Bishop Hill Church on Syria
Oct 2, 2015 Climate: WG2 ;)
The Welsh singer Charlotte Church is trying to reinvent herself as a political pundit, and is certainly doing rather well on the PR front. Last night she managed to get herself on Question Time. Unfortunately I don't think her appearance will have done much for her political aspirations, but she certainly did the whole "slightly flaky showbiz person" thing pretty well, in particular repeating the old canard about the Syrian crisis being something to do with climate change, accompanied by lots of frowning to show how serious she was.
The Twitterati, like the studio audience, seem to have been deeply unimpressed, so Ms Church leapt into action to defend herself:
and the people who dismiss my points out of hand, go do some research- come back to me and we'll have a conversation about "the real world"
— Charlotte Church (@charlottechurch) October 1, 2015
Unfortunately for her, I have already done so, and we know that the claim is utter bunk.
Reader Comments (38)
She's a celebrity.
She's pretty and she has talent in her field (she can sing).
But she's ill-informed. So are most people. Let's not be harsh on her for being exposed as a fool.
That's the danger in being a celebrity. One's foolishness is exposed.
It doesn't make her exceptionally foolish.
Intriguing contrast with the celebrity Emma Watson.
She's pretty and actually does raise good points in her chosen political subject, feminism.
But she has no talent in her field (she can't act).
Which is better?
I do hope her foot heals very soon after she shot it, so that she can have a balanced opinion. In her own words, "one of the worst droughts in it's history", so my dear Ms Church, it's happened before only worse! I do wish these showbiz types would think, as some others ought to, before they open their mouths & opinionate!
She's a Corbyn fan... nuff said.
Bishop Hill resorts to page 1 breasts in order to attract more readers!
Heavyweight breasts, featherweight brain.
Nuff said.
Dung, the Bish regularly has big tits of the front page - recent ones were Wadhams, Carney and Shukla.
Her presence definitely kept me up all night right to the end. Of the show.
it's the first time a bunch of old men is not impressed by abundant cleavage
Did she happen to sing, "Puppets on a string?" I didn't catch the show. It was a show wasn't it?
So if you made your name in acting etc what is different here?
Our Charlotte has never heard of the Keban Hydro Electric Dam restricting the flow of the Euphraties river into Iraq and Syria Turkey hoarding all the fresh water to drive all the Kurdish farmers out.
So this big hole that's opened up in the middle road in St Albans and 1700 steel workers in Redcar losing their jobs Is Charlotte blaming that on Climate Change too.
Oh for a new "Brass Eye".
"I'm talking nonce sense."
Having just watched Question time I can now say with authority that we have already discussed the only useful contribution that Miss Church brought to the show.
The fact that she thought she could introduce climate change to the 'action on Syria' discussion showed breathtaking stupidity and gullibility, it was noticeable that her comments were greeted by total silence from the audience and the panel.
She's completely serial about manbearpig.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9wmczxnT3c
To be fair she was quoting the peer-reviewed, published research of qualified researchers. Its not her fault for not discarding it as obvious rubbish - that was the job of the peer reviewers and the journals concerned.
I can't, it wouldn't be politic to intrude and nothing I would say could be remotely polite.
I have some family members regularly that watch the program. Unusually, they said they switched it off before the end last night.
I still think Ms Church and Wussell Brand would make a lovely couple.
In a strange way she's right. This whole Arab Spring thingy started with protests and riots about food price rises in Tunisia and elsewhere. The price rises were caused largely by so much land being given over to growing biofuels as a result of the unnecessary panic over man-made climate change. We'll be living with the consequences for a long time.
I had QT on in the background as I caught up with this and other blogs last night. Was something interesting said? If so, it would be a first for a long time!
Actually, I quite enjoyed watching the Plaid Cymru lady being ripped apart by the audience (what a shame it was only a figurative ripping); perhaps people are starting to wake up to the fact that layer upon layer of well-paid bureaucracy is being applied to government in attempts to cover its ever-widening cracks.
But she is partly right (but not because the drought was unusual or unexpected etc).
The political response to the perceived threat of climate change, has caused problems for many. Increased energy costs, and the switch to bio fuels has led to an increase in the price of food. More importantly, the US used to export a lot of grain as part of the World Food Programme, but the amount it has exported has fallen dramatically these past 12 years with the switch to bio fuels.
Many commentators say that part of the cause for the Arab Spring was high food price, and this high food price has been caused by the Greens and their successful lobbying of governments which have led to higher energy costs and a reduction in the spare yield of food as arable land has been turned to bio fuel growing.
What happened in Syria?
The whole country was destabilized by the Iraqi adventure, therein over the open borders did pour hundreds of thousands of refugees who took to dwelling in Syria fleeing war and thus putting an enormous strain on Syrian economy, the west ignored al-Assads pleas for aid money.
The world commodity prices indeed affected a myriad of problems - caused in the first place by a shortage of grain then, probably panic buying and scurrilous hoarding by hedge fund speculators wanting to hike prices for profit and all of this can be laid at the door of the insane US gov + EU biofuel crop distillation for motor vehicular propulsion.
It [Syrians], probably took its example from Tunisia and Egypt - people saw an opportunity and the western media and political libtards all applauded and cheered them on - "oh yes bring down Bashar al-Assad!" they screamed - Camorond flush with success in Libya thought "this is easy" and with Muslim in chief Obama and the French and EU/UN chimed in as well, "we'll support you" they promised and those promises were to say the very least - totally hollow and misguided idiocy at best.
Just before, Syria reached crisis and the point of no return...... when the west should have cooled the bellicose rhetoric and calmed a very tense and deteriorating situation quelled the foment of rioting in Syria - with Putin's help the situation could have been de-escalated and largely [with a big western aid package] pacified.
Indeed in light of what has gone on, the death and destruction........ in the first place, was Bashar al-Assad so bad - he was sympathetic to the west unlike his father - Bashar was a more emollient character by far and remember Syria allowed a great deal of freedom to its many minority sects - the Aramaic Christians being one. Of course, his Alawite generals have some serious blood on their hands but we are not talking about some local difficulty in the Chilterns here - these blood letting vendettas go back centuries and the sins of the fathers are equivalent. True enough, the Ba-athists left something to be desired and by comparison - I ask: are 'our allies and partners' the Saudis that much better?
Hark! But they didn't did they, the situation was allowed to degenerated into extremely bloody civil war and and as a proxy conflict with Iran battling the Sunnis funded by Gulf money and Turkey puppeteering in the background. And the CIA poured $500 million in to do not a lot.
What a total clusterf*** it was and the west has some big questions to answer and to which it is still dancing away from and dodging.
It wasn't climate change that caused the conflict, though, a bad harvest here and there certainly didn't help.
Church, like Emma Thompson, seems to be one of these people who have been indoctrinated by Greenpeace. She clearly has been told this is true and is clueless about any evidence to the contrary. In the long term gullible fools like her will learn the hard way in the harsh light of celebrity status that you don't want to believe everything you are told by highly partisan organisations.
No doubt there are people who will be influenced by what she says. On a science matter such as climate change, or on socialist policies, its hard to take seriously a 29 year old singer who left school at 16 years of age and who has amassed a small fortune, can afford a million pound house and a yacht.
I finished my science degree two years before she was born and have been a professional geophysicist and geostatistician for 31 years, longer than she has been alive. What is the BBC thinking putting up these people to make such stupid and ignorant statements on TV? Come and talk to me, ANYBODY but Church.
This is a clever strategy by Greenpeace though (or whoever is feeding her the info, but given she sang at a Greenpeace organised demo outside Shell offices in London, she clearly has links to that organisation). Get complete science ignoramuses from the arts, very hipster and trendy, who are gobshites, and get them to sound off your propaganda on prime time TV without challenge. Thompson, Westwood, now Church. They couldn't tell an autocorrelated time series from an aloe verde arsewipe, but they get publicity and a free ride to spout crap wherever they go. And the BBC gets off the hook when giving them airtime because the BBC defense is "we are not responsible for personal opinions expressed by guests on a show". Don Henley (he of The Eagles fame) was another one on Radio 2 yesterday afternoon, got his unsubstantiated "worst drought in California due to climate change" message into a prime time BBC radio show, unchallenged and unbalanced (and yes, you can take that last word both ways!).
In the meantime real people in the real world in Syria are having their heads cutoff by barbaric, psychopath jihadists from ISIL or are being gassed or otherwise murdered by a dictator who runs what remains of the ruins of their country, but Church excuses these criminals by saying there is another reason for the problems. Wonder how ISIL would treat her were she to parachute into Syria to see her imaginary "climate change refugees" first hand?
I thought a charlotte was a stewed fruit,
thinkingscientist (Oct 2, 2015 at 3:03 PM), thank you for your comment... I agree with everything you said.
Gorgeous and dumb.
Even trade?
Andrew
Never watch Question time any more.... been years since I have
Load of biased opinions & agenda & groomed audience ... BBC waste of TV time
"aloe verde arsewipe"
Aloe vera, Shirley
Bless..Thicker than a yard of lard....but it`ll never matter.
In the photo, holding a pen, Charlotte Church is about to demonstrate her initial abbreviation of Double C.
Wish she would stick to singing, which she does very well.
ISIS was caused by global warming. Got it now.
Some interesting geo-political comment, esp from Athelstan. In the main the media and the intelligentsia are skating around the whole Middle East/Syria/mass people movements business like scared kids. It is simple - it is a mutual religious genocide being carried out by the two strains of Islam through multiple proxy conflicts. A circular firing squad. Imagine Northern Ireland and multiply by a thousand. We have not caused it nor have we contributed in any significant way (allowing that Blair's war certainly didn't help) and its not our problem - let them get on with it. We don't have a dog a dog in this race. If Putin wants to get himself bogged down again, so be it. Apologies to Charles Moore (also on QT with Church's boobs).
Now the truth emerges: how the US fuelled the rise of Isis in Syria and Iraq
The war on terror, that campaign without end launched 14 years ago by George Bush, is tying itself up in ever more grotesque contortions. On Monday the trial in London of a Swedish man, Bherlin Gildo, accused of terrorism in Syria, collapsed after it became clear British intelligence had been arming the same rebel groups the defendant was charged with supporting.
The prosecution abandoned the case, apparently to avoid embarrassing the intelligence services. The defence argued that going ahead withthe trial would have been an “affront to justice” when there was plenty of evidence the British state was itself providing “extensive support” to the armed Syrian opposition.
That didn’t only include the “non-lethal assistance” boasted of by the government (including body armour and military vehicles), but training, logistical support and the secret supply of “arms on a massive scale”. Reports were cited that MI6 had cooperated with the CIA on a “rat line” of arms transfers from Libyan stockpiles to the Syrian rebels in 2012 after the fall of the Gaddafi regime.
Clearly, the absurdity of sending someone to prison for doing what ministers and their security officials were up to themselves became too much.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/03/us-isis-syria-iraq?CMP=twt_commentisfree-gdnopinion
Let's go back to year zero of modern Islamsim.
Five years after the 7/7 bombings in London,
the UK's decades-long collusion with radical Islam is still
going strong
"Also targeted was Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, who
in 1952 overthrew the pro-British King Farouk, providing an Arab
nationalist alternative to the pro-western monarchies in the
Middle East. Britain had first covertly funded the Muslim
Brotherhood, a new radical force with a terrorist wing, in 1942,
and further links were made with the organisation after Nasser's
revolution.
By 1956, when Britain invaded Egypt, contacts were
developed as part of plans to overthrow Nasser. Indeed, the
invasion was undertaken in the knowledge that the Muslim
Brotherhood might form the new regime.
After Nasser died in 1970, and the pro-western president
Anwar Sadat secretly sponsored militant Islamist cells to counter
nationalists and communists, British officials were still
describing the Brotherhood as "a potentially handy
weapon" for the regime.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/05/bin-laden-radical-islam-collusion
esmiff
Take care mate I got seriously ostracised when I started a discussion about the threat from Radical Islam in the UK.
The fact there was 4 million people in 1960 and around 23 million prior to the recent troubles would have nothing to do with drought or famine?
Tonyb
I often wonder why people who can act/sing/play an instrument seem to be so woefully inadequate when put in a room/on a panel with people from other areas of expertise?
Charlotte Church can sing like an angel
But talks in the stilted soundbite silliness of the emotionally challenged.
Church needs to check bits of the history, as do I to be honest, i seem to remember all this kicking off with news like this -
Syrian crisis - Syria: Bashar al-Assad vows to stamp out 'terror' with iron fist -
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/10222325/Syria-Bashar-al-Assad-vows-to-stamp-out-terror-with-iron-fist.html
there must be earlier comments but i remember (i think) - arm the opposition & there will be problems in the future
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jul/02/water-key-conflict-iraq-syria-isis
Even the Guardian admits that the conflict was created by Turkey Damming the Tigress and Euphrates rivers flowing into Northern Iraq and Syria.Turkey have been Hoarding the fresh water causing the Mesopotamian Delta drought.