Non-stories, gubbins and gibberish.

There’s practically nothing else about at the moment, so I’ll summarise.

The Hague thing. A non-story about him sharing a hotel room with his special advisor, who is a bloke. Salacious nonsense obscuring the only legitimate question, which is whether Hague misused public funds in any way.

On-going denormalisation of smokers in the rented property market. A non-story based on a poorly interpreted marketing survey. Most landlords are pragmatic in my experience, and the ones that aren’t don’t remain landlords for very long.

It’s remains to be seen whether or not the matter of #metgate is a non-story or not.

Not so much a non-story as a ‘well, what a surprise’ story, in which a front company for Tesco buys up a town centre, allows it to become run down, then along comes Tesco offering to ‘do the town a favour’ by building a massive Tesco store in its place.

Someone called Tony Blair has a book out. In it, he reveals that always was, and still is, a complete and utter cunt. Still, with any luck, it will cause enough enmity in the Labour party to keep the wrecking bastards in unelectability hell for a generation or two.

The Director General of the BBC seems to have taken to referring to the present in the past tense. He has ‘has admitted the corporation was guilty of a ‘massive’ Left-wing bias in the past’. As if it’s gone away. Pfffft.

In other news, top fungal blogger Simon Cooke has decided to poke Jack of Kent in the eye over his apparently contradictory definition of his own liberalism.

I’m fast arriving at the conclusion that Jack of Kent is a cult leader & I have little doubt that he’s in the process of setting up a compound for all his faithful believers in deepest Kent. Jack of Koresh more like.

Mr  Cooke has also, in case you missed them previously, written some good stuff on the emergent New Puritans.

More anon, doubtless.

AJ

Advertisement

Required listening

If you want to hear the BBC’s Europhile cock-gobblers eating some humble pie, listen to Radio 4 at 20:00 on Tuesday 24th August.

The Euro is in deep trouble.

As the project intended to unify the European Union causes even deeper divisions, questions are being raised about whether nations as diverse as Germany and Greece can really share the same currency.

The repercussions spread far beyond mainland Europe. Britain is affected as British firms struggle to sell to the Eurozone.

Jonathan Charles was the BBC’s Europe correspondent in the 1990s, when the euro was first introduced to great fanfare. He travelled widely around the continent, reporting on the years of preparations leading to the final launch of the euro.

Now he retraces his steps, returning to some of those places and speaking to the likes of former Chancellor of the Exchequer Norman Lamont, the UK’s treasury minister and ambassador at the time, and prominent European figures including the former Dutch Prime Minister Wim Kok and some top European bankers. Jonathan also talks to ordinary workers whose livelihood has been fundamentally changed by the advent of euro zone.

Having taken Europe’s temperature, Jonathan asks if the Euro will survive, and what does it mean for Europe’s dream of political integration?

Suck it up, socialist monkeys. The Euro is in collapse and the EU won’t be far behind it.

AJ

BBC Subliminal messaging

How many votes for the Tories, BBC?

Oh never mind. I’ll ask Kerry McCarthy.

AJ

Compare the Mongoose

Basement cat sees no need to choose.

If you’ve not seen Banded Brothers on BBC2, you’ve missed a treat.

AJ

And so the bleating begins

I’ve already said my piece about these trivial and distracting cuts the BBC is to make. (The Times leader also has it nailed).

The riders of the gravy-train are non-plussed.

The BBC’s plans to shut two radio stations and close half its website were in chaos yesterday as musicians vowed to stop the closure of 6 Music and unions threatened to strike over job cuts.

I can sense the righteous likes of Radioshed and Blurb all over this shit.

Appropriately enough, this story is in the Entertainment section of the Times website. LOL.

Broadcasting unions leaked the contents of meetings with senior BBC staff yesterday that confirmed the Times report. They have threatened industrial action over 600 potential job losses.

There is light at the end of the tunnel for 6Music listeners, though, and a valuable indicator of BBC bloat:

There was interest, however, from the BBC’s commercial rivals. Clive Dickens, the head of Absolute Radio, said that the station would bid to buy 6 Music from the BBC. Absolute has double the listeners of 6 Music, but less than half the budget. *

Quite.

Mr Dickens said: “We would buy 6 Music from the BBC, both the brand and the network, and we’d run it more efficiently than they’ve been doing.”

Can you imagine the cosseted BBC numpties’ panic at the idea of having to worry about stuff like budgets, sponsors, competition etc? One can but smirk.

We need to accept that this is precisely what should happen to the entire BBC.

Sadly, though, not all in the future garden is rosy. I’ve listened to Absolute. The sheer volume of government information adverts on there makes it even more of a Labour mouthpiece than even the fucking BBC. And don’t think the Tories wouldn’t use the same methods to ‘nudge’ their target demographics.

The BBC will admit that the average age of its listeners, 35, is valuable to advertisers on commercial stations.

Yeah – 6Music listeners – that’s 700,000 savvy, middle-class pissheads, smokers, drivers of big cars. How could they resist?

AJ

UPDATE:

* I suppose it’s worth making the distinction that 6Music is a digital only station (DAB, Interweb, cable & satellite) whereas you can actually listen to Absolute on, you know, a radio. I reckon if 6 Music got an FM broadcast, the listenership would double or treble, just on in-car listeners.

This is indicative of the total fucking shambles that is DAB radio in the UK, in which the dead hand of the BBC is central. And there are already noises about supplementing (and probably replacing) DAB with DRM. So that’s four DAB equipped devices I have that’ll become deprecated or completely useless soon after 2012. Nice work, fuckers.

UPDATE 2: JuliaM displays her usual aplomb in slicing up the special pleadings for BBC Asian Network that are emerging.

BBC: Useless mongs

So the BBC are going to prune some of it’s services – and not before time.

So what is it closing down?

will announce the closure of the digital radio stations 6 Music and Asian Network

Errr okay – closing Asian Network, but 6Music? What? That’s the only fucking decent BBC radio station.

What about BBC Alba (Scots Gaelic TV), 1extra (black music), BBC Radio 7 (fuck knows what it’s for) and BBC3 (Dave-alike)?

Dicks. Ah well – one can only hope that utter fuckbag George Lamb is a casualty of this move.

AJ

Plus ça spit #006: BBC in Value for Money row

For a change…

AJ

No wonder Tom Harris likes Dr. Who

This is not like the BBC at all.

Left wing scriptwriters hired by the BBC during the 1980s tried to inspire a ‘Tardis revolution’ by using Doctor Who as propaganda to undermine Baroness Thatcher.

In one series they caricatured the then Prime Minister as a vicious and egotistical alien ruler who banned outward displays of unhappiness among her downtrodden people and used a secret police to oppress dissidents.

Other Doctor Who plots set in distant planets included thinly veiled support for the miners’ strike and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, former actors and writers on the show have admitted.

…

Sylvester McCoy, the actor who played the Time Lord for two years in the 1980s, said: ‘Our feeling was that Margaret Thatcher was far more terrifying than any monster the Doctor had encountered.

‘The idea of bringing politics into Doctor Who was deliberate, but we had to do it very quietly and certainly didn’t shout about it. We were a group of politically motivated people and it seemed the right thing to do.

‘At the time Doctor Who used satire to put political messages out there in the way they used to do in places like Czechoslovakia. Those who wanted to see the messages saw them; others, including one producer, didn’t.’

Exterminate them all. 

And to put the cherry on the tarte au plus-ça-change,

A BBC spokesman said: ‘We’re baffled by these claims. This is the first we’ve heard of this and given that 20 years have passed, we find this strange. The BBC’s impartiality rules applied just as strongly then as they do to programmes now.’

Quite.

AJ

Join me for Undead Blogging of Question Time…

Apparently, Dimblebum was a Bullingdon boy, you know. Well I never, said I.

AJ – Pioneering Sleep Blogging.

Moral Maze: Twitter…

Who’d have guess it would come up as a topic on Moral Maze? But in light of the recent twatterstorms vis. Carter Ruck, Jan Moir and A.A. Gill, the day has come…

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00nkcfk/Moral_Maze_04_11_2009/

Makes interesting listening.

AJ

Nick Griffin on Question Time…

I can but echo the views of Juliette and Obo on this one. If the Labour party had any clue at all, the only politician they’d ‘no-platform’ is Gordon Brown, because every bit of publicity he gets drains support away from him.

I don’t care much about goading Griffin into saying anything about immigration, repatriation, Jews, Asians, Blacks, Muslims or Martians.

What I want from tonight’s inevitable debacle is one simple thing:

I want the viewing public to be left in no doubt that the BNP are a far-left party.

Then I want everyone to wake up to the BBC’s (and New Labour’s) lie about the BNP being a party of the right.

AJ

Brucey says “Lighten up, bitches” in plea for Black & White Minstrel revival…

As he’s 81 years old (“gawd bless ‘im”), he’s exempt from racism charges. On the Juliette scale at least.

Whatever. He’ll be dead soon. Cunt.

AJ

Heads up…

Apparently one Gordo McSnottysporran is to answer listeners’ questions (troffle, aye right, Gordo) on BBC Radio 5 Live at 1pm BST.

I need to pop down the chemists and get my valium topped up.

Then I’ll decide if I’m going to listen..

If you know of anyone liveblogging it, do leave a comment, ta.

AJ

UPDATE: I submitted a question:

Do you think people with serious mental illnesses – perhaps delusional – can be trusted in positions of great power?

Global Warming, My Arse – Dénouement Approaches

When I saw this from the BBC, my Jahomometer went quite mad…

New evidence on Antarctic warming

The continent of Antarctica is warming up in step with the rest of the world, according to a new analysis.

Scientists say data from satellites and weather stations indicate a warming of about 0.6C over the last 50 years.

Writing in the journal Nature, they say the trend is "difficult to explain" without the effect of rising greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere.

Meanwhile, scientists in Antarctica say a major ice shelf is about to break away from the continent.

In line with recent form, I knew that the frankly fantastic Christopher Booker would be along to break up the party of muppets, as reported over at EUReferendum.

One of the first to express astonishment was Dr Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist with the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and a convinced believer in global warming, who wryly observed "it is hard to make data where none exists". A disbelieving Ross Hayes, an atmospheric scientist who has often visited the Antarctic for Nasa, sent Professor Steig a caustic email ending: "with statistics you can make numbers go to any conclusion you want. It saddens me to see members of the scientific community do this for media coverage."

But it was also noticed that among the members of Steig’s team was Michael Mann, author of the "hockey stick", the most celebrated of all attempts by the warmists to rewrite the scientific evidence to promote their cause. The greatest of all embarrassments for the believers in man-made global warming was the well-established fact that the world was significantly warmer in the Middle Ages than it is now. "We must get rid of the Mediaeval Warm Period," as one contributor to the IPCC famously said in an unguarded moment. It was Dr Mann who duly obliged by getting his computer-model to produce a graph shaped like hockey stick, eliminating the mediaeval warming and showing recent temperatures curving up to an unprecedented high.

This instantly became the warmists’ chief icon, made the centrepiece of the IPCC’s 2001 report. But Mann’s selective use of data and the flaws in his computer model were then so devastatingly torn apart that it has become the most comprehensively discredited artefact in the history of science.

The fact that Dr Mann is again behind the new study on Antarctica is, alas, all part of an ongoing pattern. But this will not prevent the paper being cited ad nauseam by everyone from the BBC to Al Gore, when he shortly addresses the US Senate and carries on advising President Obama behind the scenes on how to roll back that "spectre of a warming planet". So, regardless of the science, and until the politicians finally wake up to how they have been duped, what threatens to become the most costly flight from reality in history will continue to roll remorselessly on its way.

Keep chipping away… unreason has to be broken at some point…

AJ

Gordon Brown Confesses to Being a Total and Utter Hypocrite

Courtesy of Guido… priceless

And Frank Bough too!!!! Oooh matron. Taught Max Mosley everything, you know.

And in case YouTube take that tidbit down, I’ve got my own copy.

AJ

BBC caught in the act of Jacqui Smith Love-in

Courtesy of the UKLP blog and The Register, we have a fine example of the BBC’s comically bad attempts at being an unbiased news organisation. About 5 or 6 completely different accounts of Ubergruppenfuhrer Smith’s latest ID cards wheeze came out from the BBC in one day.

Here’s the story

On the 6th of November the BBC announced to an astonished world that “People ‘can’t wait for ID cards’. Breathlessly repeating the words of Home Secretary Jacqui Smith’s speech that morning, Auntie reported: “I believe there is a demand, now, for cards – and as I go round the country I regularly have people coming up to me and saying they don’t want to wait that long.”

And added that the market for fingerprints, photographs and signatures* garnered in post offices and retailers would amount, according to Smith, to “about £200 million a year.” The Beeb neglected to mention that the £200 million a year represented a laundered price hike of up to £40 a throw, but there are a few other things the Beeb neglected to mention – or more properly, stopped mentioning – that day, too.

The report’s revision history, documented by News Sniffer, takes us on an impressive Odyssey from “Smith to unveil airport ID scheme”, through “Shops may take ID Card biometrics” to the final sales-pitch version, cunningly deniabled with quote marks.

…

The final – at time of writing, anyway – version isn’t an entirely uncritical commercial for ID cards, containing as it does (balance, balance…) comment from Phil Booth and the two main opposition parties. But if we’re talking about developing stories in the wonderful world of Web 2.0 reportage here, what one must assume represents a day’s ferreting by the Beeb’s finest (or a day’s being shouted at by Home Office spin doctors) does look very much like a fail.

Remember that you’re compelled to pay for these cack-handed totalitarian collaborators if you have an idiots’ lantern in your dwelling.

AJ

BBC can’t win the argument so it doesn’t engage

Have that you commie gimps.

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/tv_and_radio/article5162494.ece?

The BBC is failing to prosecute viewers who refuse to pay the television licence on principle amid claims that the corporation fears creating a wave of “martyrs”.

The band of licence-fee refuseniks include Vladimir Bukovsky, a former Russian dissident, Noel Edmonds, the television presenter, and Euro-sceptics who believe the BBC is politically biased.

Charles Moore, a columnist for The Spectator magazine, has said he will not renew his TV licence if the corporation continues to employ Jonathan Ross, the disgraced chat show host who is paid £6m a year.

The BBC’s approach to such viewers contrasts with the “bully-boy” tactics it employs to force others to pay the £139.50 annual levy. Some people have received more than 80 warning letters, threatening prosecution and a maximum £1,000 fine, even though they have paid or do not own a television.

…

Another viewer who has been watching television without a licence since 2002 is John Kelly, 70, of Exmouth, Devon.

Kelly, a member of the UK Independence party, tore up his TV licence in protest against what he perceived as the BBC’s pro-EU bias.

“I want them to summons me [to court]; I want them to prosecute me,” said Kelly. “By failing to pursue me, the BBC is implicitly accepting my case and others may be encouraged to pursue the same course.”

That line will do for me. Excepting the fact that I don’t actually own an idiots lantern.

AJ

Paragon of respect turns out to be bag of shite….

Laid reefs did they? Ignorant BBC wankers.

AJ

It may be wrong to gloat, but would you look at the silver lining!?

This whole BBC Ross/Brand thing is one of the funniest things all week. Not so much for what it says about Ross and Brand (nothing we didn’t already know or suspect), but more about the whole BBC.

I think they scented their precious licence fee in mortal danger, because they appear to have demanded that the baby throw out the bath, and water, while still in the thing.

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/tv_and_radio/article5050293.ece

The lewd phone calls scandal that has engulfed the BBC tonight claimed the head of the controller of Radio 2 as the corporation announced it had suspended Jonathan Ross until next year without pay.

Lesley Douglas sent her letter of resignation to Mark Thompson, the BBC Director-General, this evening following the broadcast of prank calls recorded by Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross.

…

Brand has already resigned from his regular presenting slot on the UK’s most popular station.

Tonight, following a four hour meeting of the BBC’s governing board, Ross was suspended from all broadcasting for the BBC for 12 weeks, ending in mid-January 2009.

The most important thing about this is a glorious and wholly unexpected outcome, which is the resignation of Lesley Douglas who, as head of lesbians and thickos for BBC 6music, has been responsible for recruiting, retaining and defending the uniquely plankular George Lamb.

George likes N’Sync and Mint Sauce

There has been a protracted campaign to stop this arsehole from polluting what is supposed to be a music lovers’ station with his brainless and infantile ‘banter’, which has fallen on the deaf ears of Ms. Douglas.

Lesley Douglas, yesterday.

I hope, therefore, that there will be a new head of 6Music who will skin that turd, Lamb, and roll him in salt before sending him to Radio Sunderland on a free transfer, where he will be kicked to death every time he draws breath.

George Lamb’s career, tomorrow.

The George Lamb thread over at the 6music message boards is a thing of awe.

AJ

‘Brand and Ross don’t get kicked to death’ shocker…

Two of the most egregious entities in the whole human race, let alone the BBC. Please, just stop paying the BBC for this shit.

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/tv_and_radio/article5031683.ece

Ofcom, the broadcasting watchdog, announced today that it was launching an investigation into a succession of lewd phone calls made by BBC presenters Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross to Andrew Sachs, the Fawlty Towers actor.

The regulator said that it would probe the calls, which were made during Brand’s Radio 2 show one week ago, in which the pair left messages for Sachs claiming that Brand had slept with his granddaughter, Georgina Baillie, 23.

…

In the offending messages, left on Sachs’ answerphone, Brand told listeners: “What Andrew doesn’t know is, I’ve slept with his granddaughter.”

Ross, 47, shouted: “He f***** your granddaughter.” Ross also speculated that Brand had “enjoyed” Georgina on a swing, and the pair also joked that Sachs, 78, could kill himself over the incident.

More mauling here:

http://www.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2554021/what-public-service-does-russell-brands-show-perform.thtml

AJ