Chutzpah

 

The chutzpah of the man who incited the January 6th riots complaining that he was misrepresented after pardoning all his rioters is off the scale.  Does anyone really understand why Tim Davie seemingly resigned over one edit in a 2 hour speech - is Panoarma supposed to be 2 and a half hours now?  Why does an edit in a speech that happened over 5 years ago and was broadcast over a year ago really matter to anyone?  Doubtless he was going to stand down soon anyway and thinks that this will pacify critics of the BBC but that's not how fascists work.  As can be seen on the left, Mr Trump is a bully with no grace who gloats at the elimination of his enemies like a James Bond supervillan.  All this disctraction in the same week that Donald Trump pardoned Rudy Giuliani over attempt to overturn 2020 election.  He pardoned all the rioters on his first day in office too, just in case anyone had any doubts over how sticky his fingers were over attempts to steal that election.

Michael Prescott who wrote the 8000 word "note" ...in effect a shopping list of complaints was an "External Advisor" to the BBC for which we the Licence Fee payers shelled out £15,000 a year.  He was contracted by the "Serota Review, the BBC Board has decided that the Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee would benefit from additional editorial advice from editorial experts with significant experience outside the BBC".  Clearly he spent all his time coming up with specious complaints which everyone got bored listening to.  The Serota Review (named after a bloke who used to work at the Tate who conducted it) was brought about in part by Martin Bashir's 1995 interview with Princess Diana in which he told her a series of absolute whoppers in order to get Diana to admit there was adultery with Camilla in her marriage.  We're now conveniently for the establishment not allowed to watch this documentary again despite the fact that the essence of what was said (that Charlie and Camilla were lovers) remains true and Diana is pushing up the daisies in the center of the Oval Lake at Althorp Park and cannot possibly be hurt by its content anymore.

Prescott identifies terrible innacuracies in BBC reporting such as "Despite growing concerns that this new methodology was unreliable, the UN and media outlets, including the BBC, reported that 70 per cent of all those killed in Gaza were women and children. Eventually the UN reviewed and revised down the figure to 52 per cent"

Quite right.  We wouldn't want to get wrong the proportion of women and children that Bibi has genocided in plain sight.

Other specious complaints include "Mass graves.  In April, 2024, and again in June, the BBC covered two stories relating to the discovery of mass graves in Gaza. The first was discovered at Al Nasser hospital and the second at Al Shifa.  The strong implication in the coverage was that Israeli forces had buried hundreds of bodies at both sites prior to withdrawing from the area. The source for both stories was the Hamas controlled Gaza Civil Defence Agency. This was not reflected in the coverage. The internal report to the EGSC flagged: “There was no independent corroboration of allegations of war crimes, including alleged evidence of summary executions, torture and bodies found with their hands tied together”.One online story incorrectly implied a UN official had corroborated the reports of hands being tied." <- Unfortunately they did (“Among the deceased were allegedly older people, women and wounded, while others were found tied with their hands…tied and stripped of their clothes,” said Ravina Shamdasani, spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.). 

But there is no point in correcting these errors.  Mr Prescott and his fellow travellors are simply trying to batter the BBC into submission by sheer quantity of output.

All of Trump's attempts to subvert the January 6th election are recorded in detail on Jack Smith's report (his prosecutions had to be aborted when Trump's re-election gave him immunity again:

E. Mr. Trump's Supporters Attack the United States Capitol

Mr. Trump's efforts to remain in power converged and culminated on January 6, the day that Mr. Biden was to be certified President. That day, Mr. Trump was scheduled to speak at the Ellipse to the crowd of supporters he had summoned to Washington with false claims of election fraud. 94 At around 1 :00 a.m. on the morning of January 6, Mr. Trump tweeted: "If Vice President @Mike_Pence comes through for us, we will win the Presidency. Many States want to decertify the mistake they made in certifying incorrect & even fraudulent numbers in a process NOT approved by their State Legislatures (which it must be). Mike can send it back!"  Just before he left the White House to give his speech at the Ellipse, Mr. Trump phoned Mr. Pence one last time;  when Mr. Pence told Mr. Trump that he planned to issue a public statement making clear that he lacked the authority to do what Mr. Trump wanted, Mr. Trump expressed anger at him.  He then directed staffers to re-insert into his planned Ellipse speech some language that he had drafted earlier targeting Mr. Pence.  During his speech at the Ellipse,  Mr. Trump made one more attempt to retain power. In his remarks, Mr. Trump repeated many of the same lies he had been telling for monthsregarding dead voters, non-citizen voters, and vote dumps-and he told newer ones: lies that targeted states wanted to change their electors and that Mr. Pence had the authority, and might be persuaded, to change the election results.  The lie regarding Mr. Pence was particularly deceptive because Mr. Trump knew what his supporters in the crowd did not: that Mr. Pence had just told him in no uncertain terms that he would not do what Mr. Trump was demanding.  Mr. Trump told the crowd-a crowd of his supporters that he had remarked to advisors the night before was "angry" -that the election had been stolen and the country would no longer exist if this purported crime were not stopped; and that the discovery of "fraud" licensed them to "go by very different rules."  Although Mr. Trump at one point also told his supporters to "peacefully and patriotically make [their] voices heard," he used the word "fight" more than ten times in the speech before concluding by directing his supporters to march to the Capitol to give allied Members of Congress "the kind of pride and boldness they need to take back our country."  He also told the angry crowd that "if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore."  Throughout the speech, Mr. Trump gave his supporters false hope that through such action, they could cause Mr. Pence to overturn the election results, even improvising new lines directed at Mr. Pence as the speech went on. 

At Mr. Trump's urging, thousands of his supporters marched from the Ellipse to the Capitol building.  There, Mr. Pence began the certification at around 1 :00 p.m.  Outside the building, the crowd swelled and broke through barriers cordoning off the grounds.  The crowd that attacked the Capitol was filled with Mr. Trump's supporters, as made clear by their Trump shirts, signs, and flags.  As described in detail below, the crowd violently attacked the law enforcement officers attempting to secure the building.  

After his speech, Mr. Trump returned to the White House and, at around 1 :30 p.m., settled in the dining room off of the Oval Office.  There, he watched television news coverage of events at the Capitol and reviewed Twitter on his phone.  When the angry crowd advanced on the Capitol building and breached it at around 2: 13 p.m., forcing the Senate to recess,  several of Mr. Trump's advisors rushed to the dining room and told him that a riot had started at the Capitol and that rioters were in the building.  Over the course of the afternoon, they forcefully urged Mr. Trump to issue calming messages to his supporters.  Mr. Trump resisted, repeatedly remarking that the people at the Capitol were angry because the election had been stolen. 

Just before 2:24 p.m., the news channel playing on the television in the dining room where Mr. Trump was sitting aired an interview with an individual marching from the Ellipse to the Capitol, who expressed his anger at Mr. Pence and stated, "But I still believe President Trump has something else left."  Then, at 2:24 p.m., sitting alone, Mr. Trump issued a Tweet attacking Mr. Pence and fueling the riot: "Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previouslycertify. USA demands the truth!"  One minute later, the United States Secret Service was forced to evacuate Mr. Pence to a secure location at the Capitol. 126 When an advisor at the White House learned this, he rushed to the dining room and informed Mr. Trump, who replied

"So what?" 

The rioters at the Capitol had been motivated and directed by Mr. Trump, and he continued to resist advisors' requests to direct them to leave. Throughout the afternoon, crowds at the Capitol hunted for Mr. Pence and other lawmakers, with some chanting, "Hang Mike Pence!"  At 2:38 p.m. and 3:30 p.m., Mr. Trump issued two Tweets falsely suggesting that events at the Capitol were "peaceful" and asking individuals there (whom he termed "WE") to remain that way: "Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement. They are truly on theside of our Country. Stay Peaceful!" and, "I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order-respect the Law 

and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!"  At 4: 17 p.m., he tweeted a video

message in which he for the first time asked his supporters to leave the Capitol-while at the

same time falsely claiming that "[w]e had an election that was stolen from us ... a landslide

election," and embracing the people who had attacked the Capitol, telling them "we love you,

you're very special."  And at 6:01 p.m., he tweeted, "These are the things and events that

happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped

away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love

& in peace. Remember this day forever!" At around the same time as he issued his 6:01 p.m. Tweet, Mr. Trump tried to reach two United States Senators, and he also directed Co-Conspirator 1 to call Members of Congress and attempt to enlist them to further delay the certification.  When Mr. Trump's White House Counsel called him at around 7:00 p.m. and asked him to withdraw any objections to the

certification, Mr. Trump refused.  Nonetheless, the certification resumed late in the evening of January 6 and, at 3:41 a.m. on January 7, Mr. Pence announced the certified results of the 2020

presidential election in favor of Mr. Biden. As he did in his 4:17 p.m. and 6:01 p.m. Tweets on January 6, Mr. Trump has providedadditional evidence of his intent by continuing to support and ally himself with the people whoattacked the Capitol. He has called them "patriots"  and "hostaoes " reminisced about January 6 as a "beautiful day,"  and championed the "January 6 Choir," a group of January 6

defendants who, because of their dangerousness, are detained at the District of Columbia jail. 

Remember Remember

 When Guy Fawkes was caught trying to blow up Parliament we got a cultural festival out of it.  

But in the boring 21st century MI5 have foiled 43 terrorist plots since 2017 and we haven't got one fucking poem out of it.  It's time to fix this so...

Remember, remember!

The 22nd of December,

Richard Reid tried to ignite his trainer

I know of no reason

Why shoes with semtex in 

Should not be in a poem!

Reid and the Taliban 

Did the scheme contrive,

To blow Boeing passengers

All up alive.

Two hollowed out shoes he had set to blow

but his sweaty feet made the fuse too damp so

by Allah's providence, him they did catch,

after the passengers beat him up when he lit a match!

Misleading Statistic of the Day

It's hard to keep up with all the whoppers in the world today but I particularly enjoyed this one from Liz Truss.  Here Mr Sentance is showing the rate of change of GDP per decade not GDP per decade to decieve the reader that this is actual GDP and to make it even more opaque the statistics for each year are first annualised and then added together and averaged over a ten year period rather than just being cumulitatively averaged.  

A GDP graph that hadn't been differentiated to show the rate of change of GDP rather than GDP would look like this... 

Dog whistle of the week

 

Stones of Blood

The Seeds of Rhinoplasty

Due to them wearing out and my VHS player being increasingly hard to service (it's a beautiful piece of engineering inside), I invested a great deal of £s in updating my Doctor Who VHS collection to DVD.  That's it I thought.  A good investment.  After all VHS had only half the picture quality of DVD which can faithfully reproduce all 625 lines on an old cathode ray tube but slightly flatter. But blow-me-down-with-an-industrial-wind-machine if the BBC didn't find a way to milk their old content further by releasing it on Blu-ray.  Well, I can't afford that at £50 a go, no matter how many extras they put on.  No disrespect to Toby Hadoke & Co but I don't want to pay their pension.  Particularly since at the same time the BBC made almost all old Dr Who free on iPlayer.  

Free FOI Use Of Public

So imagine my schadenfreude when I discovered there were problems with the Blu-rays & the BBC in an attempt to drain more money from fans had applied dodgy AI upscaling filters that give Sarah Jane a cleft palette, straighten Tom Baker's crooked teeth like they're selling unnecessary dental work, make old people look like they've had the world's worst facelifts or are filtered TikTok influencers who've had plastic surgery to make them look like their own filters ...and dyslexicly (is that a word?) rewrite the words on the TARDIS door in dodgy fonts...  

Terror of the
Zygoma reduction plasty

All because some people bought massive 92 inch TVs on which you can see the CRT lines.  Not that anyone's really crying out for AI "upscaling", it's just people inventing themselves work.  I do have the Spearhead from Space Bluray as this was entirely made on film so there is extra quality to be mined but that's it ... How much more blood can they get out of these stones...?

So three cheers for my not-so-old DVDs where everyone doesn't look like they've been replaced by an Auton.  The past is another country ... and eventually they're going to reach a point where there's no one to bring back to do DVD extras anymore because everyone will have passed on.  Which is a shame because the thing that makes "classic" Doctor Who DVDs so much fun is everyone on the commentaries etc is now retired and can be brutally honest about what they actually thought of their colleagues at the time without the fear of losing work.  

The Artificial Intelligence Invasion 

I look forward to the fully immersive holographic 2040 Whateveritisthen editions of "New Who" which faithfully recreate an old Cathode Ray Tube TV with glass and broadcast signal distortions being released with Christopher Eccleston telling us what he really thinks of RTD and Captain Jack's naked body eventually...

Not that anyone's really bitchy on the commentaries but you can tell the diplomacy filter is switched off in most of the contributors.  It being new content they're selling no one's going to let the side down say "Well, that was a bit pants" on a New Who commentary.  The occasionally brutal honesty is the fun really...

In other Doctor Who news the BBC are still trying to prise old film prints off miserly film collectors but are stuck in probate processes.  I upset someone on X by refering to these collectors as misers.  I do apologise.  Its very generous of them not to just be buried with their film collections like a modern day Tutankhamun.  Let's not get into the ethics of whether these prints should have been returned to BBC Enterprises to be destroyed.  We know for a fact that when Peter Cook contemporaneously offered to store the old copies of "Not Only... but Also" to save them from landfill, the BBC refused on policy grounds and destroyed them anyway.  They're all out there somewhere, dumpster divers!  According to the unreliable narrator that is Ian Levine when he walked into BBC Enterprises on behalf of JNT all 7 positives and all 7 negatives of "The Daleks" were sitting on a table marked "to be junked" because they didn't understand that the main archive had been purged as ruthlessly as one of Stalin's Politburos...

But anyway... the BBC have generously promised to broadcast a new episode in December 2026 after the Disney deal finally fell apart ... and before Christmas they'll be releasing the War Between Land And Sea spin-off that nobody asked for but ... Let's keep an open mind...  Apparently post production takes almost a year these days... With the result that everyone thought "The Interstellar Song Contest" was a comment on the War in Gaza despite the script being written before it started.  Maybe there's something to be said for leaving a few bloopers in and doing it stupidly quickly on a shoestring...