Who fact-checks the fact-checkers? Whatever you do, don’t ask Marianna Spring. If new revelations are to be believed, the BBC’s ‘disinformation and social-media correspondent’ – who has been showered with awards, praise, broadsheet profiles and glossy photoshoots for her putative one-woman stand against online lies and conspiracy theories – can’t even be trusted to produce a relatively factual CV.
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September 13th, 2023 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
 I had never heard of Noam Dworman before today. Apparently he is the owner of a comedy venue in New York and he does podcasts. I had vaguely heard of the Washington Post columnist Philip Bump, and I had certainly heard of the Washington Post. Woodward. Bernstein. Watergate. Like thousands of others, after seeing ‘All the President’s Men’, I dreamed of being an investigative reporter. The WaPo is not what it was, judging from Bump’s performance on this edition of Dworman’s podcast. When Dworman called it “Live From The Table: Philip Bump Battles Hard on Hunter Biden” he was too charitable. The main thing Bump battles to do is not acknowledge the steaming great news story in front of his nose and to extricate himself before someone asks a reporter at the Washington Post to investigate the President. I often think it is a valuable exercise to type out extracts from videos so that what is in them has a better chance to reach the quite large number of people who don’t watch videos. So I tried to transcribe what was said in the last few minutes of this podcast, starting at 1:10:25. There were several places where Bump and Dworman talked over each other, so forgive me if I didn’t get every word. All the bold type was added by me.
I would have thought it was clear enough.
I could not hear whether Bump then says that he appreciates Dworman asking the question or that he appreciates Dworman asking him to be on his podcast, but judging from his repetition of the line later, it was probably him trying to end the session.
For a very brief moment I thought that Mr Bump was about to say that the Washington Post would fearlessly grab the story and not let go.
When Mr Bump was a little boy, did he watch All The President’s Men like I did? Did he dream that one day he would be a journalist at the very same newspaper as Woodward and Bernstein, and that he too would have evidence of Presidential malfeasance put before him, and that he would see it for what it was, and that he would… …complain that he’d been sitting in the same seat for half an hour more than he was booked for and say, “Yeah, after a while I go.” September 2nd, 2023 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
Katie Morley is the Telegraph’s “Consumer Champion”. People who feel they have been mistreated by companies write to her and she puts their tales of woe in the paper and threatens the company with even more bad publicity if they won’t put things right. Her articles usually end with a line about how So-and-so company has issued a full refund and apologised. Usually, but not always. Her most recent piece was this one: ‘I spent £27,000 on a cruise I can’t afford, and Cunard won’t give me a full refund’ Her anonymous correspondent says,
After listing some of the things wrong with this ‘preparatory’ trip on the Queen Victoria, the writer finishes by saying,
Ms Morley did express sympathy for the writer’s health and financial troubles, but her sympathy did not extend to taking up the cudgels on his behalf. She wrote,
What really interested me was the response from the Telegraph readers. I expected them to support Cunard, and they did, but I had not expected so many of them to specifically resent the way that the writer had attempted to garner sympathy by mentioning that he and his wife were retired NHS workers. The most recommended comment was by Roger Sidney and said, “Love the bit about ‘we are retired NHS workers’. Come one everyone, give ’em a clap!” Someone called Mytwo Penneth said, “Former NHS workers booking £27k cruises and speculating on shares. Then they have the brass neck to get KM involved in an attempt to recover a deposit.” Brian Gedalla said, “Nice to see some backbone from Katie. You could have played “Entitlement Bingo” with this one. Like Roger below, I laughed out loud when I got to the “we are retired NHS workers” line.” There were many other similar comments. Although I have long since ceased to believe that a command economy is a good way to arrange a nation’s healthcare, my own experiences with the National Health Service have been good. Those people I know who work for it are hardworking, and I did clap during the pandemic, and meant it. My view that it would be desirable to privatise the NHS is only shared by about 2% of British people. Even among Telegraph readers, the great majority still support the NHS model. I do not think that the anger in these replies was motivated by hostility to the NHS per se. But something has changed in Britain when so many refuse NHS workers the automatic deference that this pair clearly expected to receive. August 30th, 2023 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Horses sweat, men perspire, ladies glow.” To the Guardian’s Steven Morris, responding to a government consultation is another of those famous irregular verbs that changes its form according to who does it.
“Powerful UK gun lobby” my breech. It has lost every legislative battle in my lifetime.
Making it easy for members of the public to respond to a Green Paper or other public consultation exercise is usually just the sort of thing the Guardian supports. The whole point of such things is that anyone with an interest in the subject is encouraged to give their view, and all advocacy groups consider it a core part of their function to tell their members that such consultations are taking place and to advise them what to say. Would anyone really prefer that a democratic country went ahead with a proposed new law without seeking input from all viewpoints? The answer to that is yes, some would prefer exactly that. Among them is Peter Squires, a professor of criminology and public policy at the University of Brighton. He says,
The consultation could turn out to be farcical in one of several ways. But if you want to give it a go, here is the link again. The deadline is tomorrow, 23rd August 2023. August 22nd, 2023 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
We are told climate change is a crisis, and that there is an “overwhelming scientific consensus.” “It’s a manufactured consensus,” says climate scientist Judith Curry in my new video. She says scientists have an incentive to exaggerate risk to pursue “fame and fortune.” She knows about that because she once spread alarm about climate change. … which will come as a shock to no one here 😉 August 13th, 2023 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
The good folk at The Cobden Centre have put together a very good documentary to explain how the fiat money system works, and has some suggestions as to what to do about it. At the instigation of the Sage of Kettering, (full disclosure, his cousin made it), here it is. I have watched it and it is very good. Ex Nihilo: The Truth about Money. My only quibble is that it repeatedly refers to banks creating money out of thin air, but there is some substance to ‘thin air’, which, after all, can sustain respiration and hold up aircraft. August 5th, 2023 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
I haven’t trusted a word the BBC says about much for several decades, but I do remember a time when at least weather reports could be taken at face value. Now I don’t even know if they are lying about that. Turns out many of the breathless inferno weather reports from southern Europe were being drastically overstated, sometimes by as much as 10 degrees! Make no mistake, the “nudge unit” is at work, spreading its statist bullshit far and wide. July 21st, 2023 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
Either the Independent‘s “Race Correspondent” (who, to add to the comedy, is called Nadine White) has written a report almost designed to be misunderstood, or she is a satirist of genius. I present to you this story: “Now the royal family is dragged into the n-word race row” Juicy! Which one of ’em was it? Will Meghan’s Spotify podcast be coming back so she can discuss it? Sorry to disappoint, but the connection to the current royal family is strong as a cobweb: it seems a catalogue of gems and jewels owned by the Royal Collection “contained more than 40 mentions of offensive racial terms”. The aberrant public catalogue concerning a sub-collection of jewels, cameos, and other small items was actually published fifteen years ago in 2008 but remained on the Royal Collection’s website until the intrepid offence archaeologists of the Independent found it last Thursday. Since the cataloguing and study of the whole collection by historians is an ongoing process, those particular entries could have been written decades earlier. Here is the current webpage. Fear not, it has been purged. And about that “offensive racial term” in the 2008 version… it wasn’t the n-word the Independent wants you to think it was.
Count the asterisks. Four, not five. Ergo it was egro, or in the final example, egroid. UPDATE 16:20 BST: Someone at the Independent read the readers’ comments. The newspaper has now changed n**** to n***o throughout the article. July 17th, 2023 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
…and Piers Morgan is someone who literally his entire career is now fuelled by this sort of nonsense. And as you know I have been on Good Morning Britain four times now. I have always found it to be a deeply unpleasant experience even when I’ve “won”. Because the way it happens – and most people won’t know this – but when you are backstage they keep you separate from the guests that you are supposed to be debating. They try and psych you up. They try and say “You should feel free to interrupt as much as possible” and the one time I was on with Peter Tatchell who for all his flaws I deeply respect and I didn’t want to be a dick and interrupt him all the time they actually basically had a go at me afterwards and that clip was never even put on the internet because it was not seen as being inflammatory enough. So the whole purpose of these shows is to create conflicts and create soundbites and create all this nonsense and Piers Morgan is like a parasite feeding off the carcass of civil discourse. – about 14 mins from the beginning of a Triggernometry “RAW” live stream from c. March 2021. Piers Morgan, of course, left GMB in a row over Meghan Markle. Earlier this year he appeared on Kissin and Francis Foster’s Triggernometry podcast. July 15th, 2023 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Empires were built on exploitation – and adjectives” claims the Guardian‘s Lucy Mangan. Here is the article in which she does it: “Joanna Lumley’s Spice Trail Adventure review – a deeply problematic travelogue”. Ms Mangan writes,
Evil Joanna Lumley, arranging to be born in India in 1946. The revelation that the adjective was the European’s secret weapon all along comes as part of a description of a scene in which Joanna Lumley eats nutmeg and says how much she likes it.
I cannot help feeling that this statement from Lucy Mangan is problematic itself. If the English, or in the case of the Banda Islands, Dutch, adjective played a significant part in the subjugation of nations, surely that implies that the native adjectives that failed to stand up to the invaders were less puissant, less krachtig? I am not a believer in the popular theory that language determines thought, but since Lucy Mangan seems to be, someone ought to let her know that the theory implies that some languages are just better than others. Or did Mangan mean that Lumley ought to have been using Banda Malay adjectives rather than oppressive English ones? Wait, wouldn’t that be cultural appropriation? It’s so hard to keep up. Maybe she meant that Joanna Lumley’s sin was to use adjectives at all. Only a Raj-born 1946-ite such as Lumley wastes the people’s oxygen with words like “divine”, “sensational”, “stunning”, “extraordinary”, “ravishing” and “enchanted” when “doubleplusgood” is available, to continue the 1984 theme from yesterday’s post on “doublethink”. Perhaps I err in trying to ascribe meaning to that sentence at all. How bourgeois to think that an anti-colonialist review of a TV travel show published in the Guardian has to withstand analysis. There was an excellent Newspeak word for phrases like “Empires were built on exploitation – and adjectives”, “duckspeak”, meaning speech that issued from the larynx without involving the higher brain centres at all, like the quacking of a duck. Note that so long as the speech was orthodox, to call someone a doubleplusgood duckspeaker was a term of praise. July 8th, 2023 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
Journalism is about covering important stories. With a pillow, until they stop moving. June 1st, 2023 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
Tara Reade, the woman who accused Joe Biden of having sexually assaulted her when she worked for him as a Congressional aide, has “defected” to Russia.
I first noticed her direction of travel when I saw a tweet by her in praise of Vladlen Tatarsky. Plenty of people had concerns about his killing without gushing over him in the way she did. I cannot find that tweet now. It was there. Perhaps she deleted it when she read the replies. At any rate, she has now gone fully Putinite. And her accusation against Joe Biden should still be taken seriously by the authorities. Note that “taken seriously” does not mean “automatically believed”. #BelieveWomen is a literally prejudiced sentiment on a moral par with #BelieveWhitePeople. Nor does it mean “automatically disbelieved”. As a woman and a Putinite, Tara Reade’s report of a crime being committed against her should be taken seriously, because as an anything whatsoever anyone whatsoever should have their report of a crime taken seriously. The gross disproportion between the way the media lined up not merely to cover but to profess their unquestioning belief in Christine Blasey Ford’s unevidenced accusation of sexual assault against Justice Brett Kavanaugh yet refused to even look at Reade’s considerably more detailed accusation of sexual assault against Joe Biden will never be anything other than a disgrace. May 31st, 2023 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
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