Always Look On The Bright Side Of Death

One likely doesn't have to read about it to realize that GB News is 'right-leaning.'

Ben Phillips

@benphillips76

A clip from Don’t Look Up, and then a real TV interview that just happened.

 

According to BBC News, it is the first channel set up with an explicit political orientation in the United Kingdom.^[86] The channel is described as right-leaning,^{[3][4][5][6][7]} having been forecast to be so by the Financial Times,^[87] and by The Guardian and City A.M. to be similar to Fox News.^[84][13] In The New York Times, Neil was quoted as saying "In terms of formatting and style, I think MSNBC and Fox are the two templates we're following".^[88] He also told the Evening Standard that Fox News was "an easy, inaccurate shorthand for what we are trying to do. In terms of format we are like Fox but we won't be like Fox in that they come from a hard right disinformation fake news conspiracy agenda. I have worked too long and hard to build up a journalistic reputation to consider going down that route."^[89] BBC media editor Amol Rajan said that "it is not the first channel to be set up in Britain with a strong worldview ... But GB News is the first to be set up with an explicit political leaning".^[21] Rajan also stated that "the validity of [the Fox News] comparison is limited".^[21] GB News has not explicitly indicated a political allegiance, and UK news broadcasters are required by Ofcom to maintain "due impartiality".^[90][22]

In a March 2021 episode of BBC Radio 4's The Media Show, Neil stated that his nightly news programme would contain segments such as "Wokewatch" and "Mediawatch".^[91][92] The channel's breakfast show, The Great British Breakfast, initially had three co-anchors, in a similar style to Fox News' Fox & Friends,^[33] but the format changed to two co-anchors from the second week of broadcasting. Free Speech Nation, a current affairs show hosted by Andrew Doyle, airs once a week.^[30]

 

To State The Obvious

 ... in a way only Theo Moudakis can.

A Bit Of A Holiday

We are currently on a trip to Newfoundland, where our son and daughter-in-law moved in the fall, after living and working in Alberta for several years. It is our first trip since Covid, and the first time we have seen them in about two-and-a-half years. I probably won't be posting much, except perhaps for a few pictures. 

From our Airbnb, I took the trail up to St. John's Signal Hill yesterday, and it was a more arduous than I had anticipated, but I made it to the top. Guess I didn't do too badly for an old guy, eh? 

Here is a picture of me and Chief, an eight-year-old Newfoundland dog who is kind of a fixture on Signal Hill. I met him three years ago when we were attending our son's wedding in St. John's, and he appears to be still going strong but apparently is battling illness.

Below is a picture of some houses nestled alongside St. John's Harbour, where I began my ascent to Signal Hill.

That's all for now, folks.

It's A Great Time To Be Bad People

A friend of mine sent me this, and it is spot-on and self-explanatory.

UPDATED: This Left Me Feeling Queasy

I confess, making it to the 3:27 mark was a real effort, one fortified by a pre-dinner libation(s) last evening. However, eventually I steeled myself to watch the remaining minute, the entire video experience leaving me feeling a tad bruised.

The following production is unbelievably cheesy but at the same time somewhat unsettling. For example, Pierre Poilievre's opening in which he lovingly fondles wood inevitably leads one into all kinds of Freudian speculations, but I'll leave those to more learned minds. However, as you will see, his very strained wood metaphor(?) eventually leads into a revisionist, completely false, history of the signing of Magna Carta.

The Great Charter was 

agreed to by King John of England at Runnymede, near Windsor, on 15 June 1215.^[b] First drafted by Archbishop of Canterbury, Cardinal Stephen Langton, to make peace between the unpopular king and a group of rebel barons, it promised the protection of church rights, protection for the barons from illegal imprisonment, access to swift justice, and limitations on feudal payments to the Crown, to be implemented through a council of 25 barons. 

To hear unlucky Pierre's version, the commoners forced King John to sign the Great Charter, thereby reclaiming their freedom, the central theme and fiction of this risible production. And if you have the intestinal wherewithal to watch the entire video, you will likely note that this historical falsehood is consistent with the false narrative he draws about the awful Liberals, who, he claims, want to take away our few remaining freedoms in a fruitless quest for a socialist utopia.  He astutely reminds his listeners that utopia means no place.

No doubt some will be impressed by Poilievre's apparent respect for the intelligence of his followers and would-be acolytes. By using an extended and laboured metaphor, by seeming to be referring to historical fact, he is trying to flatter their intellectual vanity, while at the same time shamelessly and ruthlessly exploiting their credulity.

But of course, that really is what propaganda is all about, isn't it?

In times of war, it is said that truth is the first casualty. Obviously, the same is true of CPC leadership battles.

UPDATE:  I see I am not the only one who noticed Pierre's relationship with wood. Heather Mallick writes,

Do you like wood? Sure. I like wood as much as the next guy. But not as much as Conservative Party leadership hopeful Pierre Poilievre, who has dropped another unhinged video and it’s all about wood because wood is what this strange man really likes.

Plaid-shirted Poilievre greets us inside his wooden house caressing a vertical exposed wooden beam with his fingertips and enthusing, with theatrical pauses and little bursts.

 Is that erotic? Someone thinks it is.

Twitter certainly did. “Find someone who looks at you the way Pierre Poilievre looks at an antivaxxer or a piece of wood,” it advised. “Poilievre seems to be trying to take a piece of wood on a date.”

She goes on, but I think you get the picture. The unsavoury picture, that is.

 

Freedom's Cost

Americans are a strange and contradictory lot, to put it mildly. They claim (not unlike a certain candidate running for the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada) to love freedom, yet that love of freedom clearly has its limits. For example, many of them exult in the recent decision of the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v Wade, claiming a victory for the unborn and the sanctity of life. Yet that same reverence for life apparently ends at birth, if you consider even one of several metrics, not the least being the fact that they have the highest incarceration rate in the world. If that isn't an indictment of an uncaring society, I don't know what is. And don't get me started about gun rights vs. the killing of school children.

But instances of their hypocrisy/contradictions abound. Another is the the crazed right-wing, of which America seems to have an unusual concentration, and its hatred of regulations or, as they view it, government intrusion in their lives (see the above for a glaring exception). The latest example is reflected in the Supreme Court decision to neuter the Environmental Protection Agency.

... the court released a ruling in West Virginia v EPA limiting the Environmental Protection Agency’s power to regulate emissions from fossil fuel-fired power plants, in a major environmental case with far-reaching impacts. This has been classified a “devastating” outcome by environmental lawyers, climate scientists and activists alike. One with far-reaching implications for the future of the country, and world.

Despite Americans' professed reverence for life, this ruling will have the opposite effect:

“At this point, for those in positions of high power to deny the urgency and the stakes of the climate crisis is to condemn everyone alive today and generations to come to life in a sick and impoverished world,” said Ginger Cassady, executive director of Rainforest Action Network.

Distilled to its essence, the Court decision removes much of the EPA's regulatory power to limit pollution, the argument being that only Congress has such power. Given the partisan dysfunction of Congress, this means a major brake on greenhouse gas emissions has been removed. leaving it up to states to determine their own rules. It would therefore appear that any national climate goals Joe Biden has are now impossible to achieve.

Regulating emissions from power plants is a vital piece of climate mitigation, as the power sector is the second largest planet-warming polluter in the US, making up about 25% of national emissions. 

In the meantime, experts noted the domino effect of not rapidly eliminating national greenhouse-gas emissions will disproportionately fall to Black, brown and Indigenous communities, as worsening climate crisis deepens racial and social divides.

“There are so many paths to climate justice still, but what we’re seeing is a supreme court that is, I would call them ‘Supreme Climate Deniers’, that are trying to put themselves in a decision-making position,” said US Climate Action Network’s executive director, Keya Chatterjee. “That sends a signal that they will want to make it hard for the federal government to protect people in communities where right now the fossil fuel industry is running the show.”

“Decisions like WV v EPA make it clear just how much the system is rigged against us. A supreme court that sides with the fossil fuel industry over the health and safety of its people is anti-life and illegitimate,” wrote the Sunrise Movement, a youth-led climate organization.

I sometimes think that the Ugly American would be far more tolerable were they to cast aside their cloak of self-righteousness, false piety, hubris, over-the-top patriotism and jingoism and admit to themselves and the world exactly what they really are.

But a capacity for self-reflection and honesty really isn't the American way, is it?

 

 

Happy Canada Day

 As factious as we can be, I hope most of us can at least agree on this:

H/t Theo Moudakis