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.
I just told you – “wireless” geddit? Morgan had bought up copper mines anticipating transmission wires! You may be thinking of AC v DC but actually Morgan pulled his backing after Tesla had built his tower at Colorado Springs – I do know his life story.
But I already explained the documentary is NOT about Tesla.
No, Scouse Billy. Explain the well understood, conventional reason. Show me that you care about the thoughts you propagate.
Heh.
Carnival Barker;” See the little ball under the cup? Now you see it. Now you don’t”
Billy’s Freudian slips are his undoing.
So far, Scouse Billy has tried to flatter me with “…made me think of Clark’s thesis at Tallbloke’s” and he’s tried to pick my brains to answer the question for him. This is the man who would have us believe that science is corrupt, and that climate scientists are trying to mislead us for financial gain.
You are looking like a dishonest fraud, Scouse Billy.
No, Clark I can’t read your mind, mate – not sure that I’d want to 😉
I gave you my reason whether it’s conventional or not I couldn’t say.
But I will search “tesla threat to the copper industry” ok?
Oh look what came out:
http://www.thrivemovement.com/follow-money-infrastructure
“1902: Nikola Tesla Begins Exploring How to Transmit Electricity Without Power Lines; JP Morgan Refuses Further Funding
Nikola Tesla’s Wardenclyffe Tower, initially financed by J.P. Morgan, was designed to transmit electricity without wires. By 1904, J.P. Morgan – who had a monopoly on copper which was used to transmit electricity – refused to provide any more funding.”
Sorry I thought you were “more rational” – apparently not.
Suggest you need help, Clark.
Good night.
That’s not a permanent exit, Clark. He will be back. He can’t help himself.
Tesla indeed reduced the amount of copper that any given electrical power project would require. How, Billy? Can you write the appropriate formulae? You should have done them when you were about 14 years old.
“You should have done them when you were about 14 years old”
i think the peak of intellect is age 22-24, After that, experience must transcend intellect, or not..
Sorry to inject myself into private discussions, Clark. As the intoxicants accumulate, i hyperbolate.
(made that word up, dude)
Hello Ben. That’s OK. Enjoy your intoxicants. Billy is silly. I wonder if convincing people of things he doesn’t understand himself is his intoxicant. Good old substance (ab)use seems more honest, to me.
Can’t stop here; this is bat country.
@BF – Thanks for the two links yesterday – I didn’t see them until a moment ago. I had forgotten all about Talking Heads – a welcome trip down memory lane.
And I do think Carlin is a legend. Not too many Brits have heard of him sadly.
Scouse Billy .. I just watched it. Thanks for posting, I found it very interesting. I’m no physicist but I don’t doubt that any commercially viable “free” energy source would also be a “competing” energy source for the energy monopoly suppliers and that particularly promising patents are snapped up for immediate burial.
The film has absolutely nothing to do with Tesla.
Clark said, “You are looking like a dishonest fraud, Scouse Billy.”
You’re only just concluding this, Clark? C’mon! SB has done nothing but allude to his great learning in any number of subjects. But rather than show his capacity to absorb a question and provide an answer using it, we just get a reference to something vaguely associated (if we’re lucky!), with a irritatingly patronising “run along and learn from this my son, and begin to see the light” attitude.
All SB comes up with is whacked out notions such as Save The Children are in fact child killers, bent on genocide, because they’re providing vaccinations, which everyone knows – or should know – are hoaxes by the pharmaceutical industry to make money, while their mates in the UN want to kill everyone, and blah – blah – blah. And here’s a video of some freak stating just that, in case you want proof.
It’s not possible to have an honest discussion with someone who probably wants to be a cult leader. Hence his avatar. Such people just want to forcefully assert their whackadoodle nonsense, and just keep piling more on top, to make their rather weak-minded admirers think that everything they knew was wrong, this Great Leader has all the answers, and by Christ doesn’t this visionary fellow put ordinary mortals to shame with their vast learning and insights.
After a while, it appears these people start believing in their own self-aggrandisement, drinking their own Kool-Aid so to speak, and are completely incapable of backing off a point no matter how outlandish. Not to say downright silly. The really amusing part is where they’ll accuse everyone of being stupid and misinformed for following basic scientific conventional wisdom, but go off in risible flights of fancy by way of alternative explanations (secret HAARP weapons, deep-galaxy radiation, and so on).
Every village has an idiot, and there’s a crazy uncle in every family. But we can’t base our discussions around these people as if their point of view was as valid as those from rational folk.
Is it ironic that today I received a tender for a 350 user web-expenses system with specific requirements for end-user “carbon accounting”?
What to do? Should I tell them that they are wasting their money as carbon trading is a busted flush? Or do I take the contract and snigger hypocritically all the way to the bank?
The latter, I guess.
Keep up the good work chaps, I’m beginning to see thing’s your way after all. Kerching.
Oh happy day .. It just gets better ..
The drugs don’t work: a modern medical scandal
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/sep/21/drugs-industry-scandal-ben-goldacre
The doctors prescribing the drugs don’t know they don’t do what they’re meant to. Nor do their patients. The manufacturers know full well, but they’re not telling.
“Drugs are tested by their manufacturers, in poorly designed trials, on hopelessly small numbers of weird, unrepresentative patients, and analysed using techniques that exaggerate the benefits.”
I know you won’t read it but, what the heck.
Tesla did many weird and wonderful things, but may only have been ahead of the pack by ten or so years upon arrival in the US, in taking ac from commutator-less dynamos and with such an ac source developing working practical controllable ac polyphase motors for industrial power applications mostly and proving the superiority of ac for distance transmission purposes at higher voltages with the impressive Niagara Falls hydro-electric project. Big sparky stuff distributing power wirelessly by natural or man-made lightning-bolts between huge towers (which had tremendous power requirements themselves) would have splattered the whole radio spectrum with interference, and inhibited broadcasting, an unfortunate side-effect he would have been well aware of as he demonstrated several radio controlled toy boats to great acclaim and considerable interest from competing military powers who seen potential there for torpedos and drones operated from afar. He did make some reportedly suitcase sized apparatus which induced earthquake like tremors, and as well as almost bringing down the NY apartment building he tested it in, the effect was greater further away with windows several miles away broken and other damage until the police arrived and put an end to the demonstration and the landlord to evict him and his laboratory from his distressed building. A flawed genius, but for most of his life a harmless eccentric.
Crypto;
I have been ambivalent about Einstein’s active role in developing the A-Bomb, but find my rationalizations for an otherwise outstanding human being, to be aging with me. The eagerness of science to exalt ego or ideology seems to increase by the tick of the clock. I am deep in my cups now, so it will be easier to take advantage of your good auspices today, and repent tomorrow.
http://www.ancient-world-mysteries.com/tesla-secret-weapons-technology.html
” They include:
– A means of causing artificial earthquakes
– The development of particle beam weapons
– Power systems that could tap almost unlimited energy from the Vacuum
– The ability to generate nuclear explosions and wilfully transmit them through space and time to any desired location
– Development of a means of propulsion involving anti-gravity methods based upon electricity and magnetism
In considering the list as given, of what would appear to be almost extraordinary capabilities, it would be well to know that none other than Nikola Tesla himself pioneered most of these fields. Officially, in terms of what physical-technological advancements made it into mainstream from Tesla’s work, only those things which were ‘none threatening’ to the establishment were allowed out. Thus was alternating current – developed by Tesla – considered ‘acceptable’ to the powers that be, who allowed it onto the world stage. However, Tesla’s work on ‘free energy’ systems and of tapping the almost inexhaustible reservoir of energy from the vacuum was not.”
@Jon
25 Sep, 2012 – 7:24 pm
Good post. We are debating on behalf of the experts so our own thoughts are somewhat moot. When our arguments are reduced to the essence, they are merely links to expert announcements.
I propose not to hold back until you earn enough amount of cash to order all you need! You should take the credit loans or consolidation loans and feel comfortable
[Mod/Clark: I edited this to break both of the links, but left the comment, as part of the discussion.]
Basically what this comes down to is the clash of the “scientific” mechanistic reductionist world view and a non-mechanistic world view that accepts the fact that consciousness exists as separate from matter. “Scientists” cannot see, touch, smell, hear or taste consciousness, therefore they conclude it does not exist.
The mechanistic world view postulates man are “gods” of this planet and the universe and those that managed to, by evil conspiracy, to introduce and put themselves in control of the present economic system try to live out their puny dreams of being god by using their powers to enslave humanity.
Of course free energy wouldn’t fit into the present day “scientific” models of “reality” and so do a lot of phenomena around us, e.g. consciousness, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It just means “you” cannot explain it because your references are like to those of an ant trying to grasp philosophy.
Put even more simple, it’s the clash between good and evil, or “I am god” vs. “I am a servant of God”
@Clark/Jon
Young27Mandy 26 Sep, 2012 – 7:07 am
Wow a marketing comment. It is possible that Google lends some weight to nofollow comments. One might assume especially so from high value blogs such as this. Delete that comment please!
I didn’t realise you allowed the a tag though. That’s great. It will make comments far tidier. Why not add it to your list of acceptable tags?
Above I meant nofollow links.
But really I am just commenting to test an a tag.
Phil, I have spent countless hours deleting the spam comments from this blog. Craig, apparently, used to do it all himself. Recently, Jon has been doing most of it.
We get spam here because this blog is set up such that contributors are not required to register in order to submit comments.
Sunflower at 26 Sep, 7:55 am, your comment touches upon me in a very personal way. My oldest friend, the girl, now a woman, with whom I lost my virginity, is currently letting a cancer grow in her breast rather than undergo “western” medical treatment. She refuses to speak with me because I wish to discuss the matter rationally.
If we follow “New Age” thinking to its extreme conclusion, my friend’s illness is my fault. Consciousness manifests reality, right? The cancer in her is growing because I believe it is, I am manifesting it in her, right?
Vronsky, it looks like I have a busy day of discussion beginning. Of course, if I could just “manifest” a few more copies of myself, one could go looking for the source material I need, another could monitor the thread and reply to incoming comments, and yet another could read your Zetetic Scholar link. But in the “real” world…
Sunflower and Phil,
This is a link to a comment by Nextus that triggered an emotional breakdown on my part.
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2012/02/question-of-the-day/comment-page-2/#comment-341282
Sunflower, you wrote:
The thread which includes the comment I linked to above will give you some idea of which “side” I stand on in the “clash” you refer to above.
Phil, after my crack-up, I stopped deleting the spam from this blog. Those spam “comments” have since been deleted, but other contributors’ comments will give you some idea of how much automated rubbish accumulates when there is no one to tend the threads.
Oh. Has it all got a bit serious? Suddenly, I’m the only one with anything to say. Guess I’d best just fuck off.