New pope an atheist: says gay marriage will solve the Middle East crisis and global warming!

Ah, Mainstreamia!

I was a little worried about that letter. So much so that I decided not to look too closely to spare myself the pain.

Because I knew, for sure, that really no matter what it said, the Mainstreamians were going to hook onto something and say, "LOOK! LOOKLOOKLOOK! the new pope is an atheist and says gay marriage is going to solve the Middle East crisis and global warming!

"WE WIN! stupid Christians!"

And of course, no bit of Mainstreamian obfuscation would be complete without the obligatory quote from Vidkun Quisling Bobby Mickens from the Tablet, assuring us that the new pope is soooo much better that that other guy.



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BBC knows ABSOLUTELY no shame

Who pushed the bill to outlaw the Atlantic slave trade through Parliament? Who forced the British ruling classes to look squarely at the gruesome realities of the slave trade? (Graphic images anyone?)

In 2007, the British held a national celebration commemorating the 1807 Act of Parliament that made the slave trade illegal. For its contribution in that celebration, the BBC produced a documentary smearing the man at the centre of that triumph of Christian virtue over barbarism, William Wilberforce.


According to the BBC, Wilberforce is no hero. According to the BBC doyenne Moira Stuart, he was nothing more than a political opportunist and (wait for it)...a Christian and therefore obviously a bigot who's real contribution was nothing more than to make the British feel better about themselves.

Moira, a 30-year veteran of BBC shenannigans, opens her "personal journey" into investigating the "true" history of abolition by saying she is "following the crusade of the man who is said to have abolished Britain's trade in human cargo" (emphasis in the original).

The introductory scenes show a scholarly type fellow in front of a wall of books saying, "If you want to look at a godly Christian nation, doing good things, look at us ending the slave trade."

I guess a challenge like that was too much for the secularist hounds at the BBC. A godly Christian nation? Christians doing good?! Hooo! We'll see about that!

Let the debunking begin! As our presenter Moira Stuart says, "I've discovered that many believe it's now time to re-examine this history". I'll bet you have.

As usual, this high quality smear job roams all over the world looking into the dark, dank and hideous corners of history. All the horrors are present (on a TV programme that children can see!)... tiny windowless stone rooms in a seaside fortress in Ghana that held hundreds of human beings...shackles, whips and torture implements, the famous diagrams showing the packing of people into the cargo holds of ships. All the usual trappings carefully placed with the correct music to engender a powerful emotional response in viewers.

Moira Stuart is careful to let her horror show on her face, and there are some eloquent moments when she is hugged and comforted by the people showing her around. After she has seen the dungeons, we are granted long shots of Moira, gazing soulfully out to sea, sharing her deepest fears, telling us, "I'm angry and I'm in pain..." This, we must understand at the start, is a deeply feeling person, a good woman who fights evil wherever she sees it. Someone who would never lie to us.

Then we get down to the meat of the matter. William Wilberforce has been turned into an icon of British history as the man who stopped this foul abomination, the single voice crying against it, forcing upper class ladies and gentlemen of government to look, and smell the nightmare of enslavement. He is a British hero, who selflessly fought a great evil and, as Moira points out in the first few minutes of the film, was moreover an example of the Christian man doing what he thought best for society.

They pull out all the rhetorical trickery they know to demonstrate that Wilberforce was no hero, but in reality a myopic religious fanatic (and probable racist) who took credit for the work of others. Let's examine a few of the techniques the BBC uses to manipulate a population who now no longer has enough historical knowledge to refute their assertions.

The first is a straw man, the two premises of the programme. A history professor is brought out for the thesis statement that "Britons have made Wilberforce into the national hero and pretended as if the slaves were freed entirely through the efforts of this one very benevolent man. And history didn't happen that way."

History Professor Adam Hochschild then points to an inscription on the plaque under Wilberforce's statue in Westminster Abbey that says, "He removed from the British nation the guilt of the African slave trade." (No, we don't get to see what the rest of it says; no context allowed.)

"That's the key," says Pet BBC Historian, "to why Wilberforce has become such a national hero. He made Britons feel good about it."

"It's comforting to imagine that the slave trade was stopped through the efforts of this one very nice, very benign, very philanthropic, very religious man ... see he's holding a bible in the statue..." (Emphasis in the original.)

Wait a second. Who ever said that? Who? Where? No one has ever said that one man alone ended the slave trade. Wilberforce didn't start the abolition movement, everyone knows that he joined it. No film or book no matter how adoring, would ever try to suggest that it was his efforts alone. This is probably the most glaring lie in the programme and they present it right at the start, obviously confident that the average British viewer is too stupid to catch it.

Moira tells us, "This is the story of my quest to find out why" Wilberforce has been remembered as a hero. She says she wants to examine the evidence and "make up my own mind".

But this is another blatant lie. From the opening sentences of this film, she has made it clear that her mind is already made up from the start, and the biases of the film make it obvious. It is really the story of her "quest to knock a great man off his heroic pedestal, to destroy another icon both of Traditional British culture and to defame the Christian virtues he embodied and, with the same convenient stone, to raze to the ground and sow salt on one of Christian civilisation's great historic claims..."

Remember the other opening quote? "If you want to look at a godly Christian nation, doing good things, look at us ending the slave trade."

Any doubt about where this is going?

She interviews a government official in Ghana (a majority Christina nation, by the way Moira; don't get their religious cooties on you) who tells her what everyone knows, that Wilberforce was part of a great movement manned by many people, including Africans, to stop the trade. But this is supposed to demonstrate that the British are wrong, and probably trapped in latent imperialist delusions, to hold up Wilberforce as a hero.

In Ghana, Moira "discovers" another great coverup by the Wilberforce lobby. He didn't end slavery. Slavery was made illegal in 1833. Wilberforce's achievement was "only" to make the trade illegal. Well! No one knew that! It's all obviously a giant Christian conspiracy to cover up the facts...

facts that anyone can find on Wikipedia...

Now she's armed. She's discovered a big lie. She heads back to England wanting to know "why Britain remembers him as the man who ended slavery when the 1807 bill only stopped the trade."

Having made the discovery of this nefarious conspiracy, Moira confronts a Wilberforce biographer at Wilberforce's house in Hull. All smiles as Kevin Belmonte reads her the legend at the base of the statue in the garden of the house that says, "England owes to him the reformation of manners; the world owes to him the abolition of slavery".

Moira jumps at the chance to call the lie. Gotcha!

"Is that so?" she says.

"Yes."

"Right, because I know that he was fundamental to the abolition of the slave trade but to slavery itself?"

The sadly unenlightened Mr. Belmonte explains patiently that you could not have made slavery illegal in 1833 without having made the trade illegal first. From the passage of the 1807 bill, it became clear that the next step was to take aim at slavery itself. From the first bill, the abolitionists were able to "lay deep foundations to take aim at slavery".

"It took far longer (26 years) than Wilberforce would have wanted, or indeed hoped."

Nevertheless, her response, in a voiceover so Mr. Belmonte could not hear, Moira comes back with "Despite the delay, such monuments reinforce the idea that Wilberforce ended slavery in 1807." Because obviously, people learn history entirely and exclusively from looking at monuments. Who reads books nowadays? (Or Wikipedia.)

But Moira's claws really come out when she addresses Wilberforce's religion. She tells us she wants to get "past the misconceptions" and get to know the real man. We hear that he was born into a well-to-do merchant family and became an MP for Hull at 21 and later for all of Yorkshire.

"But it's clear from his journal that he also believed in God and wanted to make a difference."

About the worst sin an MP can commit in the eyes of the BBC is to try to "impose his religious beliefs through legislation". I was wondering how the BBC would reconcile this axiom with the inescapable fact that the people who drove the abolition movement were Christians who were explicitly motivated by their religious beliefs.

Christians, according to the received wisdom of the publicly funded broadcaster, are to practice their religion privately at home. An MP who bases his work on his religious beliefs is trying to turn Britain into a theocracy. The solution? Demonstrate that the Wilberforce legend is fraudulent and that the man himself was probably a racist.

The real clincher is when Belmonte shows her in the Wilberforce family home in Hull, an embroidered rendition of the famous image of a black slave in chains, praying on one knee to be freed, "Am I not a man and a brother?" ... an image that caught the popular imagination at the time and significantly helped the movement.

Moira's delicate BBC-trained politically correct sensibilities recoil, however, at the image which she sees as evidence of the essential racism of the movement. "The Wedgewood cameo was probably the first campaign logo, found on everything from tea sets to women's brooches, it was popular amongst abolition supporters. But today, it's an awkward and difficult image."

She interrupts Belmonte's description of the contribution made by the image, saying, "What does that say to you?"

He says, "Britain still needs to be aware of the needs of the sons and daughters of Africa."

Getting a little tetchy, Moira jumps in, "It seems a travesty of the African, who has fought for his freedom to be seen in this as a mere supplicant." She ends the discussion, interrupting Belmonte's rebuttal.

After Hull, she returns to London to discover that with Wilberforce in Parliament, "It seems religion was his driving force." (Emphasis in the original.)

She interviews a painfully apologetic churchlady who explains away the kneeling black slave pictured in a stained glass window of Wilberforce in the church he worshipped in after his "evangelical conversion."

Looking at it, Moira says with a disapprovingly arched eyebrow, "No hint of repentance from the point of view of having caused the pain of enslavement in the first place..."

Aaaahhh, here is the crux of the matter. This is the real thesis of the programme. Wilberforce, and by extension all well-intended white Christians, can only redeem themselves of the sin of having been white, privileged and successful, by adopting grovelling white liberal guilt.

Pressing her point with this poor terrified little old churchlady, who is clearly desperate to please this woman (who is famous as the first "African-Carribean" to get a prominent place at the BBC), Moira continues, "It just bothers me that there is a deification..."

"Yes, I think that Wilberforce would have been quite unhappy to have been put in a stained glass window," the poor little mouse responds.

You can watch the rest on YouTube if you like. But I don't think there is any point. It has been admitted by the people who run the place that the BBC has hatred of Christianity, traditional morality and British history and culture written into its DNA.



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Homosexual Militants Disrupt Peaceful Religious Service

It's all in the headlines.

Bias? What bias?



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I keep saying it,

Britain really isn't the monolith of cloistered self-congratulating leftism everyone outside it seems to think. If you land anywhere other than Gatwick or Heathrow, you can find real people who live in the real world. And none of them can stand all this crap.

--- On Mon, 9/20/10, J--- B--- wrote:

From: J--- B--->
Subject: Daily Mail Benedict
To: "Hilary White"
Received: Monday, September 20, 2010, 8:25 PM

Reaction from the Daily Mail.
Is the Mail that conservative? I cant really seem to find any articles critical of his visit. If anything, they seem to be saying the protests were pointless.

Aitchdub responds:

Yes, on some issues, the Mail is more or less on our side. More to the point, it is more or less representative of mainstream British opinion outside the Orbital. I keep telling anyone who'll listen that the hyperliberalism that we all equate with Britain is the product of a tiny, London-based elite, all mostly talking to each other.

I've said it a hundred times, Britain needs to secede from London. Invite the Queen to live in Winchester, the ancient seat of the Anglo-Saxon kings, and build a big wall. We'll have to give up the Thames estuary, but I hear Portsmouth needs some economic boosting.

Give a six month grace period during which anyone who wants to live in the real world with the rest of us can get out of London, and anyone who wants to live in Peter Tatchell's Wonderland, can go in. But then the wall goes up and we post armed guards along the border.

HW

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Concession speech

Holy Cow! when the Independent backs down, you know the argument's over:

I suspect the Pope's gentle manner and even his very evident physical frailty really did play a part in a reversal of rhetoric by what one might describe as the anti-clerical press. When someone is conjured up as a monster (or "a leering old villain in a frock" as Richard Dawkins put it) and emerges as a modest scholarly figure visibly ill at ease with the political bombast of a state visit, the opinion-formers sense that their readers will want a more gentle tone.

Johann Hari

This is what journalistic objectivity looks like in Britain's leftist press.

I realise it's not pretty, but take a good look. This is the kind of schoolyard silliness that passes for reasoned discourse in Britain.



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Calling for bets

on how long it takes the BBC/Guardian/Times triad to start calling the pope's comments on radical atheism a "gaffe".



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Not that we're into biased reporting or anything...

Archbishop Nichols is the man preparing the way, the salesman for an event which, if polls are to be believed, is actively supported by at best a quarter of the population, and regarded with varying degrees of indifference or opposition by the rest. Safe to say that Pope Benedict, the quintessential Vatican insider risen to ultimate earthly office, is a less sympathetic figure than John Paul II, who visited Britain in 1982. A theological conservative, he has been accused of condemning the Catholic Church to increasing irrelevance in a liberalising world, while overseeing a cover-up in regard to sexual misconduct by clerics, particularly paedophilia.

Safe to say it huh? Safe with whom? Safe with the Archbishop of Westminster?

Let's see. From this, I think I can make a wild stab at the Telegraph's list of editorial requirements for writing about Benedict.

-- Benedict less popular than JPII
-- theological 'conservative' (optional: 'hardliner')
-- Church refuses to update to modern world/20th/21st century
-- traditional Catholic teaching 'irrelevant'
-- pedophilia crisis (any mention)

Perhaps Mr. Tweedie is very young. Maybe he doesn't remember all the journalists calling John Paul II a "hardliner" who refused to bring the Church into the 20th century.

Plus c'est la same crap...



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Warning: may contain hidden bias

A brief lesson in how media bias works. As Orwell taught us so well, it's not about saying things, it's about taking great care about what not to say.

Today's New York Times tells us the story of "A Birth Control Pill That Promised Too Much." Or rather the Times tells us part of the story. There's something missing.

...

Regulators say the ads overstated the drug’s ability to improve women’s moods and clear up acne, while playing down its potential health risks.

Fasten your attention on those last two words: "health risks." It isn't often that a major American media outlet writes about the health risks of contraceptives,...Go ahead; read the entire Times article if you like. You won't find another mention of "health risks" in the entire piece.

Of course, you must mean the "three democratically elected council representatives"

right?

Nope. No bias under here.

ARMY chiefs provoked fury last night after they invited a senior BNP politician to a swish do at a school.

The far-right party’s Cllr Cathy Duffy was among local politicians asked to attend a drinks and buffet reception at the Ministry of Defence’s sixth form college.

Two more officials from the racist British National Party joined Duffy at the Welbeck College event, hosted by the Army Presentation Team.

Enjoying free food and drink paid for by the taxpayer, the three extremists spent the evening mingling with military personnel. The invite to the VIP event in Loughborough, Leicestershire, came from Army chief Brigadier J E Richardson, Commander of 49 (East) Brigade.

Yes. People have (gasp) different political opinions from the ones that are officially allowed.

That's what we like to call "democracy".

Might be a good idea to start getting used to it, latte-boy.

Sparing whom?

Good old Times: apparently completely unable to resist temptation. Maybe they should start praying to the Ven. "Cardinal John Henry Newman" (that's "the Ven. John Henry Cardinal Newman", btw.)

There is no conspiracy theory over what has become of Newman’s remains: experts believe that damp conditions led to their complete decomposition.

The decision to exhume Newman’s body had been fiercely resisted by gay rights campaigners because the priest had asked to be buried close to the body of Father Ambrose St John, a lifelong friend. With Newman’s grave now lying empty, the controversy is expected to fade away, sparing the Vatican any possible embarrassment over claims that the priest was a closet homosexual.

It couldn't possibly be that it is the grotesque hacks in the homosexualist movement who staged the "furore" as a publicity stunt at the expense of the English Catholic believers who might have anything to be embarrassed about...

Nope, no bias under here...

Tautologies

a free gift

an aromatic aroma

a new innovation

a violent terrorist

a journalistic hack

a dishonest leftist

a biased BBC

Which section exactly?

A "cross section" of Peterborough population doesn't want to see the RAF personnel wearing their uniforms.

Specifically?

The abuse had come from a "cross-section" of the community, he added, and was believed to be linked to the RAF's operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A quick lesson in media spin from Auntie Beeb

The BBC offers us the following information in the following order:

Local Referendums came back with 88% asking for a referendum.

A total of 152,520 people in ten Lib-Dem and Labour ridings voted, with 133,251 backing a referendum.

IWAR claims the turnout is higher than that in local council elections.

Higher education minister Bill Rammell dismissed the poll as "flawed".

36.2% voter turnout

Mr Rammell said the turnout figure in his Harlow constituency where a vote was held was "lower than any local government election that I have ever participated in"

Now, let's examine the manner in which this information has been presented. None of it is factually untrue. But the impression is carefully constructed to support the Labour position that there is neither a need nor a demand for a referendum on the EU.

First we are told that although 88% voted for the referendum, it is only a "claim" by the campaign organizers that this number is higher than the average turnout on local elections. This is immediately followed by noting that a senior member of Cabinet - an "expert politician" - thought it was rubbish. This is followed by the percentage, 36.2, which in turn is followed by a further elaboration from The Important Cabinet Minister on how the whole thing is rubbish.

By this time, the Beeb knows full well, the decision of the reader has been made since the average reader of online news reads at most the first 300 words of any article. We don't get a quote from an organizer until 450 words have gone by, a nice safe margin. And not until after there has been a nice little slur thrown in from the Official Government Guy about how it's all really just a Tory party stitch-up anyway.

The last nail? The photo is a shot of some old guy, dressed in an anorak and flat cap. A person, in other words, who bodily represents Old Britain, the Britain most despised by the hip young internet-reading, latte-sipping denizens of Beebworld. A person whose opinion, in other words, doesn't count and who can be dismissed as probably a crank. He probably even still goes to church on Sundays too.

What Auntie isn't telling you is what the average voter turnout in local elections actually is. Something that is very easy to confirm at 35.4%. (How? easy. Stick "voter turnout UK" into Google and all the official and unofficial documentation one could hope for, including that from the Beeb/Guardian Axis, is at the reporter's fingertips in 0.27 seconds.)

The average turnout for local elections (when not held with general elections) since 1996 is 35.4%. The average turnout in referendums on directly elected mayors - including in London - is 30.1%.

This means that the mini referendum, organised by local volunteers of every party, brought out the highest turnout in recent British electoral history. And the highest ever in an unofficial vote.

Our caretakers at the Beeb also decline to note what the ballot question was.

Voters were asked two questions:

Should the hold a national referendum on the EU's Treaty?

88% voted yes and 12% voted no. Less than 1% did not answer.

Should the approve the EU's Treaty?
89% voted against the Treaty and 8% voted in favour. 3% did not answer.

Auntie was also careful to censor the quotes, not including one from Anthony Wells from UK Polling Report, an independent expert who said: "A turnout in the mid thirties is stunning for a private referendum, higher than you'd expect to find in some actual local elections. Private referendums run the risk of only those sympathetic to the cause taking part in the vote, but with independent opinion polls consistently showing around four-fifths of those who express an opinion support a referendum, these don't seem too out of line."

Have aliens stolen the brains of the Guardian editors?

and if they have, are they on our side?

Denying us a vote on the EU treaty is arrogant cowardice

Without the debate a referendum would bring, Britons will rebel against unsanctioned meddling, to the union's detriment

Simon Jenkins
Wednesday January 23, 2008
The Guardian

The House of Commons is about to do a proper job. For the next month it is not discussing the new European constitution or "Lisbon treaty". That is sealed and delivered, and was so back in 2005. The Commons is discussing whether Britain should agree to it, and how. The debate is already angry and bad-tempered, an excellent sign.

On this subject there are just two facts that matter. The first is that everyone but a fool (or a minister) knows that the new treaty is the rejected 2005 constitution in all but name. Its architect, the former French president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, says so. The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, who negotiated its passage, says so explicitly. Even the pro-government Commons foreign affairs committee said so, at least in part, last week. As the pro-EU Tory Kenneth Clarke remarked in the Commons on Monday, the foreign secretary, David Miliband, would look less miserable if he abandoned his absurd denial, admitted reality and got on with the debate.

(Ok OKAY! So I read the Guardian. Actually, I get headlines sent to me by Google News Alerts and they include the Guardian. Sheesh!)

I guess it's really true

that wonders never ever cease:

The Guardian has come out against Livingstone.

To understand why Ken Livingstone is unfit to be the Labour candidate for mayor of London, you have to grasp that he has never moved away from the grimy conspirators of the totalitarian left, who have always despised the democratic traditions of the Labour movement. There is a queasiness about dragging them into the light because so many of the baby boomers now in power wasted their youth in Marxist-Leninist politics. But it is better to overcome queasiness than fail to treat a sickness and Ken Livingstone began by travelling with the sickest sect of them all: the Workers' Revolutionary party....

I remember the shock and awe when the Globe and Mail dumped the Liberals and supported Harper. Like the day it stopped raining in Vancouver and this big weird scary bright yellow thing appeared in the sky where the cloud roof is supposed to be and all the pastey-faced bug eyed Vancouverites ran around in a panic thinking it was the end of the world. Lotta lattes spilled that day.

wellwellwell...

Hmp.

...but of course, no one ever asks us...

Judging from the wallet-polls, not very many British people are in agreement with the BBC/Guardian Axis editorial position.

The Daily Mail has one of the largest circulations of any English language daily newspaper, and the twelfth highest of any newspaper in the world....The Daily Mail considers itself to be the voice of Middle England, speaking up for "small-c" conservative values against what it sees as a liberal establishment. It generally takes an anti-European, anti-immigration, anti-homosexuality, anti-atheism, anti-abortion view, and is correspondingly pro-family, pro-tax cuts and pro-monarchy, as well as advocating stricter punishments for crime. The paper is generally critical of the BBC, which it perceives as being biased to the left.

Media Bias 2 - Proof the Devil Exists?

This from a friend. I make no comment.

Looking at ye NYT front page for today, I note, hardly for the first time: every single article which begins there has a malicious political slant, whether subtle or overt, & contributes to the known gliberal agenda, & has for its point of departure some "event" or "angle" that is essentially cooked, that would not be news if the NYT had not decided to make it news.

This is what we are up against in politics -- in the USA. Where it is better than here, because the fight isn't over.

And I am struck, over time, by the consistency, & humourlessness, of this malice. For here is the test: that in every issue, the subject of the attack is the person or institution that has behaved better; the beneficiary is the person or institution that has behaved worse. The argument itself is always fungible; & usually quite breathtakingly selective. In almost every instance, the big fact has been left out of the account, to let all the little facts breathe.

Without postulating the devil, it would be impossible to explain the NYT.