I was invited to be on the Murnaghan programme on Sky News this morning – which I always find a great deal more intelligent than the Andrew Marr alternative on the BBC. I declined because I did not want to get up and get a 7.30am train from Ramsgate on a Sunday morning. I had a meeting until 11.30pm last night planning a conference on human rights in Balochistan [I still tend to say Baluchistan], and I have a newly crowned tooth that seems not to want to settle down. But I am still worried by my own lack of energy, which is uncharacteristic. Is this old age?
I also have some serious work to do on my Burnes book, and next week I shall be staying in London to be in the British Library reading room for every second of its opening hours. So there may be a bit of a posting hiatus. I have in mind a short post on an important subject on which I suspect that 99% of my readership – including the regular dissident commenters – will strongly disagree with me.
This is a peculiarly introspective post, perhaps because my tooth is hurting, but I seem to have this curmudgeonly spirit which wishes to react to the huge popularity of this blog by posting something genuinely held but unpopular; a genuine view but one I don’t normally trumpet. The base thought seems to be “You wouldn’t like me if you really knew me”.
Similarly when I wrote Murder in Samarkand I was being hailed as a hero by quite a lot of people for my refusal to go along with the whole neo-con disaster of illegal wars, extraordinary rendition and severe attacks on civil liberties, sacrificing my fast track diplomatic career as a result. My reaction to putative hero worship was to publish in Murder in Samarkand not just the political facts, but an exposure of my own worst and most unpleasant behaviour in my private life.
I am in a very poor position to judge, but I believe the result rather by accident turned out artistically compelling, if you don’t want to read the book you can get a good idea of that by clicking on David Tennant in the top right of this blog and listening to him playing me in David Hare’s radio adaptation.
Anyway, that’s enough musing. You won’t like my next post, whenever it comes. Promise.
The salient bit is that you made your minds up without digesting the information offered.
I merely suggested Clark (and others) might want to take a look – he didn’t.
So just say so, Clark – why the personalisation and insults?
I didn’t make the documentary nor did I claim that I agree with everthing in it but put it up there: for discussion, if you care to watch it through and digest it.
So what’s your beef?
Free energy, mmm. I though “oh dear, perpetual motion” when I heard that – I was designing perpetual motion machines when I was eight, despite my father’s insistence that energy cannot be created. However some research shows that perpetual motion isn’t the meaning of the phrase “free energy” – in fact, it is collecting energy from the non-zero K air. That sounds great, and my video link claims twice that a car has been built using this technology. Yet we don’t have them – how come? The video doesn’t explain, which is a critical omission.
Building a Tesla coil seems pretty trivial. Could I make one in my back yard, and run a wire into my house? Again, sounds great, but there must be a catch somewhere.
You might be interested in the documentary, Jon.
It covers much of the ground right up to and including Professor Inomata’s N-Machine.
@ScouseBilly “Lol good luck with that – don’t blow bubbles in your bong or it’ll turn acidic …”
Now, if the world starts to use bong water to cool the reactors, everything would be so much more peaceful.
Sunflower, an intriguing thought 😉
Seriously though there is evidence that we will be able to clean up radioactive waste using some of the new technologies.
Oh and the documentary has some footage from the uniquely eccentric, John Hutchison.
Of course, there is an allusion to HAARP activity – as they say the new physics can be used for bad as well as good.
All the more reason to pay attention IMO.
I don’t want to make too big a thing of this, but the notion that “we all knew “WMD was nonsense is not quite true when you examine the polls at the time. A large proportion of both the US and UK electorate bought into the myth, as they do now on many other issues.
Another example: The Charles de Menezes police and “official” narrative was believed by not only the vast majority of the electorate but by every single mainstream news media. The fact that a statistically tiny number of people questioned it from the beginning didn’t filter through until very much later.
I think it is sensible to guard against the notion that just because things are being discussed here or on other fringe media, that somehow the general electorate is anything other than extremely compliant.
The Assange case is yet another example. A small proportion of the electorate is concerned with due process, rule of law, war crimes etc. The vast majority are concerned only with Assange’s trial by media and his alleged narcissism.
Similarly, today the entire media produced thousands of hours broadcasts and double page spreads of a jaunt to France by a teacher and pupil while hardly any newspaper has written more than a column inch, or broadcast more than fifteen seconds about the thousands of children, some between six and eight years old, who have been tortured or murdered near the Syrian border because they happened to have parents who were embroiled in the Syrian uprisings.
Sorry should have said: “guard against the assumption that the electorate is other than compliant”. Typo and lack of ordering thoughts.
1100+ Peer-Reviewed Papers Supporting Skeptic Arguments Against ACC/AGW Alarm:
http://www.populartechnology.net/2009/10/peer-reviewed-papers-supporting.html
@Clark
Scepticism and skepticism are different things, and it isn’t just the spelling. Make time (plenty of time) to read my Zetetic Scholar link (skip back a couple of threads).
What we seem to have here is a battle between sceptics and skeptics. I’ve picked my side. Sceptic. Not remotely skeptical.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wraO_FOpFJ4
@Scouse Billy – which documentary are you referring to? I’ve scanned a few pages in this thread, and can’t see one that might already have been mentioned. Apols if I’ve missed it.
Jon, it’s called, Tesla The Race to Zero Point Free Energy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKWPht3fU-o&feature=related
@Vrosnky. Of course language develops and changes, but “Sceptic” and “Skeptic” were, and still are in my view, just different spellings between US and British conventions. The fact that a few people have imposed an unilateral second meaning to “skeptic” doesn’t really cut it for me. Perhaps there should be a new or alternative word, rather than merely hijacking a perfectly sound word and twisting its very clear original meaning.
Skeptic is now a pejorative word commonly used to describe others whose views are based on stubborn or wilful denial of “consensus” science. That is a million miles from the noble origins of a “sceptic”, who is a person with an objective and disinterested position on matters intellectual or scientific. The word “skeptic” is thus an invention by those who do not approve of open-minded scepticism and prefer to the critically aware with a label of “disbeliever”, “denier” or “heretic”, whereas in fact sceptics are merely asking salient and reasonable questions before diving into beliefs or assumptions, or compliance for the sake of appearances.
Scouse Billy, ta. Will d/load and watch soon. (The one I linked to was very poor imo, as was the second part of it – all assumption and no proof. But at least it encouraged me to see some cool Tesla coil vids on the web!)
Scouse Billy, I should wait until after 0:00 to watch the Tesla video, or it eats into my download limit. But there is so much nonsense distributed about Tesla, and yet the proponents don’t even know of the real propaganda battle in which Tesla and Edison were the main public characters, nor do they realise that Tesla was vindicated because he was right, leading to all mains electricity being distributed as AC.
Your own comment indicates that the video you linked is not particularly technical, which would preclude any checking of extraordinary claims, so I thought it might just be a waste of 1hr 49min of my time. But I’ll check it out.
Vronsky, I’ll catch up with your links in due course, too. Thanks.
‘cant mind to make time for the very fine 😀
Heart and Mouth and Deed and Life
Skepticism, Science, and the Paranormal by Laurent Beauregard
Thank you, Clark. I genuinely think you might find it to be of interest.
P.S. Clark, yes, I totally share your sentiments regarding the Tesla mythology, if you will, although his papers were “confiscated” and who knows what was in them and what, if anything, they are being used for today.
But the documentary actually is not particularly concerned with Tesla and looks at more recent innovations. The titular reference is, quite possibly, “used” as a ploy to gain wider interest but don’t let that put you off, it’s carbon neutral shall we say and certainly pro-environmental and maybe even anti-Big Oil 😉
SB documentry:
“when jp morgan prohibited Tesla from broadcasting electric power overseas with broadclip tower
… it changed the course of history”
Teslas notes are studied widely. The fundamental unit for magnetic flux is named after or was coined by him. There may be some large portion of Teslas notes lost, and even his life story distorted and hidden, for any reason. However, if the repressed information includes how to practically broadcast power so accurately and safely and efficiently as to make copper wire industry redundant, which is what the documentry… dreams of. The systems/phenomens would have been rediscovered by many thousands of electronic researchers since, who are able to experiment so much more easily than Tesla, being able to order precise and very refined components and materials, not to mentioned newly invented, like efficient diodes and transistors (!)
The documentry is a kind of sci-fi.
Not very fine.
@ScouseBilly Jon, “it’s called, Tesla The Race to Zero Point Free Energy:”
Amazing video, thank you for the link. This video explains a lot. Energy is not about energy it is about control of human kind, keeping people in the Matrix is what this is all about.
If free energy was made available the incentive for global control would be gone, no more a handful of greedy materialistic devil worshipers treating the Earth’s population as their personal slaves. No more illusion of being all-powerful gods, it would mean the end of the zionist dream world.
This is not good. Quickly, start WW3 before we loose control!
“This video explains a lot.”
Sorry to say, with a lack of reading and practice in basic electronics you dont know what you are watching is fantasy fiction.
Indeed, Sunflower – do you think the crab fellow is some sort of control freak? He certainly has a propensity to inflict his opinions, yet I’ve never seen him offer anything of any substance himself 😉
Thatcrab, thanks. I strongly suspect that you just saved me from wasting nearly two hours of my life. That’s truly valuable, and I thank you.
Scouse Billy, I’m certainly not making time to watch that video tonight. Yes, Tesla was a threat to the copper industry. The reason… OK. You believe other things, so I’ll put it this way. The conventional reason is rather mundane.
I read an interesting snippet about painting and drawing. It was that abstract or surrealist art can demonstrate skill, or it can disguise incompetence. Not all artists can paint the picture that they imagine in their mind. Those who can are the ones who have practised and refined their skills of representative painting, drawing, etc. They have practised the discipline of accurately representing real objects in the real world. Then, when they wish to depict something unreal or imaginary, they have the skill to express their idea.
Likewise in the realm of maths. Any fool can write out some symbols that look like maths, and it will probably be totally original. But only someone who has actually studied maths and developed the necessary discipline is capable of extending and adding to useful, valid mathematics.
Now, Scouse Billy, if you can explain to me, from your own mind without Googling for “the answer”, why Tesla really was a threat to the copper industry, I’ll be far more inclined to watch that video.
Sunflower, do you have any clue why I just made that request to Scouse Billy?
Nothing is true. Everything is permitted. Dollops to that.
Clark, universal wireless energy – hardly difficult. That was but one aspect, Morgan “pulled the plug” on him because he couldn’t meter “free energy” is more to the point.
Don’t watch it then – trust the misanthropic crab. You’re loss – why should I care anyway.
lol just re-read “you’re loss” – Freudian?
The closest thing I can find to scientific opinion on “free energy” is this:
I’m substantially of the view that a peer-reviewed paper is the best assurance of scientific validity – I’ve read that George Monbiot receives baseless claims of harnessable energy every week, but the peer review is in each case absent. There is much about physics we do not know, but I’d guess that it’s too early to celebrate yet.
Come on Scouse Billy. Tell me how Tesla threatened the copper industry. You need High School physics. Then I’ll start taking you seriously.
Jon, essentially the same people, or at least their decendents, don’t want us to have “free energy” today as didn’t back in Tesla’s day.
I won’t spoil for those who do want to watch it but the conclusions are prescient and made me think of Clark’s thesis at Tallbloke’s.
” why should I care anyway.” A salient point, at last.
Scouse Billy, you and your comrades have spent days trying to convince the more rational on this site that global heating is a scam, and accusing us of propagating the propaganda of “the Elite” who wish to wipe out 5/6ths of humanity. You have insulted out intelligence, and encouraged us to waste our precious life hours on your nonsense.
Or have you? Show me that you possess some elementary skill with technical matters.
If you do not, it is you that are the misanthropists, the ones whose ignorance and arrogance is threatening millions and billions of lives.
[Mod/Clark: Updated for typos made in annoyance and haste.]