You can see me speaking 24 minutes in here. Can’t work out how to embed this one. It was literally freezing and the very small crowd was understandable. I think four hour rallies outdoors in Scotland in midwinter are somewhat optimistic. I think we also need to face that the high excitement of the referendum campaign, where you could just put something out on Facebook and 10,000 people would show up, is behind us. What we have now is a period of hard graft towards the general election.
I think what I say in this short speech will give comfort to those in the SNP who blocked me as a candidate, because as usual I am joyfully off message. Shortly after me there is an amazing speech from Tommy Sheridan; his physical voice projection alone is astonishing! It was bouncing back off Salisbury Crags and Holyrood Palace.
This really is under 100 yards from where we live. That view of Salisbury Crags is what I see every time I look out the window. The balcony will be great once it gets a bit warmer.
Rob, I have a visitor just turned up. Back later.
Clark, I just hope your visitor doesn’t like a Martini shaken, not stirred.
But seriously, I never called you a nuke troll on this thread. You seem like a genuinely nice chap; but I have to say, the links you are posting here (such as the ‘natural nuclear reactor’) are classic nuke troll stuff.
Sorry Clark and Rob G, have no working scanner and I’m tied up with moving my son from house to house.
I wonder whether you can approach Chris himself, he’s a pretty easy to reach guy I should think, try it, by all means mention that I put you up to it, he’ll be fine. I’m sure that he will be involved in the Fukushima accident as well as I have seen him comment on RT.
I have not spoke to him for years, but we had some hearty debates in the past and one day I will rattle into him again.
Sorry I can’t help.
Rob, please tell me what you think about the natural nuclear reactor. I’ve just followed one link from its Wikipedia page; are you saying it was a U-235 theft covered up by this man or something like that?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Perrin
Nevermind, thanks and good vibes for the move.
Rob, I’ve had a look through that pdf. It says there was about 20 to 40 times more I-129 than I-131.
Taking 30 as the ratio my guestimate is that radiation from I-131 will decrease to below that of I-129 by around 200 days and then it’s mostly over with, but in that time it’ll have delivered, say, ten thousand times an entire human lifetime’s dose of the associated I-129. However, the I-129 radiation will just go on and on affecting future generations, barely decreasing in a time several times longer than human existence on Earth so far.
So I suppose what I want to see is a graph of total I-129 emissions against time from before the Manhattan Project until now.
What do you make of my numbers? I haven’t looked further to the beta energies yet.
Caesium-137; 30 years half-life:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesium-137#Radioactive_caesium_in_the_environment
Rob, I so much want them to shut down these pressurised water reactors; the PWRs and the ones they call Boiling Water Reactors. They all give me such a bad feeling. Reactors that depend on a highly pressurised vessel to confine essential coolant are completely unacceptable. The concept horrifies the mechanic in me. It’s utterly reckless.
Glenn – “Hey Jemand, got any more videos from the EDL (or whatever White Power forum you hang around with these days), which shows Pakistani cricket fans celebrating a win? You know, the videos you like to pass off as Muslims celebrating some terrorist event.
My mate who lives there says Aussies are pretty racist on the whole. Would you agree?”
The video I posted, and acknowledged was in error, was on youtube. It had nothing to do with the EDL which is not a “white power” organisation, at least when it was initially conceived. So you might want to get your own facts straight before making accusations.
But are you suggesting that muslims did not celebrate the Charlie Hebdo shootings? A casual google and perusal of social media proves otherwise. To deny it makes you look like a fool. The 9/11 attacks on New York’s twin towers was widely celebrated. Some even made shirts to remember the great event. https://actjonesboroar.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/9-11-shirt1.jpg
As for your racist mate claiming that Aussies are racist on the whole, comments like that makes you and your racist wanker friends look even more hypocritical.
Good luck with your superiority complex.
Well I lack the time and knowledge to follow this nuclear conversation but would be interested to see any conclusions (about where you agree and disagree).
Glancing through this caught my eye as something I do feel I can add to:
Clark
“Wikipedia is mostly factually accurate. Wikipedia itself is just based on relevant sources, and considerable effort is made to reference the most appropriate ones.”
Clark, I suggest your tendency to trust authority until proven otherwise leads you to this very misplaced conclusion. Wikipedia is a focus for enormous propaganda. It is sometimes factually wrong but more often wrong by ommission. It should not be relied on in any subject which attracts the propaganda of power.
Here’s a fascinating example of how wikipedia and google are subjegated by propagandists, laid bare by historian John Simkins:
Google, Bing and Operation Mockingbird. The CIA and Search-Engines
Google, Bing and Operation Mockingbird. The CIA and Search-Engines (Part 2)
Is Wikipedia under the control of political extremists?
Clark
In my comment above I want to strike the sentence:
I suggest your tendency to trust authority until proven otherwise leads you to this very misplaced conclusion.But the rest stands. The Simkins posts present a fascinating example of how the internet is shaped by propaganda.
Thanks Clark, unfortunately everything happens at once, my mother in law died of her cancer last night.
Take care and three cheers to tidal energy, one day we will tackle such dangerous and fiendish new technology….;)
Phil, you’re quite right about contested matters on Wikipedia, indeed, I even use it to explore such matters sometimes. You can discover all sorts of interesting snippets by digging back through articles’ History pages. Talk pages contain interesting arguments, not all of which get included in the article itself. During the Ukraine, er, coup or change of government depending on which side’s terminology you wish to use, I was watching some edit-wars in real-time, as pro-revolution and pro-Russian editors battled to shape the content of critical pages.
I’ve been involved in one such battle myself; a page about a Palestinian activist which had obviously been constructed mostly by pro-Israeli editors and made into a smear article by referencing multiple sensationalised Daily Mail articles. Alisher Usmanov’s page appears to be carefully tended by his staff, too. One of the things I find fascinating about Wikipedia is the real-time view it can give of the process of perception management.
But I was being brief when I wrote “factually accurate”. On matters regarding plain facts such as chemical properties, isotope half-lives, boiling points, solubility etc. Wikipedia is really pretty reliable these days. I would be really surprised if it was way off track about things like the nuclear fuel cycle for civilian power generation, for instance.
And it’s not a matter of trusting authority either; quite the opposite. Wikipedia is special because it’s one of the first and foremost examples of distributed contribution and authority. Anyone who finds and error or an omission can fix it, so long as they can support their contribution with good citations.
Something like Operation Mockingbird is much more problematic. It’s a covert operation by the CIA, making extensive use of the operational technique called “plausible deniability”. Obviously, this can make it hard to find reliable sources. John Simkins seems to write about mostly contested pieces of history, and he’s thus very likely to find lots of inaccuracies about his subjects of interest at Wikipedia. But the sort of sources he references, such as the KGB Archives, are just the sort of references that will stand up at Wikipedia. He needs to go and add the material and references, or get someone to do it for him. Some propagandist may then remove his work but if so, Simkins will then find the Wikipedia rules to be very helpful in getting it restored and keeping it there.
What Simkins doesn’t seem to realise is that the world of Wikipedia editing is incredibly busy. Junk pages based on poorly substantiated assertions get created all the time. No doubt, for instance, people with whacky ideas tried to develop a “Sandy Hook False-Flag Shooting Hoax” page, with all sorts of “references” to YouTube videos and Alex Jones pages. Pedantic editors (thank the gods for the diversity of human motivation) trawl through new Wikipedia articles looking for this sort of stuff and removing it. Such removed material can be reinstated with a few clicks, and if any of it can be shown to be based on verifiable sources it will be allowed to stand.
John Simkins writes good articles at spartacus-educational.com, but I think he misunderstands Wikipedia and doesn’t know how to be an effective editor there. It is quite challenging, but that’s because the Wikipedia environment contains so many diverse editors all with their own objectives, not because of some centralised authority.
There are some authorities; for instance I suspect that a technical article on nuclear detonation techniques would be taken down and all trace of it erased within a matter of minutes. But generally, the senior Wikipedia admins are pretty hands-off.
Nevermind, please convey my condolences. That was her place you took me to one Christmas, wasn’t it, near the big Cold War radio mast and the bus shelter where (was it?) Charles Dance got a lift? Best wishes to all your family.
Clark
You talk about Simkins as if he hasn’t provided excellent resources to have them refused by unaccountable forces above your ideal of equality amongst editors. You write at length about detail that does not challenge these basic facts and conclude he doesn’t understand wikipedia. You simply ignore the manipulation of serps.
So right back at you: I suggest you fail to acknowledge the degree of corporate collusion with the secret state. But we have been here before so not sure we’ll get anywhere.
Nevermind
Sorry to hear about your mother-in-law. I hope her passing was peaceful and you and yours are managing ok.
Phil
Phil, anyway, I’ll continue to use Wikipedia as a starting point because it has the broadest editor-base. If Rob wants to contest any matter which I’ve referenced through Wilkipedia, then he has to present references that are more convincing than the ones I’ve indirectly referenced.
So far, for instance, I’ve seen no (zero) evidence to contradict that the vast majority of depleted uranium is waste from the enrichment process. I’ve seen nothing to suggest that enrichment involves any nuclear reactions, nor for Rob’s assertion that most DU is obtained from spent nuclear fuel.
And I wish that, rather than moaning and dismissing, people would go and improve Wikipedia. What happens it that they make an initial attempt, but then other editors challenge their work. If their contribution gets reverted they give up rather than doing what they should, which is to defend their work and achieve consensus on the article’s Talk page. Then they start complaining about some “central authority” at Wikipedia, when actually the senior admins don’t really do much at all.
Simkins ought to be able to work this out. In the first two articles you linked, he’s complaining that Wikipedia isn’t revealing enough about a CIA operation. In the third, he’s wondering why an article is effectively pro-Stalinist. But those two viewpoints are diametrically opposed! Simkins is seeing the effect of a lack of central authority rather than the work of one, but he isn’t accustomed to dealing with such decentralised systems so he keeps wondering who’s really “controlling” the place in such a weird fashion.
Phil, it would be masses of work for me to check everything in those Simkins articles; I have no idea which historians are respectable in such fields.
In the fields I’m familiar with, technical things like physics, engineering and computing, Wikipedia is pretty good, and has been getting better over the course of years.
Phil, I have trouble relating to articles like that because of sections like these, copied from the articles you linked to:
These people are starting from the assumption that there’s some central authority called “Wikipedia”, it has a voice, a policy and gatekeepers. But they also write things like this:
Yes, this is exactly what happens at Wikipedia. If you post up novel stuff, certain hyperactive pedants will do their best to trash it, even though they know nothing about it themselves. But similar people are doing just the same thing to hundreds of pages a week claiming that some fringe research proves that honey and vinegar relieves arthritis, or that cancer is a fungus, or that Tesla extracted electric power from the atmosphere and the technique has been suppressed by secret agents, or global warming is a con, or no moon landings ever took place, or Lee Rigby never existed.
Phil, I’m sure there are CIA editors at Wikipedia. And MI5, MI6, KGB, etc. etc. Some of them have probably achieved senior editor status, but I bet they had to make a load of good encyclopaedic contributions to get there. I expect it’s quite a challenging and involving game for the participants.
But Wikipedia has changed things. It used to be that you had to write to the editors of the printed encyclopaedias if you wanted to get things changed. Their internal decision-making process was invisible to you; all you’d get would be their letters in response to yours. If the CIA had a hand in the process you wouldn’t see any sign of it.
Wikipedia has brought the process out where it can be seen. You can visit the user pages of your opponents and see what other edits they’ve made. You can go to Wikipedia’s “Village Pump” gossip centre, or its “Reliable Sources Noticeboard” and make your case there. You can look at the edits of other admins and thereby find one who might support your cause.
What I object to is when Wikipedia doesn’t support someone’s pet theory and they just dismiss the process and the whole Wikipedia project as “useless and controlled (specifically by my (imagined) opponent)” rather than getting involved, learning the ropes better and working to change things. Before, we’d never even had an encyclopaedia that we could edit ourselves. Wikipedia is far from perfect but it has certainly moved control of information down a few rungs in the direction of the general public.
Clark
I didn’t mean to hijack the thread over google and wikipedia. It’s ground we have never reconciled before. Probably more productive and interesting for you to continue the nuclear stuff with RobG.
But you are wrong and I am 100% correct. 🙂
Phil, Simkins articles mostly project Simkin’s own positions about the Dewey commission and Operation Mockingbird, but they are interspersed with occasional references to his observation about the corresponding Wikipedia articles, some of his own and others’ experiences with some Wikipedia editors whom he doesn’t identify, and some speculation about the significance of search engine rankings.
In this form it’s just too much for me to assess; I’m not familiar with the history he’s writing about, so I don’t even have any idea how radical or mainstream his historical interpretation is.
If he really wants to make a point about Wikipedia he needs to concentrate on just that. He needs to pick a few specific facts that have already been published, preferably by more than one reasonably well-accepted historian. Then he should document the story of what happens when he tries to incorporate those facts into Wikipedia. That account has to stand in its own right, not mixed into an historical argument he’s making at the same time. It needs to be complete, with Wiki editors’ usernames and links to the edits which were reverted – the Wiki software supports all this and more. He needs to explain how he crafted his edits to comply with Wiki rules, and which rules he used to defend his work against the other editors who challenged it. Then we’d be able to see what was really going on at Wikipedia.
Some groups are very good at editing Wikipedia, so their arguments sometimes dominate. For instance, Israel’s Hasbara run classes about editing Wikipedia, its rules, and how to use those rules to best advantage. They end up writing good, solid articles. Some of their opposition get bitter enough to give up and then discredit themselves, claiming that “Wikipedia is run Jews”.
Speculations about the operation of search engine rankings only muddy the waters really. The search providers all keep their algorithms secret, and rankings change for all sorts of obscure or unrelated reasons. For instance, if you’re assessing the rankings for an article about, say, a politician called Peter Watkins in Australia in 1958, but whilst you’re doing so some other Peter Watkins in the US happens to get caught with 100kg of cocaine and two hookers, the rankings for your 1958 politician suddenly plummet as the randy drug dealer steals the US headlines for three days.
It’s best not to get too paranoid about Internet stuff and just keep slogging on.
Phil, this is all relevant because RobG needs to know how Wikipedia works, and how it fails. If he thinks it’s way out about the nuclear fuel cycle then I’m pretty sure he’s mistaken. I’m open to evidence that indicates otherwise, but if it’s just bold assertion versus a referenced Wikipedia article, I’ll give more weight to the latter.
If you look further up this thread you’ll see that I’ve been trying to use omissions at Wikipedia as clues about where covert nuclear advocacy may be hidden – Amersham-plc and the strangely quiet disappearance of the NRPB.
Clark : Sorry, I had totally neglected this thread – haven’t looked at it for a couple of days. Will review your figures as requested, but please give me a day or two.
Peacewisher, from here:
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2015/02/amnesty-international-conference-on-torture/comment-page-2/#comment-509616
I haven’t read the 9/11 Commission report, but I know that much of it is based upon confessions extracted under torture and therefore must be regarded as fabricated. The parts that deal with identification of the organisers of the attacks have been kept secret.
Consequently, there is no “official account” to engage with. There is a mass-media story – and I don’t know how to engage with such nonsense.
I have returned to examining the collapses over the course of several years. While I can’t rule out planned destruction of the buildings, I can’t rule out collapses due to damage, fire and gravity either; indeed, as I’ve continued to model the collapses in my mind, as it were, the latter has come to seem more and more likely, and the former less and less so.
The matter might begin to move if the redacted pages of the 9/11 Commission report were made public. Any other suggestions welcomed.
But really; those damaged, burning, extremely tall buildings may well have simply collapsed. If they did, then all the effort put into “proving” they were demolished is wasted. And who does that serve? Que bono?
John Goss, regarding Fred’s link which wouldn’t open for you; try right-clicking the following link and then clicking “Save (target / link) as…” It’s a pdf which should open on most systems after you’ve downloaded it:
https://dspace.sunyconnect.suny.edu/bitstream/handle/1951/47900/moss-09.pdf
Clark, with regard to Wikipedia, I agree that it provides a starting point of knowledge; but when it comes to subjects that are even remotely contentious, forget it.
Wikipedia strikes me as a good example of how tightly controlled information is in the West. Do you think you live in a free and open society..? Forget that one as well!
One of the best recent examples was of course the Edward Snowden revelations in the summer of 2013. The entire mainstream media completely ignored it, despite the amazing things that Snowden was coming out with. The New York Times, who had been in partnership with the Guardian, et al, dropped the story in short order. It was only when Snowden fled Hong Kong that the MSM started covering it, in a traitorous, fleeing spy sort of way. Was it the President of Bolivia whose plane was forced to land in Europe, because the psychos in Washington thought Snowden was on board? You really couldn’t make any of this stuff up.
Likewise, and getting back to all things nuclear, is the saga of the USS Reagan, one of the biggest and most expensive warships ever built, which by funny coincidence found itself offshore of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant just as the reactors were blowing up and melting down. A large number of military personel who served on this ship are now dying, and there’s an ongoing lawsuit; but it wasn’t just the USS Reagan: there were also at least 12 other ships in its support fleet that were also seriously irradiated. Apart from the human cost (something like a total of 12,000 personel who received heavy doses of radiation) there’s also the capital costs; billions and billions of dollars, because none of these warships will ever be able to be used again.
It’s both mass murder and criminal incompetence of the highest order, yet none of it ever gets reported by the MSM.
We live in the Matrix. Don’t fool yourself otherwise.
RobG, I find that Wikipedia generally adheres to the Wikipedia rules. I actually find it quite good on contentious things, but on some subjects you need to go to a different page. Here’s a trail, for instance. Here’s the 9/11 Commission report article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9/11_commission_report
But to find out that the document is based on “harsh interrogation” you need to go here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_9/11_Commission
That page is linked from the 9/11 Commission report page, as a “Main Article” link in the “Criticism” section. However, to discover that “harsh interrogation” is actually torture, you need to go to the “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_interrogation_techniques
That page isn’t even linked from the previous one. Now I could edit all this and set it straight, but no doubt some other editors would put it back again. What they won’t do is just remove the information – that is against Wikipedia’s rules; removing well-referenced material is called “vandalism” and they’d get a suspension if they persisted.
But it’s difficult to maintain enthusiasm and make the effort when people keep dismissing Wikipedia as “useless”, and can’t be bothered to chip in and offer support. It would actually be really helpful if people such as yourself took the trouble to learn the rules and help maintain some of the articles.
Rob, I’m aware how biased the corporate media is. I’m signed up with “the two Davids”:
http://medialens.org/
One of the problems with Wikipedia is that on current affairs it tends to reflect the corporate media narrative. This is a direct result of the “Reliable Source” policy. The traditional mainstream media sources are regarded at Wikipedia as reliable sources. This is because they have editorial boards and can be sued or forced to print retractions if they misreport. I know, correction of the corporate media doesn’t happen much, but they do report from slightly different perspectives…
…What has a worse effect is when none of them report a specific issue, such as the Snowden case you mention above. In such cases there are no references to support additions to Wikipedia.
However, scholarly and academic articles, court records, certain government records, verified leaked documents and serious non-fiction books are also “Reliable Sources” at Wikipedia. These take longer to come out than corporate news media articles, but their effect is to make Wikipedia articles improve over time.
I wish people would realise what a valuable resource Wikipedia really is. It is our chance to be recorders and shapers of the historical record – if we can be bothered. No community resource like Wikipedia has ever existed before.
And no, we don’t live in the Matrix. It’s nowhere near as bad as that yet, and it’s our job to prevent it from getting that way.
I don’t suppose you know much about free software – I don’t mean freeware, I mean software that respects your freedom; open source software published under the GPL or other free licenses. Here:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Copyleft licensing made Wikipedia possible. The GPL was the genius master-stroke of visionary Richard Stallman. Do please read the last of the three links above. No, it’s not as bad as the Matrix yet, and we have some excellent tools to prevent that happening. Please familiarise yourself with them; you’re going to need them!
Ditch that damn Mac OS-X (the hardware is OK) and get yourself a proper operating system, the sort hackers write and use. Oh, did I write “hackers”? Scary…
http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#what_is
And Rob, thanks for the info on your blog. I was there a few days ago. I read about the USS Ronald Reagan there; I hadn’t heard of it before, so thanks for that. I also discovered Mari Takenouchi and Save Kids Japan there:
http://savekidsjapan.blogspot.com/
Blogging is important, but it’s only part of the process. For instance, from various articles indexed on the link below, you can see Craig countering pro-war propaganda and probably averting a UK – Iran conflict – look for the articles about maritime boundaries and Royal Navy personel:
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2007/03/
Around the index page linked below Craig exposed Adam Werritty – who the corporate media were happy to dismiss as merely Liam Fox’s sometime gay lover – actually, again, trying to start a war with Iran:
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2011/10/page/2/
To be continued…
Rob, blogging forces the corporate media’s hand. That’s what we do here, what we’ve been doing for years. Craig helps to reveal things, and the commenters at this blog help to gain publicity.
We’ve had episodes where people were posting links back to this blog on articles on the Guardian and Independent websites, and of course the moderators there were removing them. So they’d re-post the comment there, and post here saying “I just posted this at the Graun; let’s see how long before they remove it”. They’d post notices at their own blogs and at others. We’d e-mail our friends…
Eventually the corporate media would be forced to cover the story, or they just end up looking silly. That’s why I linked those articles above, so you could see the process in action and see that it’s real, it really does make a difference.
And once it’s in the corporate media, which are “WP:RS” (Wikipedia: Reliable Source), Wiki editors can produce a Wikipedia article about it which, you may notice, usually come near the top of Google search results. The following exists because of activism in the Blogsphere, including this blog:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Werritty