that in a joke today and you wouldn't just be off television, you'd be banned from the planet!
When Lenny Henry, one of our wonderful black comics, started out, he had a terrific line in his act. He'd say: "If you don't laugh, I'll come and live next door to you." Funny, funny, funny. Later, I seem to remember Lenny apologising for that. Silly, silly, silly.
Where do these politically correct people live? Do they have their own special world. Do they not realise that in the real world people speak a different language to theirs? I was for many years on the Council of the Directors Guild Of Great Britain. Suddenly I saw on their notepaper the word "Chair" and then the name. "I never voted for James Cellan-Jones to be a chair," I protested. "I voted for him as our Chairman." "Can't use 'Chairman' any more," I was told. "It's not politically correct because it discriminates against women."
As far as I'm concerned, our world today is being controlled by this tiny group of out-of-touch loonies who'd prefer to see The Merchant Of Venice's finest lines disappear because a wonderfully written and beautifully spoken Jewish character is shown to be a greedy villain. And what about Othello, which might suggest that black soldiers are capable of strangling their wives in a fit of unfounded jealousy? Or Hamlet, which could offend Danes by suggesting that one of their countrymen could poison his brother in order to gain a throne?
These are the people who forced Benny Hill off TV and want topless girl pictures banned from newspapers. Don't they go to art galleries, these blinkered buffoons? There, they'd see picture after picture of topless (and some times bottomless) nymphs and ladies, many of them painted for their patrons' titillation - from Lucas Cranach in the 16th century, through Rubens and Goya, to Lucian Freud today.
Then Bernard Manning comes along, speaking the language of the British people, brilliantly phrased, exquisitely delivered, wittily composed, and above all unbelievably funny - and he's suddenly too rough for TV! Who do these idiots think watches TV? Bernard Manning spoke as his audience spoke. Except that he honed and perfected his jokes until they were gems. His humour came from the spirit of England. Brave, tolerant, welcoming to all races - a land that is rightly proud of Shakespeare, even though some of his writing is of such vulgarity that Bernard Manning is a churchwarden by comparison. Do these tight-bottomed idiots not realise laughter is a release? The day we cannot laugh at ourselves, and other people, without fear of censure is a sad day indeed.
Tragically, that day has come and it may get worse. I'm glad I'm old enough to have visited the music halls, still thriving in the Fifties and Sixties, and saw our great comics perform their art. And, yes, they made wonderfully ribald jokes about sex and gender and race and religion - all subjects that are taboo today. Now, the music halls are shopping malls and comedy has been replaced by smart, utterly unfunny political parody performed by nonentities who think the F-word is funny, while the old-timers who could stand up and enthral an audience for two hours single-handed are buried in English soil.
In a few days, Bernard Manning will join them. Make no mistake, he was a great and noble Englishman with a glorious sense of humour. I could, and should, have enjoyed him on TV for the last many years. But those arrogant enough to think they know better than everyone else decided he was not fit for mass consumption. This is not only a crazy world. It is a politically correct, tyrannical world where we let an intolerant minority tell us what to think. Goodbye Bernard. I salute you and I thank you. At least you'll be laughing at our lunatic world from on high.
Source
Monday, July 23, 2007
Pervasive dishonesty at the Leftist BBC
The BBC executive board gathered for its regular meeting last Tuesday morning for coffee, biscuits and meltdown. The previous evening, at 5pm, the deadline had passed for producers to come forward confessing, in a spirit of openness and honesty, to programmes they had made that had misled the public in some way. The invitation for them so to do had been extended by both Jana Bennett, the BBC's director of vision and an executive board member, and Jenny Abramsky, the BBC's director of audio and music. They, and other BBC chiefs, were giving staff a chance to come clean after revelations that a trailer for a programme about the Queen had been less than truthful with viewers, and that the corporation had also been fined 50,000 pounds for faking a Blue Peter competition.
Much to the apparent surprise of Bennett and Abramsky, two experienced and highly respected corporation bureaucrats, a procession of contrite and nervous producers came forward to 'fess up. The public, it seemed, had been deceived with unnerving consistency, particularly over programmes with phone-in polls and competitions. And on the corporation's most noble flagship enterprises, too. Comic Relief and Children in Need, for example. "We just sat there absolutely stunned," one executive board member told me, "shocked beyond belief. Nobody had any idea that this was going on on such a scale."
Not even Bennett and Abramsky, when they asked for producers to come forward? "Nobody. Nobody at all. And we had the very powerful sense that there was a lot more to come. And we thought this time no excuses, something really has to be done."
In the short term this might mean the ceremonial defenestration, for the benefit of a baying Fleet Street and an angry public, of some high-ranking executive. Bennett perhaps, even though she is one of the corporation's most talented and savvy apparatchiks? "But if Jana, why not Mark [Thompson, the director-general]? He is about as remote in the hierarchy from what went on as she is."
The feeling within the upper echelons of the BBC is that the sacrifice of a senior figure would be a capitulation too far to critics, although how far that view is shared lower down is a moot point. There is a certain glee and schaden-freude in some parts of the corporation, long dismayed at the grubby and antiReithian business of chasing the ratings with lowest common denominator broadcasting. Either way, all those I spoke to believe the BBC needs a change of culture, that it needs to decide what it is there for and why we should continue to pay for its existence, compulsorily and on pain of imprisonment if we don't fork out.
"Why are we doing these phone-in polls?" said the executive board member. "In what possible sense are they public service broadcasting? "The programme makers tell you that it's an invaluable way of reaching the difficult-to-get C2D audience. But we need to reach them in different, cleverer ways. "The BBC has always been very good at reaching middle-class, Old Etonian audiences; in fact it has whole channels just for them. But it doesn't know how to attract the white working class, because nobody from the white working class works for it. Phone-in polls are an easy and unacceptable answer. They've been suspended now; there's absolutely no reason why they should ever start again."
According to Roger Graef, a leading independent producer, the scams and manipulations have been threatening to erupt for some time. "It was lurking under the surface," he says, "but there were more and more people coming to my company literally bursting into tears and saying, `I don't want to do this to people any more'. But they wouldn't go public because they were worried they'd never get another job."
A senior BBC journalist put it even more bluntly. "The BBC has to stop trying to get in the f****** gutter with all the other tawdry channels. When you start chasing ratings and using the foul marketing language of City spivs, it's inevitable what will happen." AH, but the trouble is, if the BBC doesn't get into the gutter it may lose its raison d'etre anyway. For the past 60 years or so the BBC has managed to straddle two poles - universality and public service - and thus justify the licence fee. But it is finding it increasingly difficult to do so.
Never mind all this stuff about a new, imported culture whereby production teams subsist under intense pressure on short-term contracts and are not imbued with the BBC ethos, such as it is. That may be in the mix somewhere, but it is not the crucial point. It is about why the BBC exists at all and where it locates itself in the future. And each way the corporation turns it finds a howl of complaint. When it attempts to achieve universality by diversifying in order to serve a specialist audience and dreams up such channels as BBC4 (audience share: 0.4%) and BBC3 (audience share: 1.3%) it is accused of spreading itself far too thinly and as a result splurging huge amounts of licence-payers' money on a vanishingly small audience. Indeed, you might wonder why there is a need for both BBC2 and BBC4 to exist as separate entities when their remits are more or less identical.
Those who accuse the BBC of doing too much, and sacrificing quality as a consequence, were given plenty of ammunition by the current fiasco: at least one of the programmes that rigged its phone-in competition did so because nobody from the audience phoned in. They were broadcasting to an audience of close to zero.
On the other hand, when the BBC attempts to fulfil its charter by providing top-quality mainstream entertainment for a mass audience, the critics attack it for trying to compete with the commercial sector in chasing ratings and paying too much money for household names. Take the Jonathan Ross contract as an example. "The BBC was burbling with happiness because it had got Jonathan Ross for `only' 18m pounds when he had asked for 24m," the senior BBC journalist remarked with some derision. "He draws only about 3m viewers every week - for which he is paid almost eight times the entire yearly budget for a programme like The World Tonight. How can that possibly be justified?"
Privately quite a few BBC executives admit that the Ross contract was a misjudgment, politically, morally and practically. One told me it had cost the BBC "a couple of hundred million quid" when it came to charter renewal because the politicians were ill-disposed towards an organisation that could be so cavalier with licence-payers' money. Others argue that the BBC should not compete with commercial organisations because the BBC is simply inept at doing so, and they use the Ross contract as a case in point. For the executive board member it's a more straightforward calculation. "If there's a commercial organisation that wants to pay Jonathan Ross 18m and thinks it can draw an audience that justifies the salary, then let them do it. It's not for the BBC. Exactly the same applies to phone-in polls."
WHAT should be done? The BBC provided an easy sacrificial victim by "suspending" all commissions from RDF, the independent production company which supplied the original shots of Her Majesty. But the firm says that they e-mailed the BBC three times asking to see its edit before transmission. Someone in the BBC jumped to the conclusion that their trail showed the Queen storming out. At no time did they ask RDF whether this actually happened.
The Beeb's director-general has also ordered that all 15,000 staffers and a good few thousand independent producers must be inculcated in the ethos of the corporation through new training schemes. You might argue that it would be prudent for the BBC to decide exactly what its ethos is before embarking on such a laudable process. At the moment it is not remotely clear. It is vague about the extent to which it should be competing with the commercial channels, and even more vague about the notion of what constitutes its "core broadcasting".
"You know, whenever I ask them about some new programme or channel they're planning," the executive board member told me, laughing, "they always tell me that it is core broadcasting. And I say to them, `Right, okay, well give me an example of something the BBC does which is peripheral broadcasting'. They can't come up with an answer." It is this lack of focus that the BBC management needs to address - as well as the simple fact of not misleading viewers. At present the BBC's default position is that everything it does is always for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds. But if the BBC is still to be with us in 10 years, with a statutory licence fee, it needs not only the trust of its captive audience but a far clearer idea of what it stands for.
Source
More BBC fraud
A SENIOR executive at Panorama is to be questioned by police over allegations that the BBC's flagship current affairs programme broke the law by using forged documents to target one of Britain's richest doctors. Detectives are expected to interview Frank Simmonds, the programme's deputy editor, under caution, following claims that Panorama used fake referral letters from GPs to send undercover reporters into clinics run by Mohamed Taranissi, a leading IVF expert. Officers from Scotland Yard want to question Simmonds in relation to the Forgery and Counterfeiting Act, according to an informed source. Using a "false instrument" under the Act carries a maximum jail sentence of 10 years.
The BBC is already facing a crisis of trust after it admitted deceiving viewers by faking the results of phone-in competitions in shows such as Comic Relief and Children in Need. The broadcaster has also been forced to apologise to the Queen after wrongly claiming that she stormed out of a royal photoshoot. The police inquiry into Panorama, however, raises fresh questions about the BBC's core journalism, and comes as Mark Byford, the deputy director-general, faces a grilling by MPs on Tuesday.
Taranissi, 52, whose wealth is estimated at 38m pounds, is suing Panorama for libel, claiming the programme made defamatory allegations about his techniques and has caused lasting damage to his professional reputation. The BBC could face a bill for more than 1m pounds in compensation and legal costs if it loses the case.
The Panorama investigation into Taranissi, broadcast in January, claimed that one of his central London clinics, the Assisted Reproduction and Gynaecology Centre (ARGC), offered "unnecessary and unproven" treatment to an undercover reporter posing as a patient. The show alleged that a 26-year-old journalist was offered IVF treatment costing thousands of pounds despite neither her nor her partner, having any history of fertility problems. It also claimed that Taranissi was running a second clinic without a licence and was sending his older and harder-to-treat patients there to maintain a high success rate at the ARGC.
Taranissi, an Egyptian who has helped mothers give birth to 2,300 babies in seven years, denies any wrongdoing. His lawyers claim that Panorama researchers forged at least four referral letters from nonexistent GPs to gain access to his clinics. Police took a statement from Taranissi earlier this year and now want to question Simmonds, who oversaw the IVF sting, about the letters. The BBC claims they were "justified" in the context of the undercover probe.
A BBC spokesman said: "We are more than happy to cooperate with the police. They indicated at the outset that they would want to speak to Mr Simmonds." A spokesman for the Yard said: " Inquiries are still ongoing."
Source
Greenies sow food confusion
A Brit tries to take it all seriously
There's this organic carrot, and it's doing my head in. It's a nice carrot, as carrots go: fat, orange, with feathery green tufts on top. It has lived a blameless life in a field of joy, innocent of pesticides and artificial fertilisers. And now, here it is in the supermarket, rooting me on to take it home. Only, here's the thing: the carrot is from Israel. That's nearly 2,500 miles away. If I buy it, I will take on its carbon footprint, garnishing every mouthful with the greenhouse gas that it has splurged into the atmosphere to be here today. Can I live with that? Does the carrot's organic worthiness trump the fact that it is has amassed more air miles than an MP on an international fact-finding mission? Or should I let it rot for thoughtlessly contributing to the destruction of the planet?
You see my problem. I'm food confused. And not just about vegetables. Fruit, meat, dairy - these days, everything is fraught with ethical complications. If I tried to follow all of them, I'd end up an oxygenarian - one of those people who eat nothing but air. The "good" food choices have proliferated like salmonella in an Edwina Currie egg - organic, Fairtrade, locally grown, free range, boutique, the Leaf mark, Red Tractor, Freedom Food, farm assured - some important, others just marketing spin. How am I meant to know what comes first in the pecking order?
Some choices are straightforward. Processed food clearly puts you on the fast track to hell. As for animal welfare, I won't eat anything that hasn't had weekly spa treatments. But organic? I used to think it was a no-brainer: good for the planet (no energy wasted on fertilisers and pesticides); good for the soil (it works with nature, rather than against it); good for the creatures that inhabit furrow and field (livestock, wildlife, farmers). It is also, arguably, good for us.
But when food miles enter the equation, organic quickly loses its halo. Getting an organic New Zealand apple from the tree to your lunchbox releases 235 times as much carbon as it saves. How depressing is that? And that's before you even think about seasonality. We shouldn't be eating apples in June, but we have turned luxuries into necessities, demanding strawberries in midwinter and nectarines in spring.
Of course, there are some things (citrus fruit, pineapples, bananas) that don't grow in Britain, and I would be the last to suggest we could do without them. I'm also not sure I could survive without spices, olives, tea and coffee. But there have to be limits, such as not flying blueberries from Chile in December. And where do food miles and seasonality leave fair trade? Supporting Ethiopian coffee growers is one thing, but should we really be importing pears from South Africa, however benevolent our intentions?
Home-grown is no less problem-filled: your Isle of Wight tomatoes were probably grown in a greenhouse that burns more energy than a Chinese power station, and that supermarket potato has been taken by lorry to the other end of the country to be washed and packed. Sometimes it seems as if supermarkets set traps for unwary ecoshoppers. You know those fruit and veg packets with a picture of a happy supplier on the front - farmer Ted from Hampshire with his organic fruit? Turns out they aren't always from his farm at all. Sometimes they aren't even from his country.
Still, at least you know where you are with meat and dairy. Stick to organic and free range, and you can't go wrong. Except that farm animals happen to be huge contributors to global warming. A field of farting cows produces enough centrally heated methane to drown out the sound of the icecaps crumbling. Then there's all the packaging, the energy-hungry refrigeration, the distance between farm, slaughterhouse and supermarket depot.
A brilliant book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, by the American journalist Michael Pollan, poses this dilemma: "When you can eat everything, what do you choose to eat?" Pollan works his way along the different food chains in the States, from the longest (which stretches from the cornfields of the Midwest through intensive cattle farming and processing plants to the fast-food outlets that blight every town and city in the country) to the shortest - a modern hunter-gathering mission in northern California, on which he shoots his own wild boar, harvests morels in the hills, picks cherries from the streets of San Francisco and makes bread with wild yeast captured from the air. In between, there is "big" organic - operations such as the American organic supermarket Whole Foods Market - and small-scale organic, local growers supplying local people and local businesses. The hunter-gathering wins hands down, although Pollan admits it's not that practical on a daily basis. Local organic comes a close second.
Pollan has thought about what he eats; he has looked at the contradictions and worked out what matters. It's probably pretty similar to what most of us want - food that tastes good and makes us happy, without troubling either our conscience or our health. The difference is that he has done something about it. We can blame the supermarkets and producers, but ultimately the responsibility for what we eat lies with us. The choices are confusing, and there is no perfect solution. But the worst thing we can do is do nothing.
There is a movement in America called the Locavores - people who eat, wherever possible, a diet harvested within a 100-mile radius (in cities, we're talking farmers' markets, allotments, small shops that prioritise local producers). Locavores have a mantra: "If not locally produced, then organic. If not organic, then family farm. If not family farm, then local business. If not local business, then fair trade." I would add a line at the beginning: "If not local organic, then locally produced." But I've decided the Locavore code of priorities is going to be my way through the food confusion. That Israeli carrot will just have to go home with someone else.
Source
Greenie misanthropy on display again
Hatred of people is a major driving force among Greenies -- which is why they have been trying to stop people having babies from long before the global warming scare popped up. See e.g. here
The new head of the Science Museum has an uncompromising view about how global warming should be dealt with: get rid of a few billion people. Chris Rapley, who takes up his post on September 1, is not afraid of offending. 'I am not advocating genocide,' said Rapley. 'What I am saying is that if we invest in ways to reduce the birthrate - by improving contraception, education and healthcare - we will stop the world's population reaching its current estimated limit of between eight and 10 billion.
'That in turn will mean less carbon dioxide is being pumped into the atmosphere because there will be fewer people to drive cars and use electricity. The crucial point is that to achieve this goal you would only have to spend a fraction of the money that will be needed to bring about technological fixes, new nuclear power plants or renewable energy plants. However, everyone has decided, quietly, to ignore the issue.'
Such arguments give an indication of the priorities of the new Science Museum chief, an office that has been vacant since 2005 when Lindsay Sharp abruptly left the 150,000 pound post following rows about financial waste, cronyism and the 'Disneyfication' of exhibitions. Now Rapley, currently head of the British Antarctic Survey and a passionate believer [not a real scientist, in other words] in man's influence on climate, is set to take charge of the museum, one of Britain's most challenging institutions, where strict academic requirements must be met while competing with Legoland and Disneyland to attract visitors. Only by tackling the issues of the day can he succeed, Rapley said.
Hence his urging that we deal with overpopulation, a call of wide public interest and one that reflects the contents of the recent report by the Optimum Population Trust, which called for each couple in Britain to be limited to having two children each. 'A voluntary stop-at-two guideline should be adopted for couples in the UK who want to adopt greener lifestyles,' it stated.
The interest of Rapley, 60, in this subject stems directly from his climatic concerns. He sits near the extreme end of scientific views about global warming. He fears our planet faces a very hot and uncomfortable future. This belief puts him opposite climate-change deniers, about whom Rapley is generally vitriolic. He described the recent Channel 4 programme The Great Global Warming Swindle as 'a tissue of lies' while individual deniers, like Dominic Lawson, are dismissed in unexpectedly terse, Anglo-Saxon terms.
'As to my job at the Science Museum, my remit is very simple,' Rapley said. 'It is to make it the most advanced museum in the world. I will only be able to do that by addressing the key issues in science today and the most important of these is climate change and energy policy. However, there are topics like stem cell science and genomics that are set to have enormous impact and which will have to be tackled in detail.'
Rapley is passionate about making displays and instruments far more accessible. 'If you look at the Science Museum's great engine hall, there are wonderful machines on display but the accompanying explanations are quite often above most people's heads. Most children today probably don't realise these machines run on heat and water, but that is never mentioned. We need different explanations for different levels of understanding: the six-year-old, the 60-year-old, the PhD student. At the same time, there is no point having a few touch-screens about the place. People can only use them one at a time. One idea would be to send free texts to visitors' mobile phones, according to their needs, as they stand in front of displays. Just about everyone has a mobile phone, after all.'
The Oxford-educated physicist earned his spurs as a scientist who built instruments for space probes, such as X-ray detectors for the international Solar Maximum Mission launched in 1980. He went on to work at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory using satellite radar scanners to study the Earth and in particular Antarctica. 'All sorts of environmental issues lead to the Antarctic: sea-level rise, ozone depletion, atmospheric warming,' added Rapley, who is married with two daughters. In 1997, he was appointed head of the British Antarctic Survey and has worked there ever since.
As to key influences, Rapley points to an English teacher at his old school, King Edward's School, Bath, who introduced him to the works of Conan Doyle. 'I learned the joys of deduction from Sherlock Holmes and they stood me in good stead for the rest of my life. They got me to the Science Museum, in effect.'
Source
More straight talk from Bolton
When John Bolton left the United Nations, some of the fun went out of the multi-storey talking shop. No longer was the walrus-moustached rightwinger there to cast barbs at the silver-tongued bureaucrats who took pride in peddling compromises, turned a blind eye to corrupt practices and humoured dictators - the very essence of diplomacy, some might say.
Happily, Gordon Brown's elevation of Mark Malloch Brown to be his minister for Africa, Asia and the UN, a lofty perch from which the newly minted peer will attend cabinet meetings and play the "wise eminence" to young David Miliband at the Foreign Office, has revived one of the most entertaining transatlantic grudge matches of recent years. If the hawkish former US ambassador to the UN is from Mars, the flexible former UN deputy secretary-general is from Venus....
Malloch Brown, Bolton points out, was "simply saying the sort of thing he used to say lurking behind closed doors in the United Nations", where diplomats have perfected the art of "speaking with four or five faces". It is important, he suggests, for the United States to "know exactly where the Brown government is going instead of skulking around the hallways".
"If the Brown government wants to be more European than Atlanticist, let's hear it. If they would rather not have a special relationship, let's hear it." And then comes the zinger: "If they want to be a part of Europe in the same way as Belgium and Luxembourg, let's hear it." Bolton believes Britain must face the question: "Do you want to be an independent country or a county in a big Europe?" The way he tells it is guaranteed to offend our national pride, but you can't say he hasn't warned us. "If Britain wants to be subsumed into the European soup, the United States will have to react accordingly - and we will, make no mistake." ....
Officials on both sides of the Atlantic believe that Iran presents the greatest threat of disagreement between Brown's Britain and America - not Iraq, where plans for a drawdown of British troops were agreed long ago with Tony Blair. Although the balance of power between Dick Cheney, the bellicose vice-president, and the dovish Pentagon and State Department is more volatile than it used to be, some senior officials are convinced that Bush is determined to strike Iran's nuclear facilities before he leaves office. "I hope so," says Bolton, unabashed. "I don't regard the use of military force as attractive, but if the choice is a nuclear-armed Iran, there is no question that you have to come down on the side of force."
Bolton believes the "blind persistence" of diplomacy through the EU3 nations of Britain, France and Germany has merely strengthened Iran's hand. "What will it take to convince Europe the policy has failed? If we wait till they get a bomb, it will be too late."
More here
Testing defended in Britain
The new Children, Schools and Families Secretary set himself on a collision course with the teaching establishment yesterday by pledging that national testing and school league tables were here to stay. Despite growing pressure from the Government's own examinations regulator and the majority of the teaching profession about overtesting in schools, Ed Balls said that "testing and the publication of results" were the only way to ensure accountability. "It enables us to be able to see as policymakers what is working, who is not performing well and, in the extremes, being able to tackle poor performance," he told The Times. It was necessary also, he said, to help parents to judge the performance of their child's school.
Mr Balls's comments will disappoint the main teaching unions, as well as the professional body, the General Teaching Council. All complain that, far from raising standards, overtesting encourages a narrow curriculum, alienating students from learning and increasing their anxiety.
Children in England typically sit 70 tests and exams in their school careers and are the most tested in the world. Despite this, Britain is near the bottom of international league tables for the number of students leaving school with valuable qualifications.
Critics of testing include Ken Boston, head of the examinations regulator, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, who has argued that national tests for children aged 7, 11 and 14 should be replaced by the random testing of a sample of pupils and teacher assessments.
Mr Balls's opposition to this approach will also distance the Government from the Conservative Party, which has promised "fewer but tougher" tests and the dropping of Key Stage 3 tests at 14. In his first newspaper interview since he was appointed three weeks ago, Mr Balls also attacked Tory support for more streaming and the promise made by the Conservative leader, David Cameron, for a "grammar stream" in every comprehensive.
Mr Balls stopped short of banning streaming, which involves separating children into groups according to overall ability and teaching them in the same class for all subjects, arguing that individual head teachers know what works best in their own schools. But he emphasised that it was "backward-looking and divisive", imposing an arbitrary judgment on children's intelligence and ignoring individual talents. He said that he would rather see a greater use of setting, where children are separated into ability groups for individual subjects. "I do not find anybody sensible advocating streaming in schools. As somebody who went through streaming myself through secondary school I saw how deeply socially divisive it was," he said.
Mr Balls said that he would be making a series of impromptu visits to schools to spend time with teachers and pupils, who would not be informed who he was. He made his first such visit on Monday, when he spent the day at Banbury School in Oxfordshire, having informed only the head, the deputy and two senior staff members of his intention to visit. He arrived on foot, having asked his driver to drop him some distance from the school and was introduced to teachers and pupils as "a visitor".
He said that there was an old-fashioned view that you either focused on the welfare of the child or drove up standards in the classroom. His visit to Banbury had shown him that this was a false choice. "You can only drive up standards if you are actually focusing on the whole child, tracking their learning on an individual basis, but also knowing that if they aren't ready to learn because they are not sleeping or have difficulties at home, it's not possible for them to do well," he said.
He was determined to tackle the "achievement gap" in society, emphasising the importance of closer cooperation between education, health and social care services for children. "There are children in the same borough, on the same streets sometimes, and even going to the same schools, who have radically different experiences, shaped by family income and family environment, by poor health. The scandal is not England v Sweden, but Blackbird Leys v Headington. It's Harehills v Roundhay. It is North Kensington v South Kensington," he said.
Mr Balls said that more than 400 city academies could be set up, but insisted that they should become part of the "mainstream" and work more closely with nearby schools. The man who has spent most of his political life advising or working for Gordon Brown admitted that he felt "a bit liberated" at being outside the Treasury at last and declared himself ready to argue hard with his former colleagues for cash. Acknowledging that plans for a more flexible national curriculum would place a heavy burden on teachers and head teachers, he said that he would welcome the appointment of head teachers from outside the teaching profession.
Source
The BBC executive board gathered for its regular meeting last Tuesday morning for coffee, biscuits and meltdown. The previous evening, at 5pm, the deadline had passed for producers to come forward confessing, in a spirit of openness and honesty, to programmes they had made that had misled the public in some way. The invitation for them so to do had been extended by both Jana Bennett, the BBC's director of vision and an executive board member, and Jenny Abramsky, the BBC's director of audio and music. They, and other BBC chiefs, were giving staff a chance to come clean after revelations that a trailer for a programme about the Queen had been less than truthful with viewers, and that the corporation had also been fined 50,000 pounds for faking a Blue Peter competition.
Much to the apparent surprise of Bennett and Abramsky, two experienced and highly respected corporation bureaucrats, a procession of contrite and nervous producers came forward to 'fess up. The public, it seemed, had been deceived with unnerving consistency, particularly over programmes with phone-in polls and competitions. And on the corporation's most noble flagship enterprises, too. Comic Relief and Children in Need, for example. "We just sat there absolutely stunned," one executive board member told me, "shocked beyond belief. Nobody had any idea that this was going on on such a scale."
Not even Bennett and Abramsky, when they asked for producers to come forward? "Nobody. Nobody at all. And we had the very powerful sense that there was a lot more to come. And we thought this time no excuses, something really has to be done."
In the short term this might mean the ceremonial defenestration, for the benefit of a baying Fleet Street and an angry public, of some high-ranking executive. Bennett perhaps, even though she is one of the corporation's most talented and savvy apparatchiks? "But if Jana, why not Mark [Thompson, the director-general]? He is about as remote in the hierarchy from what went on as she is."
The feeling within the upper echelons of the BBC is that the sacrifice of a senior figure would be a capitulation too far to critics, although how far that view is shared lower down is a moot point. There is a certain glee and schaden-freude in some parts of the corporation, long dismayed at the grubby and antiReithian business of chasing the ratings with lowest common denominator broadcasting. Either way, all those I spoke to believe the BBC needs a change of culture, that it needs to decide what it is there for and why we should continue to pay for its existence, compulsorily and on pain of imprisonment if we don't fork out.
"Why are we doing these phone-in polls?" said the executive board member. "In what possible sense are they public service broadcasting? "The programme makers tell you that it's an invaluable way of reaching the difficult-to-get C2D audience. But we need to reach them in different, cleverer ways. "The BBC has always been very good at reaching middle-class, Old Etonian audiences; in fact it has whole channels just for them. But it doesn't know how to attract the white working class, because nobody from the white working class works for it. Phone-in polls are an easy and unacceptable answer. They've been suspended now; there's absolutely no reason why they should ever start again."
According to Roger Graef, a leading independent producer, the scams and manipulations have been threatening to erupt for some time. "It was lurking under the surface," he says, "but there were more and more people coming to my company literally bursting into tears and saying, `I don't want to do this to people any more'. But they wouldn't go public because they were worried they'd never get another job."
A senior BBC journalist put it even more bluntly. "The BBC has to stop trying to get in the f****** gutter with all the other tawdry channels. When you start chasing ratings and using the foul marketing language of City spivs, it's inevitable what will happen." AH, but the trouble is, if the BBC doesn't get into the gutter it may lose its raison d'etre anyway. For the past 60 years or so the BBC has managed to straddle two poles - universality and public service - and thus justify the licence fee. But it is finding it increasingly difficult to do so.
Never mind all this stuff about a new, imported culture whereby production teams subsist under intense pressure on short-term contracts and are not imbued with the BBC ethos, such as it is. That may be in the mix somewhere, but it is not the crucial point. It is about why the BBC exists at all and where it locates itself in the future. And each way the corporation turns it finds a howl of complaint. When it attempts to achieve universality by diversifying in order to serve a specialist audience and dreams up such channels as BBC4 (audience share: 0.4%) and BBC3 (audience share: 1.3%) it is accused of spreading itself far too thinly and as a result splurging huge amounts of licence-payers' money on a vanishingly small audience. Indeed, you might wonder why there is a need for both BBC2 and BBC4 to exist as separate entities when their remits are more or less identical.
Those who accuse the BBC of doing too much, and sacrificing quality as a consequence, were given plenty of ammunition by the current fiasco: at least one of the programmes that rigged its phone-in competition did so because nobody from the audience phoned in. They were broadcasting to an audience of close to zero.
On the other hand, when the BBC attempts to fulfil its charter by providing top-quality mainstream entertainment for a mass audience, the critics attack it for trying to compete with the commercial sector in chasing ratings and paying too much money for household names. Take the Jonathan Ross contract as an example. "The BBC was burbling with happiness because it had got Jonathan Ross for `only' 18m pounds when he had asked for 24m," the senior BBC journalist remarked with some derision. "He draws only about 3m viewers every week - for which he is paid almost eight times the entire yearly budget for a programme like The World Tonight. How can that possibly be justified?"
Privately quite a few BBC executives admit that the Ross contract was a misjudgment, politically, morally and practically. One told me it had cost the BBC "a couple of hundred million quid" when it came to charter renewal because the politicians were ill-disposed towards an organisation that could be so cavalier with licence-payers' money. Others argue that the BBC should not compete with commercial organisations because the BBC is simply inept at doing so, and they use the Ross contract as a case in point. For the executive board member it's a more straightforward calculation. "If there's a commercial organisation that wants to pay Jonathan Ross 18m and thinks it can draw an audience that justifies the salary, then let them do it. It's not for the BBC. Exactly the same applies to phone-in polls."
WHAT should be done? The BBC provided an easy sacrificial victim by "suspending" all commissions from RDF, the independent production company which supplied the original shots of Her Majesty. But the firm says that they e-mailed the BBC three times asking to see its edit before transmission. Someone in the BBC jumped to the conclusion that their trail showed the Queen storming out. At no time did they ask RDF whether this actually happened.
The Beeb's director-general has also ordered that all 15,000 staffers and a good few thousand independent producers must be inculcated in the ethos of the corporation through new training schemes. You might argue that it would be prudent for the BBC to decide exactly what its ethos is before embarking on such a laudable process. At the moment it is not remotely clear. It is vague about the extent to which it should be competing with the commercial channels, and even more vague about the notion of what constitutes its "core broadcasting".
"You know, whenever I ask them about some new programme or channel they're planning," the executive board member told me, laughing, "they always tell me that it is core broadcasting. And I say to them, `Right, okay, well give me an example of something the BBC does which is peripheral broadcasting'. They can't come up with an answer." It is this lack of focus that the BBC management needs to address - as well as the simple fact of not misleading viewers. At present the BBC's default position is that everything it does is always for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds. But if the BBC is still to be with us in 10 years, with a statutory licence fee, it needs not only the trust of its captive audience but a far clearer idea of what it stands for.
Source
More BBC fraud
A SENIOR executive at Panorama is to be questioned by police over allegations that the BBC's flagship current affairs programme broke the law by using forged documents to target one of Britain's richest doctors. Detectives are expected to interview Frank Simmonds, the programme's deputy editor, under caution, following claims that Panorama used fake referral letters from GPs to send undercover reporters into clinics run by Mohamed Taranissi, a leading IVF expert. Officers from Scotland Yard want to question Simmonds in relation to the Forgery and Counterfeiting Act, according to an informed source. Using a "false instrument" under the Act carries a maximum jail sentence of 10 years.
The BBC is already facing a crisis of trust after it admitted deceiving viewers by faking the results of phone-in competitions in shows such as Comic Relief and Children in Need. The broadcaster has also been forced to apologise to the Queen after wrongly claiming that she stormed out of a royal photoshoot. The police inquiry into Panorama, however, raises fresh questions about the BBC's core journalism, and comes as Mark Byford, the deputy director-general, faces a grilling by MPs on Tuesday.
Taranissi, 52, whose wealth is estimated at 38m pounds, is suing Panorama for libel, claiming the programme made defamatory allegations about his techniques and has caused lasting damage to his professional reputation. The BBC could face a bill for more than 1m pounds in compensation and legal costs if it loses the case.
The Panorama investigation into Taranissi, broadcast in January, claimed that one of his central London clinics, the Assisted Reproduction and Gynaecology Centre (ARGC), offered "unnecessary and unproven" treatment to an undercover reporter posing as a patient. The show alleged that a 26-year-old journalist was offered IVF treatment costing thousands of pounds despite neither her nor her partner, having any history of fertility problems. It also claimed that Taranissi was running a second clinic without a licence and was sending his older and harder-to-treat patients there to maintain a high success rate at the ARGC.
Taranissi, an Egyptian who has helped mothers give birth to 2,300 babies in seven years, denies any wrongdoing. His lawyers claim that Panorama researchers forged at least four referral letters from nonexistent GPs to gain access to his clinics. Police took a statement from Taranissi earlier this year and now want to question Simmonds, who oversaw the IVF sting, about the letters. The BBC claims they were "justified" in the context of the undercover probe.
A BBC spokesman said: "We are more than happy to cooperate with the police. They indicated at the outset that they would want to speak to Mr Simmonds." A spokesman for the Yard said: " Inquiries are still ongoing."
Source
Greenies sow food confusion
A Brit tries to take it all seriously
There's this organic carrot, and it's doing my head in. It's a nice carrot, as carrots go: fat, orange, with feathery green tufts on top. It has lived a blameless life in a field of joy, innocent of pesticides and artificial fertilisers. And now, here it is in the supermarket, rooting me on to take it home. Only, here's the thing: the carrot is from Israel. That's nearly 2,500 miles away. If I buy it, I will take on its carbon footprint, garnishing every mouthful with the greenhouse gas that it has splurged into the atmosphere to be here today. Can I live with that? Does the carrot's organic worthiness trump the fact that it is has amassed more air miles than an MP on an international fact-finding mission? Or should I let it rot for thoughtlessly contributing to the destruction of the planet?
You see my problem. I'm food confused. And not just about vegetables. Fruit, meat, dairy - these days, everything is fraught with ethical complications. If I tried to follow all of them, I'd end up an oxygenarian - one of those people who eat nothing but air. The "good" food choices have proliferated like salmonella in an Edwina Currie egg - organic, Fairtrade, locally grown, free range, boutique, the Leaf mark, Red Tractor, Freedom Food, farm assured - some important, others just marketing spin. How am I meant to know what comes first in the pecking order?
Some choices are straightforward. Processed food clearly puts you on the fast track to hell. As for animal welfare, I won't eat anything that hasn't had weekly spa treatments. But organic? I used to think it was a no-brainer: good for the planet (no energy wasted on fertilisers and pesticides); good for the soil (it works with nature, rather than against it); good for the creatures that inhabit furrow and field (livestock, wildlife, farmers). It is also, arguably, good for us.
But when food miles enter the equation, organic quickly loses its halo. Getting an organic New Zealand apple from the tree to your lunchbox releases 235 times as much carbon as it saves. How depressing is that? And that's before you even think about seasonality. We shouldn't be eating apples in June, but we have turned luxuries into necessities, demanding strawberries in midwinter and nectarines in spring.
Of course, there are some things (citrus fruit, pineapples, bananas) that don't grow in Britain, and I would be the last to suggest we could do without them. I'm also not sure I could survive without spices, olives, tea and coffee. But there have to be limits, such as not flying blueberries from Chile in December. And where do food miles and seasonality leave fair trade? Supporting Ethiopian coffee growers is one thing, but should we really be importing pears from South Africa, however benevolent our intentions?
Home-grown is no less problem-filled: your Isle of Wight tomatoes were probably grown in a greenhouse that burns more energy than a Chinese power station, and that supermarket potato has been taken by lorry to the other end of the country to be washed and packed. Sometimes it seems as if supermarkets set traps for unwary ecoshoppers. You know those fruit and veg packets with a picture of a happy supplier on the front - farmer Ted from Hampshire with his organic fruit? Turns out they aren't always from his farm at all. Sometimes they aren't even from his country.
Still, at least you know where you are with meat and dairy. Stick to organic and free range, and you can't go wrong. Except that farm animals happen to be huge contributors to global warming. A field of farting cows produces enough centrally heated methane to drown out the sound of the icecaps crumbling. Then there's all the packaging, the energy-hungry refrigeration, the distance between farm, slaughterhouse and supermarket depot.
A brilliant book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, by the American journalist Michael Pollan, poses this dilemma: "When you can eat everything, what do you choose to eat?" Pollan works his way along the different food chains in the States, from the longest (which stretches from the cornfields of the Midwest through intensive cattle farming and processing plants to the fast-food outlets that blight every town and city in the country) to the shortest - a modern hunter-gathering mission in northern California, on which he shoots his own wild boar, harvests morels in the hills, picks cherries from the streets of San Francisco and makes bread with wild yeast captured from the air. In between, there is "big" organic - operations such as the American organic supermarket Whole Foods Market - and small-scale organic, local growers supplying local people and local businesses. The hunter-gathering wins hands down, although Pollan admits it's not that practical on a daily basis. Local organic comes a close second.
Pollan has thought about what he eats; he has looked at the contradictions and worked out what matters. It's probably pretty similar to what most of us want - food that tastes good and makes us happy, without troubling either our conscience or our health. The difference is that he has done something about it. We can blame the supermarkets and producers, but ultimately the responsibility for what we eat lies with us. The choices are confusing, and there is no perfect solution. But the worst thing we can do is do nothing.
There is a movement in America called the Locavores - people who eat, wherever possible, a diet harvested within a 100-mile radius (in cities, we're talking farmers' markets, allotments, small shops that prioritise local producers). Locavores have a mantra: "If not locally produced, then organic. If not organic, then family farm. If not family farm, then local business. If not local business, then fair trade." I would add a line at the beginning: "If not local organic, then locally produced." But I've decided the Locavore code of priorities is going to be my way through the food confusion. That Israeli carrot will just have to go home with someone else.
Source
Greenie misanthropy on display again
Hatred of people is a major driving force among Greenies -- which is why they have been trying to stop people having babies from long before the global warming scare popped up. See e.g. here
The new head of the Science Museum has an uncompromising view about how global warming should be dealt with: get rid of a few billion people. Chris Rapley, who takes up his post on September 1, is not afraid of offending. 'I am not advocating genocide,' said Rapley. 'What I am saying is that if we invest in ways to reduce the birthrate - by improving contraception, education and healthcare - we will stop the world's population reaching its current estimated limit of between eight and 10 billion.
'That in turn will mean less carbon dioxide is being pumped into the atmosphere because there will be fewer people to drive cars and use electricity. The crucial point is that to achieve this goal you would only have to spend a fraction of the money that will be needed to bring about technological fixes, new nuclear power plants or renewable energy plants. However, everyone has decided, quietly, to ignore the issue.'
Such arguments give an indication of the priorities of the new Science Museum chief, an office that has been vacant since 2005 when Lindsay Sharp abruptly left the 150,000 pound post following rows about financial waste, cronyism and the 'Disneyfication' of exhibitions. Now Rapley, currently head of the British Antarctic Survey and a passionate believer [not a real scientist, in other words] in man's influence on climate, is set to take charge of the museum, one of Britain's most challenging institutions, where strict academic requirements must be met while competing with Legoland and Disneyland to attract visitors. Only by tackling the issues of the day can he succeed, Rapley said.
Hence his urging that we deal with overpopulation, a call of wide public interest and one that reflects the contents of the recent report by the Optimum Population Trust, which called for each couple in Britain to be limited to having two children each. 'A voluntary stop-at-two guideline should be adopted for couples in the UK who want to adopt greener lifestyles,' it stated.
The interest of Rapley, 60, in this subject stems directly from his climatic concerns. He sits near the extreme end of scientific views about global warming. He fears our planet faces a very hot and uncomfortable future. This belief puts him opposite climate-change deniers, about whom Rapley is generally vitriolic. He described the recent Channel 4 programme The Great Global Warming Swindle as 'a tissue of lies' while individual deniers, like Dominic Lawson, are dismissed in unexpectedly terse, Anglo-Saxon terms.
'As to my job at the Science Museum, my remit is very simple,' Rapley said. 'It is to make it the most advanced museum in the world. I will only be able to do that by addressing the key issues in science today and the most important of these is climate change and energy policy. However, there are topics like stem cell science and genomics that are set to have enormous impact and which will have to be tackled in detail.'
Rapley is passionate about making displays and instruments far more accessible. 'If you look at the Science Museum's great engine hall, there are wonderful machines on display but the accompanying explanations are quite often above most people's heads. Most children today probably don't realise these machines run on heat and water, but that is never mentioned. We need different explanations for different levels of understanding: the six-year-old, the 60-year-old, the PhD student. At the same time, there is no point having a few touch-screens about the place. People can only use them one at a time. One idea would be to send free texts to visitors' mobile phones, according to their needs, as they stand in front of displays. Just about everyone has a mobile phone, after all.'
The Oxford-educated physicist earned his spurs as a scientist who built instruments for space probes, such as X-ray detectors for the international Solar Maximum Mission launched in 1980. He went on to work at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory using satellite radar scanners to study the Earth and in particular Antarctica. 'All sorts of environmental issues lead to the Antarctic: sea-level rise, ozone depletion, atmospheric warming,' added Rapley, who is married with two daughters. In 1997, he was appointed head of the British Antarctic Survey and has worked there ever since.
As to key influences, Rapley points to an English teacher at his old school, King Edward's School, Bath, who introduced him to the works of Conan Doyle. 'I learned the joys of deduction from Sherlock Holmes and they stood me in good stead for the rest of my life. They got me to the Science Museum, in effect.'
Source
More straight talk from Bolton
When John Bolton left the United Nations, some of the fun went out of the multi-storey talking shop. No longer was the walrus-moustached rightwinger there to cast barbs at the silver-tongued bureaucrats who took pride in peddling compromises, turned a blind eye to corrupt practices and humoured dictators - the very essence of diplomacy, some might say.
Happily, Gordon Brown's elevation of Mark Malloch Brown to be his minister for Africa, Asia and the UN, a lofty perch from which the newly minted peer will attend cabinet meetings and play the "wise eminence" to young David Miliband at the Foreign Office, has revived one of the most entertaining transatlantic grudge matches of recent years. If the hawkish former US ambassador to the UN is from Mars, the flexible former UN deputy secretary-general is from Venus....
Malloch Brown, Bolton points out, was "simply saying the sort of thing he used to say lurking behind closed doors in the United Nations", where diplomats have perfected the art of "speaking with four or five faces". It is important, he suggests, for the United States to "know exactly where the Brown government is going instead of skulking around the hallways".
"If the Brown government wants to be more European than Atlanticist, let's hear it. If they would rather not have a special relationship, let's hear it." And then comes the zinger: "If they want to be a part of Europe in the same way as Belgium and Luxembourg, let's hear it." Bolton believes Britain must face the question: "Do you want to be an independent country or a county in a big Europe?" The way he tells it is guaranteed to offend our national pride, but you can't say he hasn't warned us. "If Britain wants to be subsumed into the European soup, the United States will have to react accordingly - and we will, make no mistake." ....
Officials on both sides of the Atlantic believe that Iran presents the greatest threat of disagreement between Brown's Britain and America - not Iraq, where plans for a drawdown of British troops were agreed long ago with Tony Blair. Although the balance of power between Dick Cheney, the bellicose vice-president, and the dovish Pentagon and State Department is more volatile than it used to be, some senior officials are convinced that Bush is determined to strike Iran's nuclear facilities before he leaves office. "I hope so," says Bolton, unabashed. "I don't regard the use of military force as attractive, but if the choice is a nuclear-armed Iran, there is no question that you have to come down on the side of force."
Bolton believes the "blind persistence" of diplomacy through the EU3 nations of Britain, France and Germany has merely strengthened Iran's hand. "What will it take to convince Europe the policy has failed? If we wait till they get a bomb, it will be too late."
More here
Testing defended in Britain
The new Children, Schools and Families Secretary set himself on a collision course with the teaching establishment yesterday by pledging that national testing and school league tables were here to stay. Despite growing pressure from the Government's own examinations regulator and the majority of the teaching profession about overtesting in schools, Ed Balls said that "testing and the publication of results" were the only way to ensure accountability. "It enables us to be able to see as policymakers what is working, who is not performing well and, in the extremes, being able to tackle poor performance," he told The Times. It was necessary also, he said, to help parents to judge the performance of their child's school.
Mr Balls's comments will disappoint the main teaching unions, as well as the professional body, the General Teaching Council. All complain that, far from raising standards, overtesting encourages a narrow curriculum, alienating students from learning and increasing their anxiety.
Children in England typically sit 70 tests and exams in their school careers and are the most tested in the world. Despite this, Britain is near the bottom of international league tables for the number of students leaving school with valuable qualifications.
Critics of testing include Ken Boston, head of the examinations regulator, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, who has argued that national tests for children aged 7, 11 and 14 should be replaced by the random testing of a sample of pupils and teacher assessments.
Mr Balls's opposition to this approach will also distance the Government from the Conservative Party, which has promised "fewer but tougher" tests and the dropping of Key Stage 3 tests at 14. In his first newspaper interview since he was appointed three weeks ago, Mr Balls also attacked Tory support for more streaming and the promise made by the Conservative leader, David Cameron, for a "grammar stream" in every comprehensive.
Mr Balls stopped short of banning streaming, which involves separating children into groups according to overall ability and teaching them in the same class for all subjects, arguing that individual head teachers know what works best in their own schools. But he emphasised that it was "backward-looking and divisive", imposing an arbitrary judgment on children's intelligence and ignoring individual talents. He said that he would rather see a greater use of setting, where children are separated into ability groups for individual subjects. "I do not find anybody sensible advocating streaming in schools. As somebody who went through streaming myself through secondary school I saw how deeply socially divisive it was," he said.
Mr Balls said that he would be making a series of impromptu visits to schools to spend time with teachers and pupils, who would not be informed who he was. He made his first such visit on Monday, when he spent the day at Banbury School in Oxfordshire, having informed only the head, the deputy and two senior staff members of his intention to visit. He arrived on foot, having asked his driver to drop him some distance from the school and was introduced to teachers and pupils as "a visitor".
He said that there was an old-fashioned view that you either focused on the welfare of the child or drove up standards in the classroom. His visit to Banbury had shown him that this was a false choice. "You can only drive up standards if you are actually focusing on the whole child, tracking their learning on an individual basis, but also knowing that if they aren't ready to learn because they are not sleeping or have difficulties at home, it's not possible for them to do well," he said.
He was determined to tackle the "achievement gap" in society, emphasising the importance of closer cooperation between education, health and social care services for children. "There are children in the same borough, on the same streets sometimes, and even going to the same schools, who have radically different experiences, shaped by family income and family environment, by poor health. The scandal is not England v Sweden, but Blackbird Leys v Headington. It's Harehills v Roundhay. It is North Kensington v South Kensington," he said.
Mr Balls said that more than 400 city academies could be set up, but insisted that they should become part of the "mainstream" and work more closely with nearby schools. The man who has spent most of his political life advising or working for Gordon Brown admitted that he felt "a bit liberated" at being outside the Treasury at last and declared himself ready to argue hard with his former colleagues for cash. Acknowledging that plans for a more flexible national curriculum would place a heavy burden on teachers and head teachers, he said that he would welcome the appointment of head teachers from outside the teaching profession.
Source
Sunday, July 22, 2007
British woman dies waiting for brain scans
A high-flying television producer died from a suspected epileptic fit while waiting for vital brain scans on the NHS. Laura Price, 30, who worked on shows such as Big Brother and Strictly Come Dancing, was found dead in her home just hours after she had been discharged from casualty.
The evening before she died, Miss Price, from Notting Hill, west London, had begged a junior A&E doctor for anti-seizure drugs but had been told they could only be prescribed by a neurologist.
Two days earlier she had visited a specialist at Charing Cross hospital and was told she would have to wait six weeks for a brain scan. She had felt "concerned and afraid" at having to wait that length of time for a test before being treated for a recurrence of childhood epilepsy, Westminster coroner's court heard.
She had not had a seizure for more than 10 years, but after a series of "strange episodes", including a numb face and flashing lights in her vision, she had visited her GP and was referred to the specialist.
On the night before she died Miss Price entered her flatmate Sarah Jackson's room in a confused state. Miss Jackson told the court: "I was very concerned and called an ambulance." Once at Charing Cross hospital Miss Price begged a doctor for drugs. Dr Christina Coppel, who treated her, told the inquest it would have been against hospital guidelines to prescribe them without a neurologist.
At lunchtime the next day Miss Price was found lying on the floor and an ambulance pronounced her dead at the scene. A post mortem examination concluded it was a sudden unexpected death in epilepsy. Dr Paul Knapman, the coroner, returned a verdict of natural causes. Yesterday, her parents said they were considering legal action against Hammersmith Hospitals NHS Trust.
Source
Up against the warming zealots
Martin Durkin says his British documentary rejecting the idea of human-caused global warming has survived last week's roasting by Australia's public broadcaster
WHEN I agreed to make The Great Global Warming Swindle, I was warned a middle-class fatwa would be placed on my head. So I wasn't shocked that the film was attacked on the same night it was broadcast on ABC television last week, although I was impressed at the vehemence of the attack. I was more surprised, and delighted, by the response of the Australian public.
The ABC studio assault, led by Tony Jones, was so vitriolic it appears to have backfired. We have been inundated with messages of support, and the ABC, I am told, has been flooded with complaints. I have been trying to understand why.
First, the ferocity of the attack, I think, revealed the intolerance and defensiveness of the global warming camp. Why were Jones and co expending such energy and resources attacking one documentary? We are told the global warming theory is robust. They say you'd have to be off your chump to disagree. We have been assured for years, in countless news broadcasts and column inches, that it's definitely true. So why bother to stamp so aggressively on the one foolish documentary-maker - who clearly must be as mad as a snake - who steps out of line? I think viewers may also have wondered (reasonably) why the theory of global warming has not been subjected to this barrage of critical scrutiny by the media. After all, it's the theory of global warming, not my foolish little film, that is turning public and corporate policy on its head.
The apparent unwillingness of Jones and others at the ABC to give airtime to a counterargument, the tactics used to minimise the ostensible damage done by the film, the evident animosity towards those who questioned global warming: all of this served to give viewers a glimpse of what it was like for scientists who dared to disagree with the hallowed doctrine.
Why are the global warmers so zealous? After a year of arguing with people about this, I am convinced that it's because global warming is first and foremost a political theory. It is an expression of a whole middle-class political world view. This view is summed up in the oft-repeated phrase "we consume too much". I have also come to the conclusion that this is code for "they consume too much". People who believe it tend also to think that exotic foreign places are being ruined because vulgar oiks can afford to go there in significant numbers, they hate plastic toys from factories and prefer wooden ones from craftsmen, and so on.
All this backward-looking bigotry has found perfect expression in the idea of man-made climate disaster. It has cohered a bunch of disparate reactionary prejudices (anti-car, anti-supermarkets, anti-globalisation) into a single unquestionable truth and cause. So when you have a dig at global warming, you commit a grievous breach of social etiquette. Among the chattering classes you're a leper.
But why are the supporters of global warming so defensive? After all, the middle classes are usually confident, bordering on smug. As I found when I examined the basic data, they have plenty to be defensive about. Billions of dollars of public money have been thrown at global warming, yet the hypothesis is crumbling around their ears.
To the utter dismay of the global warming lobby, the world does not appear to be getting warmer. According to their own figures (from the UN-linked Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), the temperature has been static or slightly declining since 1998. The satellite data confirms this. This is clearly awkward. The least one should expect of global warming is that the Earth should be getting warmer.
Then there's the ice-core data, the jewel in the crown of global warming theory. It shows there's a connection between carbon dioxide and temperature: see Al Gore's movie. But what Gore forgets to mention is that the connection is the wrong way around; temperature leads, CO2 follows.
Then there's the precious "hockey stick". This was the famous graph that purported to show global temperature flat-lining for 1000 years, then rising during the 19th and 20th centuries. It magicked away the Medieval warm period and made the recent warming look alarming, instead of just part of the general toing and froing of the Earth's climate. But then researchers took the computer program that produced the hockey stick graph and fed it random data. Bingo, out popped hockey stick shapes every time. (See the report by Edward Wegman of George Mason University in Virginia and others.) In a humiliating climb down, the IPCC has had to drop the hockey stick from its reports, though it can still be seen in Gore's movie.
And finally, there are those pesky satellites. If greenhouse gases were the cause of warming, then the rate of warming should have been greater, higher up in the Earth's atmosphere (the bit known as the troposphere). But all the satellite and balloon data says the exact opposite. In other words, the best observational data we have flatly contradicts the whole bally idea of man-made climate change.
They concede that CO2 cannot have caused the warming at the beginning of the 20th century, which was greater and steeper than the recent warming. They can't explain the cooling from 1940 to the mid-'70s. What are they left with? Some mild warming in the '80s and '90s that does not appear to have been caused by greenhouse gases. The whole damned theory is in tatters. No wonder they're defensive.
The man-made global warming parade, on one level, has been a phenomenal success. There isn't a political party or important public body or large corporation that doesn't feel compelled to pay lip service. There are scientists and journalists (a surprising number) who have built careers championing the cause. There's more money going into global warming research than there is chasing a cure for cancer. Many important people and institutions have staked their reputations on it. There's a lot riding on this theory. And it has bugger-all to do with sea levels. That is why the warmers greeted my film with red glowing eyes.
Last week on the ABC they closed ranks. They were not interested in a genuine debate. They wanted to shut it down. And thousands of wonderful, sane, bolshie Australian viewers saw right through it. God bless Australia. The DVD will be out soon.
Source
A high-flying television producer died from a suspected epileptic fit while waiting for vital brain scans on the NHS. Laura Price, 30, who worked on shows such as Big Brother and Strictly Come Dancing, was found dead in her home just hours after she had been discharged from casualty.
The evening before she died, Miss Price, from Notting Hill, west London, had begged a junior A&E doctor for anti-seizure drugs but had been told they could only be prescribed by a neurologist.
Two days earlier she had visited a specialist at Charing Cross hospital and was told she would have to wait six weeks for a brain scan. She had felt "concerned and afraid" at having to wait that length of time for a test before being treated for a recurrence of childhood epilepsy, Westminster coroner's court heard.
She had not had a seizure for more than 10 years, but after a series of "strange episodes", including a numb face and flashing lights in her vision, she had visited her GP and was referred to the specialist.
On the night before she died Miss Price entered her flatmate Sarah Jackson's room in a confused state. Miss Jackson told the court: "I was very concerned and called an ambulance." Once at Charing Cross hospital Miss Price begged a doctor for drugs. Dr Christina Coppel, who treated her, told the inquest it would have been against hospital guidelines to prescribe them without a neurologist.
At lunchtime the next day Miss Price was found lying on the floor and an ambulance pronounced her dead at the scene. A post mortem examination concluded it was a sudden unexpected death in epilepsy. Dr Paul Knapman, the coroner, returned a verdict of natural causes. Yesterday, her parents said they were considering legal action against Hammersmith Hospitals NHS Trust.
Source
Up against the warming zealots
Martin Durkin says his British documentary rejecting the idea of human-caused global warming has survived last week's roasting by Australia's public broadcaster
WHEN I agreed to make The Great Global Warming Swindle, I was warned a middle-class fatwa would be placed on my head. So I wasn't shocked that the film was attacked on the same night it was broadcast on ABC television last week, although I was impressed at the vehemence of the attack. I was more surprised, and delighted, by the response of the Australian public.
The ABC studio assault, led by Tony Jones, was so vitriolic it appears to have backfired. We have been inundated with messages of support, and the ABC, I am told, has been flooded with complaints. I have been trying to understand why.
First, the ferocity of the attack, I think, revealed the intolerance and defensiveness of the global warming camp. Why were Jones and co expending such energy and resources attacking one documentary? We are told the global warming theory is robust. They say you'd have to be off your chump to disagree. We have been assured for years, in countless news broadcasts and column inches, that it's definitely true. So why bother to stamp so aggressively on the one foolish documentary-maker - who clearly must be as mad as a snake - who steps out of line? I think viewers may also have wondered (reasonably) why the theory of global warming has not been subjected to this barrage of critical scrutiny by the media. After all, it's the theory of global warming, not my foolish little film, that is turning public and corporate policy on its head.
The apparent unwillingness of Jones and others at the ABC to give airtime to a counterargument, the tactics used to minimise the ostensible damage done by the film, the evident animosity towards those who questioned global warming: all of this served to give viewers a glimpse of what it was like for scientists who dared to disagree with the hallowed doctrine.
Why are the global warmers so zealous? After a year of arguing with people about this, I am convinced that it's because global warming is first and foremost a political theory. It is an expression of a whole middle-class political world view. This view is summed up in the oft-repeated phrase "we consume too much". I have also come to the conclusion that this is code for "they consume too much". People who believe it tend also to think that exotic foreign places are being ruined because vulgar oiks can afford to go there in significant numbers, they hate plastic toys from factories and prefer wooden ones from craftsmen, and so on.
All this backward-looking bigotry has found perfect expression in the idea of man-made climate disaster. It has cohered a bunch of disparate reactionary prejudices (anti-car, anti-supermarkets, anti-globalisation) into a single unquestionable truth and cause. So when you have a dig at global warming, you commit a grievous breach of social etiquette. Among the chattering classes you're a leper.
But why are the supporters of global warming so defensive? After all, the middle classes are usually confident, bordering on smug. As I found when I examined the basic data, they have plenty to be defensive about. Billions of dollars of public money have been thrown at global warming, yet the hypothesis is crumbling around their ears.
To the utter dismay of the global warming lobby, the world does not appear to be getting warmer. According to their own figures (from the UN-linked Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), the temperature has been static or slightly declining since 1998. The satellite data confirms this. This is clearly awkward. The least one should expect of global warming is that the Earth should be getting warmer.
Then there's the ice-core data, the jewel in the crown of global warming theory. It shows there's a connection between carbon dioxide and temperature: see Al Gore's movie. But what Gore forgets to mention is that the connection is the wrong way around; temperature leads, CO2 follows.
Then there's the precious "hockey stick". This was the famous graph that purported to show global temperature flat-lining for 1000 years, then rising during the 19th and 20th centuries. It magicked away the Medieval warm period and made the recent warming look alarming, instead of just part of the general toing and froing of the Earth's climate. But then researchers took the computer program that produced the hockey stick graph and fed it random data. Bingo, out popped hockey stick shapes every time. (See the report by Edward Wegman of George Mason University in Virginia and others.) In a humiliating climb down, the IPCC has had to drop the hockey stick from its reports, though it can still be seen in Gore's movie.
And finally, there are those pesky satellites. If greenhouse gases were the cause of warming, then the rate of warming should have been greater, higher up in the Earth's atmosphere (the bit known as the troposphere). But all the satellite and balloon data says the exact opposite. In other words, the best observational data we have flatly contradicts the whole bally idea of man-made climate change.
They concede that CO2 cannot have caused the warming at the beginning of the 20th century, which was greater and steeper than the recent warming. They can't explain the cooling from 1940 to the mid-'70s. What are they left with? Some mild warming in the '80s and '90s that does not appear to have been caused by greenhouse gases. The whole damned theory is in tatters. No wonder they're defensive.
The man-made global warming parade, on one level, has been a phenomenal success. There isn't a political party or important public body or large corporation that doesn't feel compelled to pay lip service. There are scientists and journalists (a surprising number) who have built careers championing the cause. There's more money going into global warming research than there is chasing a cure for cancer. Many important people and institutions have staked their reputations on it. There's a lot riding on this theory. And it has bugger-all to do with sea levels. That is why the warmers greeted my film with red glowing eyes.
Last week on the ABC they closed ranks. They were not interested in a genuine debate. They wanted to shut it down. And thousands of wonderful, sane, bolshie Australian viewers saw right through it. God bless Australia. The DVD will be out soon.
Source
Saturday, July 21, 2007
A profound loss of culture in modern Britain
If even literary people don't recognize some of Britain's greatest literary work, what hope is there for the mass of the people even to know what they are missing? Education once transmitted a people's inherited culture. The only thing it transmits well now is Leftist propaganda
A frustrated author has confirmed what other unpublished writers have long suspected: even Jane Austen would have difficulty finding a book deal in the 21st Century. But what really astonished David Lassman was that only one of 18 publishers and literary agents recognised her work when it was submitted to them under a false name. Mr Lassman, 43, had spent months trying without success to find a publisher for his own novel Freedom's Temple. Out of frustration - and to test whether today's publishers could spot great literature - he retyped the opening chapters of three Austen classics: Pride and Prejudice, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.
He changed only the titles, the names of the characters and his own name - calling himself Alison Laydee, after Austen's early pseudonym "A Lady" - then waited for the offers to roll in. Instead he received yet another sheaf of rejection letters, including one from Penguin, which republished Pride and Prejudice last year, describing his plagarised chapters as "a really original and interesting read" but not right for Penguin. That was one of the gentler rejections. But Mr Lassman said: "Penguin neither requested to see the rest of the novel nor did they recognise a work they already publish.
"I wasn't surprised that the publishing process rejects people out of hand, but I was staggered that no one recognised the work. Here is one of the greatest writers that has lived, yet only one recipient recognised them as Austen's work. "At best their letters were mildly apologetic about declining the material and at worst completely indifferent to what they had in their possession. If major publishers can't recognise great literature, who knows what might be slipping through the net."
Mr Lassman concocted his plan after returning from the Greek island where he had been writing his own novel and found himself facing a brick wall. "I was having a hard time getting it published and I was chatting to friends about it, saying I wondered how Jane would have fared today. "Getting a novel accepted is very difficult unless you have an agent first, but I had no idea at the scale of rejection poor old Jane suffered."
The literary agency Christopher Little, which represents J.K. Rowling, regretted that it was "not confident of placing this material with a publisher". Jennifer Vale of Bloomsbury publishers turned down Northanger Abbey, renamed Susan, saying "I didn't feel the book was suited to our list."
The one publisher to recognise the deception was Alex Bowler, assistant editor at Jonathan Cape. His reply read: "Thank you for sending us the first two chapters of First Impressions; my first impression on reading these were ones of disbelief and mild annoyance, along with a moment's laughter. "I suggest you reach for your copy of Pride and Prejudice, which I'd guess lives in close proximity to your typewriter and make sure that your opening pages don't too closely mimic the book's opening. After all, there is such a thing as plagiarism and I'd hate for you to get in any kind of trouble with Jane Austen's estate."
Last night a spokeswoman for Penguin admitted that Mr Lassman's submission may not actually have been read. She said: "We don't take anything that is not agency-led, so I doubt the person would even have read it. I can't comment on this individual case but I don't think we have done anything bad." Neil Blair at Christopher Little said Mr Lassman had received a standard response. He said: "As you can imagine we get hundreds of submission each week - some from genuine writers or would-be writers, but also some from cranks. Our letter was a polite note declining representation and provided a standard response. "However, our internal notes did recognise similarities with existing published works and indeed there were even discussions about possible plagiarism. We chose an approach was designed to end the chain of communication with this person and not start a whole new one. Sadly, we have had experience of where accusations of plagiarism can lead to." Bloomsbury declined to comment.
Source
British Labor Party politician speaks for his voters
And gets condemned for it
A MERSEYSIDE Labour MP has broken ranks by becoming the first in the country to blame the failed bomb attacks in London and Glasgow on rising immigration into Britain. Outspoken Birkenhead member Frank Field said his constituents were angry when the Government told them to be "vigilant" following last month's aborted terror scares. He said the reality was that ministers had failed to be vigilant by letting in so many immigrants, some of whom had turned to terrorism,
The manager of Liverpool's Asylum Link charity last night branded Mr Field's comments as irresponsible and potentially dangerous, as did Adam Kelwick, a Muslim-based chaplain in Wavertree. And the head of Merseyside police's community relations team said multi-ethnic and faith groups across the region had been overwhelmingly receptive to pleas for vigilance.
Superintendent Rowland Moore described any comments which undermined public reassurance in the wake of the failed London and Glasgow attacks as "not helpful". During a Commons debate, Mr Field said: "In the statements of relief that the last bombing episode had not wrought the evil on innocent people that had been intended, Cabinet ministers told us to be vigilant. "The report back from my constituents in Birkenhead market was: `What a damned cheek that they should lecture us on vigilance!' "If the political class had been a little more vigilant in the past, and responded to their regular doubts and worries about the level of immigration, we might not, they said, be listening to such statements."
Some of the suspects arrested after bombs failed to go off in London city centre and at Glasgow Airport grew up in Iraq, Jordan, India and elsewhere. During the debate on immigration, Mr Field went on to say that the Home Secretary's failure to track people leaving Britain to go to terror camps abroad would "haunt her as time goes on". And he attacked the decision to grant free movement to workers from the poorer countries of Eastern Europe, when their living standards were so much lower. He warned: "The future of the European Union is an unsure one if we continue blindly to turn our eyes away from what is now a mass movement of people within Europe."
In response, immigration minister Liam Byrne accepted there was a "social impact" as well as an economic one and pointed to the new points-based work permit system that was being brought in. He also highlighted new government systems that he said would track the majority of migrants by 2009.
Last night, Adam Kelwick, a Muslim chaplain based in Wavertree, said: "To use this kind of language is irresponsible. "He's obviously got an agenda to push, targeting asylum-seekers and immigrants who themselves are extremely vulnerable. "They would far rather live in their own countries, if there was no interference with their daily lives.
Superintendent Rowland Moore, who heads Merseyside police's community relations team, said in response to Mr Field's recounting of his constituents' views: "That may be what he's being told, but that is certainly not what we have been hearing on the ground. "The community has been very receptive to the message of vigilance - and that includes the white population of the city." Ewan Roberts, centre manager of Liverpool's Asylum Link charity, said: "I'd criticise anyone who uses emotive language and makes sweeping statements like this. "It is irresponsible and it could be dangerous."
Source
If even literary people don't recognize some of Britain's greatest literary work, what hope is there for the mass of the people even to know what they are missing? Education once transmitted a people's inherited culture. The only thing it transmits well now is Leftist propaganda
A frustrated author has confirmed what other unpublished writers have long suspected: even Jane Austen would have difficulty finding a book deal in the 21st Century. But what really astonished David Lassman was that only one of 18 publishers and literary agents recognised her work when it was submitted to them under a false name. Mr Lassman, 43, had spent months trying without success to find a publisher for his own novel Freedom's Temple. Out of frustration - and to test whether today's publishers could spot great literature - he retyped the opening chapters of three Austen classics: Pride and Prejudice, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.
He changed only the titles, the names of the characters and his own name - calling himself Alison Laydee, after Austen's early pseudonym "A Lady" - then waited for the offers to roll in. Instead he received yet another sheaf of rejection letters, including one from Penguin, which republished Pride and Prejudice last year, describing his plagarised chapters as "a really original and interesting read" but not right for Penguin. That was one of the gentler rejections. But Mr Lassman said: "Penguin neither requested to see the rest of the novel nor did they recognise a work they already publish.
"I wasn't surprised that the publishing process rejects people out of hand, but I was staggered that no one recognised the work. Here is one of the greatest writers that has lived, yet only one recipient recognised them as Austen's work. "At best their letters were mildly apologetic about declining the material and at worst completely indifferent to what they had in their possession. If major publishers can't recognise great literature, who knows what might be slipping through the net."
Mr Lassman concocted his plan after returning from the Greek island where he had been writing his own novel and found himself facing a brick wall. "I was having a hard time getting it published and I was chatting to friends about it, saying I wondered how Jane would have fared today. "Getting a novel accepted is very difficult unless you have an agent first, but I had no idea at the scale of rejection poor old Jane suffered."
The literary agency Christopher Little, which represents J.K. Rowling, regretted that it was "not confident of placing this material with a publisher". Jennifer Vale of Bloomsbury publishers turned down Northanger Abbey, renamed Susan, saying "I didn't feel the book was suited to our list."
The one publisher to recognise the deception was Alex Bowler, assistant editor at Jonathan Cape. His reply read: "Thank you for sending us the first two chapters of First Impressions; my first impression on reading these were ones of disbelief and mild annoyance, along with a moment's laughter. "I suggest you reach for your copy of Pride and Prejudice, which I'd guess lives in close proximity to your typewriter and make sure that your opening pages don't too closely mimic the book's opening. After all, there is such a thing as plagiarism and I'd hate for you to get in any kind of trouble with Jane Austen's estate."
Last night a spokeswoman for Penguin admitted that Mr Lassman's submission may not actually have been read. She said: "We don't take anything that is not agency-led, so I doubt the person would even have read it. I can't comment on this individual case but I don't think we have done anything bad." Neil Blair at Christopher Little said Mr Lassman had received a standard response. He said: "As you can imagine we get hundreds of submission each week - some from genuine writers or would-be writers, but also some from cranks. Our letter was a polite note declining representation and provided a standard response. "However, our internal notes did recognise similarities with existing published works and indeed there were even discussions about possible plagiarism. We chose an approach was designed to end the chain of communication with this person and not start a whole new one. Sadly, we have had experience of where accusations of plagiarism can lead to." Bloomsbury declined to comment.
Source
British Labor Party politician speaks for his voters
And gets condemned for it
A MERSEYSIDE Labour MP has broken ranks by becoming the first in the country to blame the failed bomb attacks in London and Glasgow on rising immigration into Britain. Outspoken Birkenhead member Frank Field said his constituents were angry when the Government told them to be "vigilant" following last month's aborted terror scares. He said the reality was that ministers had failed to be vigilant by letting in so many immigrants, some of whom had turned to terrorism,
The manager of Liverpool's Asylum Link charity last night branded Mr Field's comments as irresponsible and potentially dangerous, as did Adam Kelwick, a Muslim-based chaplain in Wavertree. And the head of Merseyside police's community relations team said multi-ethnic and faith groups across the region had been overwhelmingly receptive to pleas for vigilance.
Superintendent Rowland Moore described any comments which undermined public reassurance in the wake of the failed London and Glasgow attacks as "not helpful". During a Commons debate, Mr Field said: "In the statements of relief that the last bombing episode had not wrought the evil on innocent people that had been intended, Cabinet ministers told us to be vigilant. "The report back from my constituents in Birkenhead market was: `What a damned cheek that they should lecture us on vigilance!' "If the political class had been a little more vigilant in the past, and responded to their regular doubts and worries about the level of immigration, we might not, they said, be listening to such statements."
Some of the suspects arrested after bombs failed to go off in London city centre and at Glasgow Airport grew up in Iraq, Jordan, India and elsewhere. During the debate on immigration, Mr Field went on to say that the Home Secretary's failure to track people leaving Britain to go to terror camps abroad would "haunt her as time goes on". And he attacked the decision to grant free movement to workers from the poorer countries of Eastern Europe, when their living standards were so much lower. He warned: "The future of the European Union is an unsure one if we continue blindly to turn our eyes away from what is now a mass movement of people within Europe."
In response, immigration minister Liam Byrne accepted there was a "social impact" as well as an economic one and pointed to the new points-based work permit system that was being brought in. He also highlighted new government systems that he said would track the majority of migrants by 2009.
Last night, Adam Kelwick, a Muslim chaplain based in Wavertree, said: "To use this kind of language is irresponsible. "He's obviously got an agenda to push, targeting asylum-seekers and immigrants who themselves are extremely vulnerable. "They would far rather live in their own countries, if there was no interference with their daily lives.
Superintendent Rowland Moore, who heads Merseyside police's community relations team, said in response to Mr Field's recounting of his constituents' views: "That may be what he's being told, but that is certainly not what we have been hearing on the ground. "The community has been very receptive to the message of vigilance - and that includes the white population of the city." Ewan Roberts, centre manager of Liverpool's Asylum Link charity, said: "I'd criticise anyone who uses emotive language and makes sweeping statements like this. "It is irresponsible and it could be dangerous."
Source
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
