It’s official – the BBC obviously decided to start openly pimping for Obama from the beginning of May and, unsurprisingly, the oleaginous Mark Mardell was selected to kick off the campaign with a shameless piece of brown-nosing about the killing of Osama Bin Laden. Since the BBC is financed by a compulsory surcharge levied on practically every household in the Britain you can now add the UK taxpayers to Obama’s list of campaign donors.

His team won’t allow anyone to run away with the idea that the Navy Seals raid was the inevitable result of obvious decisions taken by shadowy figures within the administration.
Instead, they hammer home the view that the president made a courageous and difficult call, going against the advice of many of those around him.
This is pushed explicitly in a new campaign video narrated by Bill Clinton.
There have been several detailed insider accounts which support the idea of a tough and risky decision-maker at the top.

Fortunately at the moment the media influence of the left leaning BBC is counter balanced by a lively and disrespectful right wing press so readers of the UK Daily Mail were able to get a different perspective from Toby Harnden.

Senior military figures have said that Admiral William McRaven, a former SEAL who was then head of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) made the decision to take bin Laden out. Tactical decisions were delegated even further down the chain of command.
Mr Kyle added: ‘He’s trying to say that Romney wouldn’t have made the same call? Anyone who is patriotic to this country would have made that exact call, Democrat or Republican. Obama is taking more credit than he is due but it’s going to get him some pretty good mileage.’
A former intelligence official who was serving in the US government when bin Laden was killed said that the Obama administration knew about the al-Qaeda leader’s whereabouts in October 2010 but delayed taking action and risked letting him escape.

Once the BBC had a reputation for fairness and balance that was unrivalled in any other part of the world. Sadly that gold standard of reporting and commentary has been replaced by a left wing bias more reminiscent of a Polish TV station in the early 1970s.

You know what is even more worrying? They no longer feel the need to even pretend to be neutral….

Of course I am paraphrasing Goering’s famous quote about “culture” – and I also recognise that in a personal capacity I am usually willing to trust the doctor who repairs my hernia or the plumber who fixes my boiler because the chances are they know more about hernias and boilers than I do for they are dealing with them every day.

No, the “experts” I would love to threaten are the ones beloved of the media because they need a gap filled in the programme or on the page. Moreover the “expert” is usually produced to push an agenda favoured by the editorial team – to pimp a company or a political viewpoint or a questionable scientific “theory”.

The “experts” usually dress up their presentation with an impressive display of certainty buttressed with “facts” which on the surface appear ultra convincing. These “facts” are then often machine gunned out with a degree of rapidity that discourages in depth analysis. Certainly the host or editor rarely has the time or inclination to find someone who could present a contrary view.

The result? An initially rather shaky position is offered a framework of reinforcement by inertia and becomes an accepted wisdom. Very often the purpose is to agitate to change something that has worked efficiently and effectively, often for centuries with a view to provide opportunities for a whole tribe of leeches who cannot find gainful employment in the normal world.

Fortunately the “experts” are frequently proved wrong by subsequent events. Unfortunately so often a large amount of time and money has already been wasted in a fruitless search for each specific unicorn.

So – bring on the “experts”……

Less than two weeks ago our UK “experts” were saying this

contingency plans are being drawn up as the Environment Agency confirmed the drought is likely to last until Christmas.

Today they were saying this

The Environment Agency issued flood warnings in the South West and South East as drivers battled torrential rain on the motorways.

Why do we even listen to them. Switch on any TV news programme and there will almost certainly be an “expert” droning on about some topic and usually blaming us, the ordinary everyday folk, for being ignorant.

Remember which company was being singled out for praise by financial guru Gary Hamel in 2000?

extraordinaryaspirations, a willingness to listen to new points of view, flexible organizational boundaries. The managers of —- concentrated on the growth of new markets and industries, andindividual entrepreneurship is highly encouraged

You guessed it…Enron…yes that Enron….and he wasn’t alone in pimping it…

At roughly the same time a certain UK banker was being lauded as a business superman but a few years later the media changed their tune

Remember all the great and the good who really did think money grew on trees….until the recession? I wonder why they got it wrong?

And those brilliant minds who were telling us that those who opposed the Euro were Neanderthal doomsayers totally out of step with the times?

Well now James Lovelock, who as a “scientist”was always treated with due reverence as a top level “expert”, says he got it wrong about global warming when he issued dire warnings in 2006.

There’s nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now … The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time

Thanks a bunch, you silly old fool – can I have my taxes back, please?

Don’t get me wrong. Every man and woman is entitled to express an opinion and, being human, will sometimes be mistaken. But for self proclaimed “experts” it is never sufficient to “express”…..they must PRONOUNCE as if they have descended from Mount Sinai with tablets of stone. They exude authority and turn a fierce and disapproving eye on any who dare question the validity of their utterances…and we fall for it every time. Even when they are proved wrong “experts” shamelessly slough off their mistakes as a snake sheds it’s skin. Like whores they are forever turning new tricks.

So next time you are watching TV and an “expert” is wheeled in to pontificate on some burning issue remember

1. He/she is getting paid for it and traffic will expand earning potential…everyone will want to go Al Gore

2. So many “experts” have got things wrong every future pronouncement should be accompanied with a large dose of salt

Somebody once defined the etymology of the word “expert”

In mathematics X is an unknown and in plumbing a spurt is a drip under pressure

Sounds good to me…..now, where is my Smith & Wesson?

h/t for violin cartoon

More evidence of the official media spinning the Zimmerman/Martin shooting incident in Florida before any proper evidence has appeared,

Blogger William A Jacobson at Legal Insurrection (who also doubles up as a law professor) does simple fact check that US media (and the UK Daily Mail) failed to do on the “Armed American White Supremacists Patrolling Sanford, Florida” story…and finds out that it is an unfounded rumour (aka a “lie”)

Mind you he used a very unusual method..he rang the local police. Maybe those highly trained, highly paid “journalists” could learn a thing or two from that….

Forty something UK “journalist” Samantha Brick should be scored a perfect ten for achieving maximum publicity with minimum talent. Her cri de coeur about the downside of being so beautiful has impacted the world like a tsunami – why it’s even been picked up by the leading American political website at Hot Air…

I’m tall, slim, blonde and, so I’m often told, a good-looking woman. I know how lucky I am. But there are downsides to being pretty — the main one being that other women hate me for no other reason than my lovely looks.

True, most of the reaction has been scornful and positively insulting but Samantha doesn’t care. Playing out the old showbiz adage that there can never be such a thing as bad publicity Ms Brick will reap a golden dividend of TV appearances, radio interviews and magazine articles. A book and probably a film will almost certainly be on the way as well.

Some achievement for a woman who changed career midlife from being a self proclaimed “top TV executive” (large pinch of salt needed here) to a lifestyle scribbler after having decamped across the channel to marry a Frenchman.Within microseconds of marrying Pascal she had become an expert on all things Francais, pumping out, via the UK Daily Mail, articles on stepmothering, household management, cooking and keeping slim a la Francais….oh plus “trying for a baby” and little sideswipes against former colleagues and, naturally, her first husband.

Every article is shallow, derivative and self obsessed – in other words perfect material for the Daily Mail which appears to thrive in its crusade to portray women as emotionally unstable airheads concerned primarily with their clothes, waist size and the workings of their internal pumping systems. It’s a misogynistic approach which irritates not only feminists but also those of us who appreciate the strengths and values of the women in our lives. But it has not harmed the financial viability of the Daily Mail so why should they care?

It’s called Polyfilla journalism partly after the DIY product so handy for filling up gaps and holes in walls and ceilings and the Polly Filler character in Private Eye “a vapid and self-centred female “lifestyle” columnist, whose irrelevant personal escapades and gossip serve solely to fill column inches”. Editors abhor empty spaces in their papers so a whole legion of Samantha Bricks earn a generous living regurgitating and slightly reconfiguring articles on sex, fashion, marriage, divorce, careers and diets. Most pass easily down the memory hole but sometimes, as in Brick’s latest piece of vacuous scribble, they hit a mother lode of controversy which generates publicity and sells extra copies.

She might not have much talent or sense of perspective but she deserves a brief salute for her chutzpah, surely…..

Last Monday Fiachra Gibbons at the UK Guardian just knew in his bones who had perpertrated those vicious killings of Jewish children and French soldiers.
What could be the link, they ask, between Jewish children and French military personnel? The link is they are both seen – and not just by a far-right fringe – as symbols of all that has sabotaged la France forte, to borrow Sarkozy’s election slogan. Confessional schools, be they Jewish or an informal weekend madrassa, are seen as actively undermining the secular Republic by activists of groups like the Bloc Identitaire and the Front National, as well as some members of Sarkozy’s UMP, and even some on the left.
This was echoed across the UK media with adjectives like “toxic”, “hatred” and “racism” being bandied about alongside references to Dreyfus and Vichy. The whole of France, nay all Europe was invited to rise up and crush the noxious weed of “right wing extremism” and attempts to question the wisdom of unrestricted immigration.

But now it is practically certain that the killings were committed by a French Muslim gunman who appears to be associated with Jihadist groups the tone has suddenly changed. There are now pleas for everyone to calm down and BBC hack Gavin Hewitt has obviously been ordered to tell people that this event will have nil long term impact on the forthcoming French presidential election, essentially telling everyone to “Move along, please, nothing to see here”

I wonder why?

Young American conservative blogger Tina Korbe at Hot Air is shocked

U.K. schools to kids: No best friends for you!

One speculative quote, no evidence but still a neat hook for a slow news day. I actually like Tina’s more personal style but when she edges towards this going to hell in a handcart schtick all it does is bring out the endoftheworld brigade who always lurk around the edges at Hot Air and fantasise about “socialist” policies and/or Britain becoming a province of the new caliphate.

FYI I have five delightful granchildren who are all in different UK schools and a permanent strand of their conversation is about friendships including the making and the breaking of the same.

Almost all parents and teachers get involved in the fall out when best friendships go sour. I would bet that most of us then advise the child to maintain a wider circle of friends to alleviate the extent of the heartache when these relationships drift apart – which is, I suspect, the reasoning behind the original quotation.

There is no official policy in this matter, no UK government diktat and it was a tad misleading to imply such in the headline and in the opening paragraph….”apparently, they’re a thing”

As in the USA we in the UK have enough official fruitloopery to befuddle our brains without having to invent them so, Tina, do use a little shoeleather to tease out the background before waving flags like these.

Unless, of course, one UK school has decided to import an idea from…….the good old US of A……

BTW…this is an expansion of a comment I made on Tina’s article at Hot Air

President Obama’s birth certificate, made public as a result of Donald Trump’s brief “campaign”, is a forgery.

This is an astonishing claim.

Note that nobody has said that Barack Obama is not a natural born citizen of the USA – just that the document purporting to prove his natural born citizenship is not an honest piece of evidence.

With the results of Maricopa County, AZ sheriff Joe Arpaio’s “Cold Case Posse,” an incredible claim has become an incredible situation: a team of professional investigators, commissioned by a major law-enforcement agency, has determined that the alleged birth certificate produced by the president of the United States is a probable forgery.

One would have expected a veritable tsunami of claim and counter claim as a result of the Mariscopa County investigation with Obama’s supporters and opponents slugging it toe to toe in print and on screen. I expected to see in the Obama friendly BBC and Guardian a line by line dissection of the Cold Posse’s case with a host of experts drafted in via the NYT and the US networks to pour scorn on it’s conclusions. CBS in particular might well have been rather sensitive to the issue of forged documents after its own Dan Rather debacle.

But instead there has been a deafening silence. Not a syllable from the White House. Zilch from the DNC official newsletters at NYT and WaPo. Nothing from Sandra Fluke, the Democrats Presidential candidate for 2028………….and also nothing from any of the scuffed retreads sleepwalking to the 2012 GOP nomination.

I wonder why?

The Stalinists are here, says Dan Riehl, referring to Think Progress and their latest antics in the left’s Tucsonesque Rush Limbaugh/Sandra Fluke blitzkrieg.

There is no real difference between today’s un-American U.S.-based left and regimes such as Stalin’s – only they don’t quite yet have enough power. But they are busy aquiring it. You’re kidding yourself if you think otherwise. These are very dangerous people that need to be defeated for an America anything like how Conservatives view her to survive.

Sandra Fluke, a professional agitator, has become the poster girl of the left and the left supported President Obama and his administration. She appears to be a humourless, single-minded apparatchik, ruthless and intolerant of those with opposing views. Nevertheless it would be unwise to underestimate this woman. She is intelligent and has a superb feel for any political opportunity. She will no longer operate in the political shadows. She, and many like her, is the future of the Stalinist left.

You see the thing about Stalinists (or Marxists, as they should be called since the key element of Marx’s Communist version of socialism was the need for a dictatorship of the revolutionary elite) is that they are quite content to use the arena of freedom provided by parliamentary democracy to further their cause and impugn their political rivals. But once they have power that arena of free debate and discussion is dismantled and we enter the dark world of Orwell’s 1984 where it is no longer sufficient to withdraw from political activity and remain silent. Stalinists require that everyone publicly celebrates and praises the regime however degraded their circumstances.

As is often the case art can encapsulate the essence of this essential truth (largely ignored/forgotten by a complicit media that constantly revisits Hitler, Franco, Pinochet and other non Marxist authoritarian regimes)….so maybe this 1938 French political cartoon could give us a glimpse of the USA in 2037 at the beginning of President Fluke’s second term….

French anti stalinist cartoon 1938

BTW….The sign reads “We are very happy”

The price of evil….police officer blinded by criminal in shotgun attack gives up hope “I lost my sight, my job, my wife and my marriage”

Hey – why shouldn’t mothers ask doctors to kill their new born babies if they don’t happen to fit in with their lifestyle……

Billions of pounds later civil servants think it might be time to think about thinking about ways to stop fraudsters, lowlifes from stealing taxpayers’ money…..oh and some of those thieves might be CIVIL SERVANTS so perhaps before we employ them we should check to see if they have previous convictions for fraud….

“You know maybe Hitler was right, perhaps those Jews need to be taught a lesson”…..funny how liberal leftists seem to be able to peddle this stuff without courting the wrath of the BBC/Guardian North London dinner party circuit…

Here’s an idea – why not recruit people who are kind and caring into nursing…..

Stone Age Europeans were first humans to settle in North America – so Chicago politicians truly are the real native Americans…

…and FINALLY meet the UK’s new elite at play…..and they don’t seem to care about using mirrors……

As a former schoolboy (a long time ago) and a teacher (now retired) and an amateur actor (still mumbling) I must confess enjoying a moment of guilty pleasure when I watch that Blackadder clip…

It came to mind when I learned a day or so back that I had just landed myself a part in our amateur theatre group’s Shakespeare spring production of “The Winter’s Tale”….not a particularly big role but, as Private Eye might say, it’s small but perfectly formed…..

I love being involved with a play, be it on or back stage. For a few weeks you are part of a joint endeavour with a group of people for one common purpose. You share all the ups and the downs, the crises and the celebrations, the laughter and the tears. Forget those familiar dividing lines of social intercourse age, sex or experience. You are pitched together like a close family battling the world. Then the set is struck and you go your separate ways. Once or twice the bonds made during a run might hold long after the scripts are filed. But more usually, once the play is done, the connections dissolve and disappear down memory lane.

The Bard, however, raises different issues for he is the broccoli of drama. We are told how good he is for us yet so many leave him on the side of the plate. Amateur groups feel he has to be performed even though quite a few tickets will be left unsold.
Shakespeare is often the amdram equivalent of a loss leader.

But he shouldn’t be. The characters are fascinating. The language is powerful and vivid. The themes are universal. He is part of every school’s curriculum.

We all have studied Shakespeare – and there’s the rub.

He is studied because he is a Good Thing. In school we have all analysed and dissected Billy S like a specimen on a laboratory bench. We have discussed characters, motives, meanings and symbolism, turned over metaphors and deconstructed references and laid bare every bone, muscle and sinew. His words are revered like a biblical text, a scientific hypothesis or a philosophical treatise. There is a vast Shakespeare industry employing thousands of actors, academics and gushing media scribblers and talking heads.

The guy’s works are being adulated to death – so here’s a thought.

Let’s turn off the tap for five years. Embargo the puff pieces. Deep freeze the academics in a cryogenics unit. Remove Stratford’s name from all road signs and sat navs. Ban Billy S from being mentioned in the school classroom. Perform the plays with zero hype. Hang anyone who dares to say “the bard”

Shift his library classification from the doom laden “Literature” to cheap and cheerful “Entertainment” – because that was how he was regarded by the noisy, bawdy riotous townsfolk who watched his plays in Elizabethan and Jacobean London.

As a schoolboy in 1950s England any chance of appreciating Shakespeare was ground out of my consciousness by hour after hour of mind numbing analysis until the very mention of the name would cause my eyes to glaze over and my brain to slip into neutral.

Then one evening in 1955 I went with my bus driver dad for our weekly cinema visit. He had misread the bill and was expecting to see a gangster movie. By the time we realised it was Laurence Olivier’s film of Richard III our tickets had already been purchased so we went in, expecting to be bored to tears.

How wrong we were. It was magical.

At the end, as the final credits rolled the audience in that packed cinema in a working class suburb of South London sat motionless and silent for a few brief moments. Then as we walked out into the night there was a massive buzz as we all began to talk of what we had seen and my dad looked at me and said “That wasn’t the Shakespeare that was hammered into me at school. That film must be the real Shakespeare….what have I been missing all these years?”

So, unlike Blackadder, it’s not the real Will Shakespeare I want to punch on the nose – it’s the polystyrene cultural idol created by the termites of the Shakespeare industry that I would like to target with my custard pie.

Mind you sometimes I do find Colin Firth a tad irritating……