Richard Black, BBC, Hypocrisy, and FOI

Black’s photo makes him looking like he and Michael Mann were separated at birth.

GEE, Doesn’t that smell just like the University of Virgina!

Virginia’s highest court has ruled that Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli cannot compel the University of Virginia to turn over records dealing with the work of a former university climate scientist, ending an extraordinary legal battle between Cuccinelli and his alma mater.
The Supreme Court of Virginia ruled Friday that the attorney general does not have the authority to issue a “civil investigative demand” to state agencies, including public universities, under the state’s Fraud Against Taxpayers Act…. http://www.roanoke.com/news/roanoke/wb/305722

the high court ruled today that the university is not “a person” under the act, and the term “corporation” as used in the statute does not include state agencies such as public universities.
If ever we needed examples that there are two sets of laws, one for “us” and one for the Regulating Class and that universities and the media belong to the Regulating Class we certainly have been getting a lot of evidence recently.

MangoChutney: This is a most awesome typo — “…unless you want a lot of carp in your email.” Good god! Carp in one’s e-mail is terrifying. Imagine the little bastards swimming around in your inbox. Intolerable! 🙂
Anyway, Richard Black is jerk. I know this because I know a guy, who knows a guy, who knows someone who knew someone that met Richard Black in real life, and that’s what they said. Jerk, they said. Pretty trustworthy fifth-hand info, I’d say. 😛

Ahh. The privilege of the liberal elite.

The utter hypocricy is astounding….. Anyway, a taxpayer funded media broadcaster is an obscenity in a modern democracy as far as I am concerned..

As if on cue, Richard Black as a total wing nut article on BBC front page.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17400804
The wild claims as well as purported inane solutions to what is, in reality, a non-existent problem is simply staggering. A front page that would normally be expected to be seen on National Enquirer along side an article “Mum gives birth to Gorilla”.
Richard Black is a pathetic creature. I wish him no ill but the sooner he finds another outlet for his twisted depressed mind the better. Richard really needs to learn how to enjoy life and the wonders of our world. Poor guy.

Mmmm i wonder if our ally (is it Graham Stringer M.P.) in Parliament might be able to find anything out.
What difference F.O.I requests made about Journalists makes is beyond me???Yet ANOTHER on the public’s pay list and supposedly unaccountable,where did it all go wrong with the BBC?

The BBC are not interested in transparency, except where they can obtain information about others. They are not interested in equity, except when it is other people who shoulder the burdent. They are not interested in reducing carbon footprints, except when it is other’s who are doing so.
The BBC is a lib-left elitist group who look down on the ordinary folk who pay their wages. The great unwashed, the hoi-poloi, the plebs. They are hypocrits extremis and should be allowed to die in the playing fields of the free market.

I recalled this post and googled it, the forum details do not include how it was sourced. The numbers suggest that BBC staff are a somewhat mobile bunch. Also mentioned, some difficulty in getting updates. 🙂
“BBC’s Carbon Footprint
« Thread Started on Aug 6, 2007, 7:55pm »
Quote:
In the period Jan- Dec 2004 (The most recent for which data is available) BBC staff and other individuals on BBC business took a total of 51,570 flights with an aggregate mileage of 181,706,000 miles. Or 1000 flights a week.
This is equivalent to 36,543,000 kgs of carbon emissions.
I am trying to get this up to date -but there is resistance.”
http://biasedbbc.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=hotair&action=display&thread=526

Cant see why there would be an exemption under FOI for asking how many flaights he took last year. The data should be readily available— he should just look back through his diary — simples
I can understand some off the reluctance with detailed personal contract details— but not the number of flights— the preach to everyone else to keep these down.
I would put in a formal appeal to the information Commisioner on the Flights issue— this was what the FOI was supposed to be for. Shows the BBC up as hypocrictical—- usual left tendancy

In the same way that men sweat but women glow, mortals are hypocrites but gods are capricious.
Perhaps it is time to occupy Mount Olympus.

That’s funny. Heartland posts its annual tax return online. Took me 3 minutes to find it.
http://heartland.org/media-library/pdfs/2010-IRS-Form-990.pdf
But they are opaque?
Here, by the by, is BBC’s financial report. I doubt they have the information you need in there, but you can always check.
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/annualreport/pdf/bbc_ar_online_2010_11.pdf

Doug Proctor said (March 17, 2012 at 10:03 am)
“…The power to determine what is and what is not discussed. Hansen, Gore, Gleick – none will argue publicly because they will not be able to control what is said by the other side, and not be able to control what they have to answer…”
And I’ve noticed it whenever they post somewhere – they tend to prefer sites where the moderation agrees with their views. Every time their “message” is sent out of their “zone” the comments are HEAVILY negative to their tactics.
This has been a well-known idea in law circles – don’t ask a question unless you already know the right answer. You may not like the reply you get.
An addition to that would be “Never make a posting at a blog where you don’t control the moderation. You may not like the comments you receive.”

Richard Black and Michael Mann look as though they were separated at birth.
It would explain one heck of a lot if they turned out to be one and the same person. (:-

If you want to know all about the BBC’s attempts to ‘hide the truth’ just Google ‘Balen Report’. The BBC spent around £200,000 of licence payers money to prevent details of a report into biased reporting, by the BBC, from being released to the public.
The BBC is now known worldwide for the politically-based slant they place on articles of ‘key subjects’ – e.g. AGW, the EU, certain religions…., the Israel/Palestinian conflict – to name but a few.
From once being a beacon of accurate and impartial reporting the BBC are now an embarrassment to the British public.

> That graph of Arctic sea ice reductions, in this Richard Black article. Did not someone prove that this was merely a computer model
It is PIOMAS, like it says it is.
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/wordpress/research/projects/arctic-sea-ice-volume-anomaly/
We don’t have obs of sea ice volume (well, certainly not back that far).

OMG. Clones!!!!
We’re all doomed……..

Mycroft says:
March 17, 2012 at 10:39 am
…
,where did it all go wrong with the BBC?

Well, 2 or 3 generations ago …
Confessions of a BBC liberal

The BBC has finally come clean about its bias, says a former editor, who wrote Yes, Minister
Antony Jay
In the past four weeks there have been two remarkable changes in the public attitude to the BBC. The first and most newsworthy one was precipitated by the faked trailer of the Queen walking out of a photographic portrait session with Annie Leibovitz.
It was especially damaging because the licence fee is based on a public belief that the BBC offers a degree of integrity and impartiality which its commercial competitors cannot achieve.
But in the longer term I believe that the second change is even more significant. It started with the BBC’s own report on impartiality that effectively admitted to an institutional “liberal” bias among programme makers. Previously these accusations had been dismissed as a right-wing rant, but since the report was published even the BBC’s allies seem to accept it.
…
The growing general agreement that the culture of the BBC (and not just the BBC) is the culture of the chattering classes provokes a question that has puzzled me for 40 years. The question itself is simple – much simpler than the answer: what is behind the opinions and attitudes of this social group?
They are that minority often characterised (or caricatured) by sandals and macrobiotic diets, but in a less extreme form are found in The Guardian, Channel 4, the Church of England, academia, showbusiness and BBC news and current affairs. They constitute our metropolitan liberal media consensus, although the word “liberal” would have Adam Smith rotating in his grave. Let’s call it “media liberalism”.
It is of particular interest to me because for nine years, between 1955 and 1964, I was part of this media liberal consensus. For six of those nine years I was working on Tonight, a nightly BBC current affairs television programme. My stint coincided almost exactly with Harold Macmil-lan’s premiership and I do not think that my former colleagues would quibble if I said we were not exactly diehard supporters.
But we were not just anti-Macmil-lan; we were antiindustry, anti-capital-ism, antiadvertising, antiselling, antiprofit, antipatriotism, antimonarchy, antiempire, antipolice, antiarmed forces, antibomb, antiauthority. Almost anything that made the world a freer, safer and more prosperous place – you name it, we were anti it.
Although I was a card-carrying media liberal for the best part of nine years, there was nothing in my past to predispose me towards membership. I spent my early years in a country where every citizen had to carry identification papers. All the newspapers were censored, as were all letters abroad; general elections had been abolished: it was a one-party state. Yes, that was Britain – Britain from 1939 to 1945.
…
So how did we get from there to here? Unless we understand that, we shall never get inside the media liberal mind. And the starting point is the realisation that there have always been two principal ways of misunderstanding a society: by looking down on it from above and by looking up at it from below. In other words, by identifying with institutions or by identifying with individuals.
To look down on society from above, from the point of view of the ruling groups, the institutions, is to see the dangers of the organism splitting apart – the individual components shooting off in different directions until everything dissolves into anarchy.
To look up at society from below, from the point of view of the lowest group, the governed, is to see the dangers of the organism growing ever more rigid and oppressive until it fossilises into a monolithic tyranny.
Those who see society in this way are preoccupied with the need for liberty, equality, self-expression, representation, freedom of speech and action and worship, and the rights of the individual. The reason for the popularity of these misunderstandings is that both views are correct as far as they go and both sets of dangers are real, but there is no “right” point of view.
…
These four factors have significantly accelerated and indeed intensified the spread of media liberalism since I ceased to be a BBC employee 40 years ago.
But let’s suppose that I had stayed. Would I have remained a devotee of the metropolitan media liberal ideology that I once absorbed so readily? I have an awful fear that the answer is yes.

RTWT. Essential b/g!!

Something that the BBC licence payer payed for.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/climateexperiment/whattheymean/theuk.shtml
The BBCs “Climate Change Experiment” (a computer model)

Sorry guys, can we forget the bizarre conspiracy theories and the excuse for knocking the BBC and focus on the FACTS of the progressive, unrelenting loss of sea ice volume? The data is clear for all to see and the predictions flow from the data. If you don’t like it why shoot the messenger? Is it because it’s easier and less painful than facing the reality of what is happening to the planet. The Arctic is our current ‘canary in the mine’ and should be a cause for alarm rather than nonsensical head-in-the-sand reactions.

I attended the Vienna International School in the 80s, run by the United Nations. We were taught that it is more normal for the Earth to not have a ice cap on the North Pole than it is for there to be one. Now Peter says we should be alarmed that the Earth is trending towards its normal state.

Mann, Black, Schmidt, the modern Three Stooges. Ok, who is Larry, who is Moe? We know none of them is Curly.

“Peter says:
March 18, 2012 at 5:56 am
Sorry guys, can we forget the bizarre conspiracy theories and the excuse for knocking the BBC and focus on the FACTS of the progressive, unrelenting loss of sea ice volume? The data is clear for all to see and the predictions flow from the data. If you don’t like it why shoot the messenger? Is it because it’s easier and less painful than facing the reality of what is happening to the planet. The Arctic is our current ‘canary in the mine’ and should be a cause for alarm rather than nonsensical head-in-the-sand reactions.”
Peter (or Richard Black himself perhaps?),
Do yourself a favor and either
1) investigate the science yourself or
2) go back to your Guardian and BBC fairy tales and don’t waste your time on a real science blog like WUWT.
Clearly you have been reading too much propaganda. The stuff Richard Black regularly puts out about the Arctic is so patently ridiculously alarmist that your comments do not even deserve the time of day. Sea ice loss – so what? What in the world makes you think sea ice is supposed to be constant? How do you know that sea ice levels of the 1970’s (a decade randomly selected out of billions of years) are the correct amount for now and forever more, Amen?

I’ve worked in FoI (in Australia) and I want to make the point that the precise manner in which a document, or part of a document, fits within a particular exemption is often quite subjective. It’s surprisingly common for different officers to reach different conclusions about quite similar requests or to argue about on which side of the line a particular request falls.
That said, I note that it was the same Stephanie Harris who gave the details for Harribin’s flights, but refused to release Black’s flight details. Hmmm . . .

Reed Coray [March 18, 2012 at 8:36 am] says:
“Mann, Black, Schmidt, the modern Three Stooges. Ok, who is Larry, who is Moe? We know none of them is Curly.”

They all look like Moe’s to me. 😉
Well he asked.

William M. Connolley [March 18, 2012 at 10:37 am] says:
“It is not possible to merge together the sea ice records before 1979 with those after. The instruments are different and attempting to stick the two records together doesn’t work, which is why people don’t do it.“

Bwahahaha. You didn’t say that with a straight face now did you?
Just give it to Mikey, he’ll splice anything.

Peter says:
March 18, 2012 at 5:56 am
Sorry guys, can we forget the bizarre conspiracy theories and the excuse for knocking the BBC and focus on the FACTS of the progressive, unrelenting loss of sea ice volume? The data is clear for all to see and the predictions flow from the data. If you don’t like it why shoot the messenger? Is it because it’s easier and less painful than facing the reality of what is happening to the planet. The Arctic is our current ‘canary in the mine’ and should be a cause for alarm rather than nonsensical head-in-the-sand reactions.
________________________________________
I suggest you try to wrap your mind around this thread and comments The End Holocene, or How to Make Out Like a ‘Madoff’ Climate Change Insurer
Your canary is healthy.

Peter, 2 simple questions for you.
How much sea ice should there be?
How much sea ice was there at max during 1947?
I can give you the answers. We Don’t Know.
So what is your point again?
“Peter says:
March 18, 2012 at 5:56 am
Sorry guys, can we forget the bizarre conspiracy theories and the excuse for knocking the BBC and focus on the FACTS of the progressive, unrelenting loss of sea ice volume? The data is clear for all to see and the predictions flow from the data. If you don’t like it why shoot the messenger? Is it because it’s easier and less painful than facing the reality of what is happening to the planet. The Arctic is our current ‘canary in the mine’ and should be a cause for alarm rather than nonsensical head-in-the-sand reactions.”