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.
@Clark “What do you think of all this? Do you believe that crappy film that Scouse Billy linked to, or do you think I could be right, and it’s full of nonsense? Which of us do you consider more trustworthy?”
You may have a strong position against the content of the video a “crappy film” as you say. On the other hand you recognise that there are lots of stuff “out there” that science cannot explain through the reductionist empiric process -even a higher power or God, and consciousness.
The film relates to the concept of Free Energy and gives examples of people exploring the field, some of them are documented brilliant minds.
My understanding is that there are two issues here, one is that the concept of free energy collides with your academic understanding of energy and the other is that you basically don’t like ScouseBilly. I think those two should be separated.
The first issue, the film about free energy, I thought it was an informative and interesting film. It doesn’t claim to prove anything, it shows that people are working in the field and it states some have more success in the area than others, I believe that. In principle I absolutely believe there is free energy to be tapped out of the creation if we could understand how to do it.
Second issue, you don’t like ScouseBilly, somehow he makes you angry by his way of expression and the view he represents. In this case refer to my previous post, you are response-able, you can choose how you react to that.
In this context, ScouseBilly has the upper hand and you and your “supporters” who don’t like ScouseBilly because of the view he holds, come across as small-minded and disrespectful. If this is about arrogant and inconsiderate use of words ScouseBilly is definitely not unique.
Apology is only defeat for small-minded persons, you do not loose anything by apologising, you win. If I would be you I’d jump on the opportunity to show who is the “greater person”. Not that this is a contest in anyway, but for my own sake.
Anger may be natural, but it is the “all-devouring sinful enemy of this world”.
The Supreme Personality of Godhead said: It is lust only, Arjuna, which is born of contact with the material mode of passion and later transformed into wrath, and which is the all-devouring sinful enemy of this world.
Regarding the Tesla Zero Point Energy film, I watched half of it last night. So far, it’s a round-up of ideas, but doesn’t present them in sufficient detail to assess them, and in any case I don’t think it is trying to prove anything. I’d estimate the documentary was done around 1997 – so it would be quite out of date. At worst, it is interesting – the (mainly hobbyist) inventors featured genuinely believe they’re solving the world’s energy problems, and they’re brave for trying (I wonder if Edison and Bell were regarded as crackpot in their time!).
One of the topics the film is unclear on is whether energy is being created. Many references are made to “creating more energy than is supplied”, but the subtext of these “open” systems is that they are harnessing the energy in the air, and so don’t necessarily violate the laws of thermodynamics.
I made some notes on the first half – if only to give you an idea of whether you want to invest the time watching it. I don’t expect the second half will be more persuasive, but I may give it a go if I get the time.
———
Free Energy – The Race to Zero Point (hosted by Bill Jenkins)
Atomic energy. What new physics is calling the Quantum Vacuum Flux.
Standard energy will run out by 2025.
Tesla wanted to transmit power without wires – to ships at sea – Wardencliffe Tower. Project scuttled by JP Morgan, who wanted to lay copper cables for electrical transmission. His papers were seized by the US govt when he died.
Faraday and Maxwell set up the basis of the science.
“N machine” from Bruce de Palma and Para Mahamsad Toohari’s [spell?] “Space Power Generator”. “Repeated experiments have detected anomalous electrical outputs greater than that used to rotate the disk but friction and voltage limitations have hampered efficiency, and therefore widespread acceptance”.
ZPF/ZPE is very hard to measure, since energy is going in all directions at all times. Bringing “aether” theories back into vogue.
Lamb Shift in quantum mechanics – given Nobel prize. Casamir Effect. Raw energy in a cubic cm – if you could take the raw energy inside it and condense it into mass, you would have more observable mass result from that than our largest telescope can see in the observable universe.
Moray Valve to detect space energy in the 1920s. Radiant energy device ran for days and put out 50KW of energy. No-one could explain how it worked.
Moray and his family were threatened, shot at, his lab ransacked, and his equipment destroyed by his assistant, a Communist sympathiser who was frustrated that Moray would not let him take the technology to Russia.
Schauberger 1930s. Harnessing the spiralling of the atom. Duped into passing the rights of his ideas over to US interests, none of his ideas were manufactured, and he died a broken man.
Walter Russell, revised period table.
A variation of the electrostatic Wimshurst device, is the Testatica, developed in a small Swedish Christian community in the 70s, supplying power for more than 20 years. Many technical experts have come away stumped, but the community thinks the world is not spiritually prepared for it, and won’t release the design.
Electrogrivitics. High voltages (20-200KV) used to make capacitors float. US army planes using this technology in the Cold War to assist plane propulsion.
Over-unity systems [i.e. devices that give out more energy than they consume] is perfectly legitimate physics. Most scientists aren’t aware that the ZPE exists, since most scientists are not physicists. Science is too fragmented to spot it.
No more confusing than a windmill or a waterwheel. Mention of “Consciousness/sacred” physics [29:40].
Inertial Propulsion, a badly balanced rotating energy that wobbles in a box to create propulsion. 20 times more efficient than jet engines. Demo powering a canoe in a swimming pool. Difficult to commercialise. Finds it difficult to get investment, even with a patent.
1996. Convert plasma discharge into electricity. GEET Fuel Processor, runs on water with a little crude to prime the engine. Runs 8.5 hours/day. Never needs cleaning. Fitted into car – 300% efficiency. Trebles car’s 20mpg to 60. Transmutation of elements? they are not entirely sure how it works.
Initially rejected by many US companies, but they are looking into it again.
Cold fusion in a bottle, in Utah. Initially widely debunked, but was widely replicated around the world. More energy out than in. US Dept of Energy masterminded a panel of biases experts who unfairly evaluated it. Up to 1KW power output from 1W in. Cells carry on generating for 14 hours after they have been switched off.
As a result of cold fusion: transmutation of heavy metals. Production of copper and rhodium. Confirmed with minimal energy input – similar to old claims of the alchemists, now being done in labs. May be able to create precious metals, or make radioactive materials non-active.
US Energy companies now very interested in cold fusion conferences. The technology will make the power grid disappear.
(Reel 2)
Newman. Status quo power brokers have been fighting [against it]. Meters show that the device is creating more “RF power” than the batteries themselves are capable of producing. Scientists have signed affidavits to say the invention works.
I’m posting this “blind”, in that I have not read the comments after my last submission in the early hours of the morning, in which, if I remember rightly, I stated that I did indeed wish for Scouse Billy’s humiliation. To reiterate with more clarity, if Billy cannot develop humility spontaneously, humiliation of him seems appropriate to me.
I’m posting “blind” because upon waking, I realised that I’d got something wrong. I wrote:
This was wrong and I therefore admit my error. Simoncini probably does claim “99% success”, and Scouse Billy quoted this claim. My investigations also took considerably longer than five minutes. I apologise for my overstatement.
I have been looking into Lorraine Day. This video gives some idea :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&feature=endscreen&v=dtjOIcrzNsk
Lorraine Day spouts Illuminati conspiracy theory and religious creationism. She says that humans were “placed in the Garden of Eden by God who designed them to live forever”. The Report from Iron Mountain which she cites as evidence was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the “Most Successful Literary Hoax”. She is married to William E. Dannemeyer, a US Republican politician. From Wikipedia:
So we are back to the topic of global heating denial (ie. US gas prices), and (coincidentally?) we find it associated with the US Religious Right, and funnily enough, hatred of Jews.
I fully expect that Lorraine Day is simply a liar, and that she has had expensive and extensive private cancer treatment and is simply lying about it. I expect that her personal appearance is likewise maintained by expensive “therapies”.
Interestingly, Lorraine Day advises us to purge ourselves of all anger, because it “eats us up” and “gives us cancer”. Nothing to do with rich republicans preferring a docile population, then. Throughout history, populations have wrested power from rulers through acts of disobedience and revolution, and obviously, people’s anger at injustice has been an important motivator in these struggles for justice.
——-
Scouse Billy, are you a Christian? Do you believe that the Bible is literally the “Word of God”? Do you believe in the biblical story of creation? And do you hate Jews? If not, maybe you should disassociate yourself from this nonsense.
I’m off for a walk now. I still haven’t checked for new comments and I’ll review this thread later.
There should be a pic of you in the dictionary next to ‘persistent’, Clark.
It’s surprised me since childhood, that the right/left divide will separate points of view so consistently. Throw out any given issue, particularly one that has no obvious ideological leaning, and people will fall cleanly to one side or the other, consistent with their preferred party’s line. Why is that? Because their party has chosen where their interests lie (for the right – does this benefit the rich? Will big business approve of it?), and starts pumping the message on down?
Outfits like Fox “news”, The Sun and so on are brilliant at turning moneyed interests into a cause that champions the little guy, everyday folk. They can turn around a news item so quickly, the narrative is suddenly Big, Bad Government screwing the ordinary fellow. And leave out entirely how profitable the favoured position enriches the investor class.
They’ve been working on this for years when it comes to GCC – everything is at stake, if by “everything” we’re talking about short term profit. We’ve been hit up on this thread very hard by their stooges and useful idiots.
Before the subject moves on to medical science (in the general rejection of all science), it’s worth noting how paltry the GCC deniers’ case actually was. A bogus petition. Various shams and baseless assertions. Smears of institutions, individual scientists, and – in desperation – the very notion of science itself. Vague and half-baked paranoia about the UN, population control, and that old standby – a one-world takeover. Far better designed for ignorant, racist, terrified xenophobes in the US than in more civilised parts.
The inability of “sceptics” to answer direct questions, or frankly to dialogue at all in a meaningful way on subject. The more serious the matter at hand, the more studiously it is ignored. Proof by repeated assertion.
*
Yet in all meaningful aspects of life – using technology, respecting physics and engineers to keep cars, trains and planes operating as they should – science is understood to be as real as the air we breathe. Science only becomes all wooly and corrupt when there’s a politically inconvenient conclusion. Such as the reality of man-made GCC.
“the very notion of science itself”
Trust issues abound. Even formerly trusted NEWS orgs have been assaulted, and, at times guilty of the sin of fudging, or omitting data. So we came out with Fact-Checkers, and now they are verklempt. Polls are currently in vogue as punching bags. So where do we turn for accuracy and efficacy? Hell if I know.
Sunflower, I see that you have posted a moral lesson for me, while you have ignored Scouse Billy and his promotion of potentially lethal procedures. Maybe anger scares you so much that you react against it reflexively. Maybe you should post a little criticism of Jesus of Nazereth because he threw over the tables of the money-changers in the temple. Or maybe your New Age “philosophy” merely serves to make you feel very pure.
Your point has some validity. It is pointless and harmful to hang on to anger. However, when anger flows for an appropriate cause, it is a force for good in this world. It is a motivator. It does need to be properly channelled and directed, of course. That Billy is keeping out of range indicates his cowardice.
Ben, what we have to help us to find truth amid the lies and distortions is logic and consistency, observation over time, and honest communication across community. Sunflower seems to think that people like me are setting ourselves in the place of God. However, I believe that I stand beneath reason and observation (in the personal and community senses). Regarding observation, we have to become aware of our interpretive processes so that we can adjust for our biases and prejudices. I think this is called “right seeing” in some Buddhist teachings.
The Illuminati depopulation conspiracy is utterly stupid. The elites of this world are pleased to have teaming hordes of people, because they serve as workers and as a market. The elites are happy for a large number to be unemployed, too, as their suffering serves to scare the employed into compliance.
Sunflower wrote – “In this context, ScouseBilly has the upper hand and you and your “supporters” who don’t like ScouseBilly because of the view he holds, come across as small-minded and disrespectful. If this is about arrogant and inconsiderate use of words ScouseBilly is definitely not unique”
….yep,that just about sums it up
Clark; In keeping with the George Carlin Cultism are his words, paraphrased;
“The Rich only keep the Poor around to scare the living shite out of the Middle-Classes.”
Sunflower, poor stuff from you.
I watched half an hour or so. I noted several points of distortion and deception, to create sensationalism. If I find the time, I shall watch it again and write them out for you.
Do you really think I should respect this sort of thing? When The Sun newspaper slandered the Liverpool fans by blaming them for the Hillsborough disaster, do you think I should have “respected” this as a valid point of view? Lies are lies.
I don’t know Scouse Billy, except for the words I see here. I don’t like lies, and I disapprove of people re-transmitting lies, especially ones that can be fatal. But you defend it and moralise at me.
No, it is not about “use of words”, it is about re-transmitting potentially fatal lies, and not having enough respect for other readers to fact-check before re-transmitting.
Yes. I am offering Scouse Billy the opportunity to become a greater person. So far, he prefers to protect his precious ego by hiding.
Incidentally, your own contradictions are showing; you say “Not that this is a contest in anyway”, and yet you advise me how to win. How you think you would win.
Chris Jones: Yup, that about sums it up – if and only if you were a lazy, partisan hack who’d already made up their mind, while giving it the one-glance over. And was utterly shameless in knowingly bringing about such a willful deception too.
But you’re here to visit the whole thing again, as an innocent, interested bystander who’s just interested in the truth – again – right? Are you ready to put down your two or three points (for the newcomer), as if they’d never already been discussed?
Chris Jones, did you not check my links, or did you disbelieve them? Scouse Billy tried to “help” me by advertising the services of a fake “doctor” who performs at best useless and at worst lethal procedures, and charges lots of money. How can you defend that fake doctor, and why do you defend Scouse Billy when he promotes it?
If your lover had a headache, and I said to go to a “doctor” who would shoot a magic bullet through his or her head, would you respect that?
Ben, you’re keeping me sane. This really is bat country. Glad I’m not tripping…
Sunflower, you also wrote this:
Inscribed on a stone tablet or something, was it? Or was it written by a human?
Clark; I have NO idea why Wiki lists Oscar Ocosta as ‘Narrator’, but this is the reference;
Narrator: We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like:
Raoul Duke: I feel a bit lightheaded. Maybe you should drive.
Narrator: Suddenly, there was a terrible roar all around us, and the sky was full with what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, and a voice was screaming:
Narrator and Raoul Duke (simultaneously): Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?!
Dr. Gonzo: Did you say something?
Raoul Duke: Hm? Never mind. It’s your turn to drive.
Narrator: No point in mentioning these bats, I thought. Poor bastard will see them soon enough.
Ben, I don’t have a copy here, so I can’t look to see if Oscar Ocosta is mentioned. I don’t remember it, but it’s a difficult sort of book to recall details from. Sorta mind-bending.
The police convention. Chris Jones and Sunflower turning into alligators. “No! Keep that child away from those monsters!”
Mind-bending…that sounds about right :+)
These crazies would have me send my oldest friend to have bicarb syringed into her breast, so that I show appropriate “respect” for non-“academic” ideas.
When I was a child, I would have argued against having a blood transfusion, because I’d been brainwashed for most of my life to think that blood transfusions made God really upset.
FFS, why should God give a damn about that?
At least drugs wear off…
sorry. Oscar Acosta, which was a pseudonym to protect the intemperate attorney.
For the benefit of any bewildered readers, Ben and I are both fans of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a Savage Journey into the Heart of the American Dream, by Hunter S Thompson, illustrated by Ralph Steadman.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_and_Loathing_in_Las_Vegas
The corruption of the American Dream of liberty and equality into fake medicine and religious mind-control has certainly been showing itself on this thread, paradoxically enough in non-Americans.
You know, this bit by SB: “NOW the important bit is where she reveals that chemotherapy causes cancer and that “the patients don’t know that but the doctors do”. “ really chaffs my arse.
My old lady works in the medical profession, leaning towards the care and treatment of children in particular. Always has done. She hates me mentioning anything about her in public, which is why I stay largely anonymous. She got a first in her degree. Her masters is in health promotion – breast, skin and bowel cancer in particular. She’s worked in all aspects from theatre, to initial consultation and follow-up, to nursing care, to play therapy for children, and on and on.
The very idea that she’s all part of some massive scam to visit harm on women & children in particular, so they can die through avoidable cancers while getting abused with needless and terrible radiation/chemo etc., is not just silly.
The idea is utterly outrageous, it can only come from a complete detachment from the real world. If that makes you think I’m “disrespectful”, Sunflower, because I won’t agree that my old lady IS in on such a scam – I have two words. Screw You.
Clark; I sense we will bore everyone with this American cult fragging. We’re still Colonial, after all.
Ben, US foreign policy perpetrates some disgusting abuse upon the rest of the world. But so does British, European, Australian, Chinese etc. etc. foreign policy.
From the US has come all sorts of high culture, literature, art, concepts of law, you name it. People everywhere are a mixture. And each person, internally is a mixture, and always will be.
I’m going to argue harder in future against knee-jerk anti-Americanism.
It’s cool. No need to intervene. They will see it themselves, eventually.
Glenn, too right. It is disgusting that these people slander the caring professions so. Doctors, nurses, scientists, teachers; they’re all in on it, these idiots tell us. We must love fraudsters and respect their lies.
{expletive deleted}
Clark – i think you’ll find Scouse Billy was trying to be of help. That and expressing an opinion.
Regarding your comment of:
“The Illuminati depopulation conspiracy is utterly stupid. The elites of this world are pleased to have teaming hordes of people, because they serve as workers and as a market. The elites are happy for a large number to be unemployed, too, as their suffering serves to scare the employed into compliance”
…The great caring elites of this world think of you as an useless eater Clark,a vermin. In this new technotronic and scientific era (read Brzezinski for more on this), there will soon be no need for ‘the workers’ – technology and science will eventually take the place of that outmoded idea. Think about that as you witness the gradual de-industrialisation of the developed countries in favour of the lower waged developing and BRIC countries for short term profit and exploitation. What will everybody left in the developing world do Clark,work for Wikepedia? Voluntary euthanasia will probably be the kindest option..
Those good old Rhodes Milner group ey – what a dandy bunch of chaps
Bed time for me. Goodnight Ben, from all the way across the Atlantic. Goodnight Glenn. Thank you both for your support.
Here’s to critical thinking and research.