Myths About Nuclear War

[Cleve Blakemore]

http://www.aussurvivalist.com/nuclear_war/nuclear_facts_vs_myths.htm

[Albert Woo]

Hey, Cleve's back!

Um...why?


Edit: Well, I guess he came back yesterday...but, again, why?

[Jason McCullough]

You're right, it'd only kill 90% of the population, with the last 10% wishing they were dead. Touche`!

[Cleve Blakemore]

You're right, it'd only kill 90% of the population, with the last 10% wishing they were dead. Touche`!

Ooh, whatta loss it would be, too!

[Jim F.]

I can't believe I read all that, but it was really facinating.

But that site is spouting as much propaganda as it claims to refute. It's a sales pitch attempting to sell people on their need for shelters. Obviously they got sick of hearing "why should I bother with a shelter when the world is just going to be a living hell anyway?". So they write up a myth/fact sheet that in itself relies on unproven numbers and selective study sighting.

The biggest issue is their refutation of the nuclear winter theory. Instead of disproving the theory, the writer simply states that theory can be disproven, but the people who would disprove it just aren't the type of people that get involved in government matter. The writer is counting on a deus ex machina to show up and suddenly demonstrate why nuclear winter is bunk.


Serious climatic effects from a Soviet-U.S. nuclear war cannot be completely ruled out. However, possible deaths from uncertain climatic effects are a small danger compared to the incalculable millions in many countries likely to die from starvation caused by disastrous shortages of essentials of modern agriculture sure to result from a Soviet-American nuclear war, and by the cessation of most international food shipments.


In otherwords: ok, so maybe nuclear winter will happen and it will be horrible. But not as horrible as all the other problems! So many people will be dying of starvation that a little multiyear blocking of the sun is nothing to worry about.

[Sean Tudor]

Who cares about all this crap. We're all going to die someday anyway !

[Cleve Blakemore]

The biggest issue is their refutation of the nuclear winter theory. Instead of disproving the theory, the writer simply states that theory can be disproven, but the people who would disprove it just aren't the type of people that get involved in government matter. The writer is counting on a deus ex machina to show up and suddenly demonstrate why nuclear winter is bunk.

You obviously are not very well read. Carl Sagan publicly confessed in many different forums that he was wrong to propagate the nuclear winter hypothesis and that he was duped by Soviet scientists into studying the issue.


Serious climatic effects from a Soviet-U.S. nuclear war cannot be completely ruled out. However, possible deaths from uncertain climatic effects are a small danger compared to the incalculable millions in many countries likely to die from starvation caused by disastrous shortages of essentials of modern agriculture sure to result from a Soviet-American nuclear war, and by the cessation of most international food shipments.

In otherwords: ok, so maybe nuclear winter will happen and it will be horrible. But not as horrible as all the other problems! So many people will be dying of starvation that a little multiyear blocking of the sun is nothing to worry about.

You're exactly right. What do you think a couple cold years means to somebody like me? That's tea time. I could shrug that like water off a duck's back. Sure, consumer units like yourself might be aboveground freezing to death in their SUVs weeping and wondering how come the fuel light is blinking, but true humans like myself are not going to seriously consider a few years of Vermont style weather to be the end of human civilization. If that's the worst we have to worry about we are pretty secure in saying a global thermonuclear war is not that big a deal.

I've got several thousand litres of diesel stored long term in an underground bay and I could probably run my electrical system without sunlight for at least ten years off generator power alone. Some marxist birdbrain shrieking about the fifty year nuclear winter is just plain rubbish, it's more middle-class voodoo. The truth is that most people are stone age primitives who regard nuclear weapons as the big Kahuna and use them as a deus ex machina to integrate into their weird notions of guaranteed company when their nation's dopey Jerry Springer cultures finally get their just desserts. I've got a better idea - how about we start acting like sentient lifeforms and get realistic civil defense programs? Oh, that's a big ask you see. Reality and whatnot, it's all so complex. Let's just forget about all of it and watch more Oprah instead and try not to think about any grownup issues or anything that is in any way linked to sanity in our lives. Buy Martha Stewart products, watch cable tv, sip cappuccino and tsk, tsk.

Soon, you won't have the option of ignoring the issues of civil defense, national sovereignty, fiat money, cultural homogeneity and the survival of western civilization. The chickens are coming home to roost and they won't be shushed away by another Oprah broadcast this time.

It's not about who is "right." This isn't a television chat show. It is about who will be left.

[Troy S Goodfellow]

You obviously are not very well read. Carl Sagan publicly confessed in many different forums that he was wrong to propagate the nuclear winter hypothesis and that he was duped by Soviet scientists into studying the issue.

Considering you are resorting to the ever popular "appeal to authority" - and on nuclear winter there are few better authorities than Dr. Sagan - I'm going to have to ask for a citation here. I can find no reference to such a confession.

Troy

[Desslock]

You obviously are not very well read. Carl Sagan publicly confessed in many different forums that he was wrong to propagate the nuclear winter hypothesis and that he was duped by Soviet scientists into studying the issue.

Do you have any links off-hand to that sort of admission, Cleve? Interesting article, by the way.

Stefan

[Chowhound]

Being relatively new to these boards...

Cleve = educated troll?

[Cleve Blakemore]

You obviously are not very well read. Carl Sagan publicly confessed in many different forums that he was wrong to propagate the nuclear winter hypothesis and that he was duped by Soviet scientists into studying the issue.

Do you have any links off-hand to that sort of admission, Cleve? Interesting article, by the way.

Stefan

http://mediawhore.wi2600.org/mirrors/textfiles.com/survival/nkwrmelt.txt

Carl Sagan predicted that the 1991 Kuwaiti oil fires would throw up so much soot and pollution they would darken the sun and catastrophically cool the earth. (What a gammy-eyed goofball!) Sagan was speaking outside his field of expertise, basing his prediction on the nuclear winter theories (which he already admitted may have been based on bad comp sims) that atmospheric scientists had formed in their study of a potential nuclear war. Needless to say, nuclear wars are far more serious than oil fires, and Sagan's prediction did not come true -- at least to the degree that he thought it would. Perhaps he was spending too much time on that cardboard Star Trek set at PBS muttering about his "billions and billions" of particles of nuclear ash. The guy was a vain performing artist and a bit of a naff loon, in my opinion. all he needed was a turban on his head with a feather sticking out of it. Like a lot of "skeptics" you needed to be a bit skeptical about this pencil necked geek when reading his books. I've never read the kind of crappy hack flowery prose scrawled in hammy texts like BROCA's BRAIN in my life. Amazingly bad writing. Carl loved to use really weird malapropisms and big words in the wrong context. He should have been writing for Bush Jr. or putting out his own Xmas albums crooning away about the "Fecundity of fossil field fallacies amidst the laconic laity! Oh, baby, won't you be home for a white snowwwwwwooohh!" He could be in a duet with Stevie "Screamin' Garlic Breath" Jay Gould!

Good debunk from here :

http://www.fortfreedom.org/s05.htm

Another good summary of Oprah crowd mythology in general :

http://www.ki4u.com/survive/doomsday.htm

[Ignatius P. Reilly]

I love it when bug-eyed right-wingers quote The Wall Street Journal editorial page as if it was some kind of even-handed, temperate journal of reason.

The particular article you linked to attempts to persuade, when you cut through all the bullshit rhetoric, that since a 100 megaton, tactical nuclear exchange would fail to produce a nuclear winter, no such thing as nuclear winter must exist.

Unfortunately at the time of that article's writing there were about 10,000 megatons of nuclear weapons in the hands of the United States and the USSR. The WSJ test case of a 100 megaton exchange presumably was chosen to justify their political desire to place and then keep tactical nuclear weapons in Europe (which Reagan did, if I recall correctly), which might produce just such an event.

What we have here is a perfect example of Rush-Limbaughesque conservative "logic", which is to find the most extreme left-wing argument being advanced by anyone anywhere, debunk it (easy enough, since you've gone out of your way to assault only the most hair-brained claims of the left), and declare the entire field of inquiry settled in favor of an immoderate, right-wing agenda.

The other article (from Arizona) that you linked doesn't appear worth reading through, but a quick glance indicates that it bears a strong resemblance to the rhetoric of General Jack. D. Ripper in Dr. Strangelove. I like the line where he says that arguing that a full-scale nuclear war would wipe out life on earth as we know it is a "criminal simplification" of the issue.

What sort of foaming-at-the-mouth tin-foil-hatted nutcase, when considering the consequences of nuclear war, places the onus of criminality on those who worry that it will wipe them and their kind out?

Have fun in your bomb shelter.

[Cleve Blakemore]

I love it when bug-eyed right-wingers quote The Wall Street Journal editorial page as if it was some kind of even-handed, temperate journal of reason.

The particular article you linked to attempts to persuade, when you cut through all the bullshit rhetoric, that since a 100 megaton, tactical nuclear exchange would fail to produce a nuclear winter, no such thing as nuclear winter must exist.

Unfortunately at the time of that article's writing there were about 10,000 megatons of nuclear weapons in the hands of the United States and the USSR. The WSJ test case of a 100 megaton exchange presumably was chosen to justify their political desire to place and then keep tactical nuclear weapons in Europe (which Reagan did, if I recall correctly), which might produce just such an event.

What we have here is a perfect example of Rush-Limbaughesque conservative "logic", which is to find the most extreme left-wing argument being advanced by anyone anywhere, debunk it (easy enough, since you've gone out of your way to assault only the most hair-brained claims of the left), and declare the entire field of inquiry settled in favor of an immoderate, right-wing agenda.

The other article (from Arizona) that you linked doesn't appear worth reading through, but a quick glance indicates that it bears a strong resemblance to the rhetoric of General Jack. D. Ripper in Dr. Strangelove. I like the line where he says that arguing that a full-scale nuclear war would wipe out life on earth as we know it is a "criminal simplification" of the issue.

What sort of foaming-at-the-mouth tin-foil-hatted nutcase, when considering the consequences of nuclear war, places the onus of criminality on those who worry that it will wipe them and their kind out?

Have fun in your bomb shelter.

I'll have more fun scrubbing your outline off concrete with a wire brush. "Right wing reasoning." Yeah, that's ... odd. Dude, there's nothing wrong with you that a sky ring of 220 kiloton airbursts can't fix.

It's not about who is right. It's about who is left. People like you have trouble understanding reality stuff. I predict a cure is in the pipeline.

[Ignatius P. Reilly]

Well, now everyone can see the extent of your ability to sustain political argument.

I'm not exactly sure how to interpret the "cure is in the pipeline" comment. Is that a threat?

[Jason McCullough]

I think that means god will choose cleve as TEH WINNER by nukin' the rest of us up real good. The same way god has chosen Cleve as the best game developer - you know, by delaying his game endlessly and anointing his belly with TEH HOLY FANNY PACK.

[Troy S Goodfellow]

Cleve, I was looking for a citation of Sagan's confession that he was duped by the Russkies. Though the provided WSJ article makes allusion to Soviet propagandists in the concluding paragraph, but no reference to Sagan admitting being prodded by them. You did intend to cite the confession of this naff loon as evidence that nuclear war wouldn't be so bad, right?

Troy

[Robert Sharp]

I can't believe you guys are responding to him. Didn't any of you READ the matrix reloaded thread? We already went over this. I suggest going to the movie section and reading it. Cleve is NOT going to listen to your arguments. He self seals everything he says. if you don't agree with him, you are an idiot, and therefore everything you say is wrong. So you can't possibly argue with him. He then throws in some ad hominem attacks, appeals to authority (without citation) and calls it a day. At least, he said he was going to call it a day, but I guess he changed his mind. Fair enough, but fueling him isn't really helping anything.

[Jason McCullough]

It sure is fun though.

[Brian Koontz]

Obviously I'm either crazy or stupid or both, depending on who you talk to, but I'd rather work to avoid large-scale nuclear war rather than work to survive it. Somehow I think I'd be better off with the former.

[XPav]

I'm no Sparky, but it'll have to do.

http://www.pavloff.net/fallout_cleve.jpg

[Peter Frazier]

Very funny- I'm glad you took into account his bullet-proof skin.

[Cleve Blakemore]

Unfortunately at the time of that article's writing there were about 10,000 megatons of nuclear weapons in the hands of the United States and the USSR. The WSJ test case of a 100 megaton exchange presumably was chosen to justify their political desire to place and then keep tactical nuclear weapons in Europe (which Reagan did, if I recall correctly), which might produce just such an event.


Nothing is more embarrassing than a liberal trying to pretend to understand something. They never do. If they understood anything, don't you think they'd be doing something other than interior decorating, symposiums on negritude and living off government grants?

Let me try to lay it out really simply. UNDER NORMAL CONDITIONS, NUCLEAR WARHEADS DON'T EJECT ASH INTO THE OUTER ATMOSPHERE THE WAY THAT VOLCANOS DO. THEY SIMPLY DON'T. A NUCLEAR DETONATION IS DIFFERENT IN ALMOST EVERY WAY. THAT'S WHY LIBERALS WHO TYPED IN VOLCANO VALUES FOR A NUCLEAR WAR SIMULATION END UP WITH THE KIND OF RESULTS THEY PAID TO GET.

Outside of some specially designed nuclear weapon (I'm not aware of the existence of any) the ash that is kicked up by a deliberate dirty ground burst is INCAPABLE of lifting enough earth high enough into the air to match the destructive force of some volcanos.

Sane people are being very generous with you gammy eyed televitz watching loons to even indulge you in your afflicted "Krakatoa-Nuke" analogy. I don't honestly think you have the foggiest idea of what a nuclear weapon is or it's effects. It isn't the same at all, not in any way. Both of them have been known to throw up ash. That's it. There's a huge difference between physically ejecting volcanic ash miles and miles upwards almost into orbit and a nuclear weapon throwing up a cloud of fallout a couple thousand feet.

Most of the nuclear winter guys are like those drunks at a party who try to stumble into a conversation that has been going on for some time and who try to inject some non sequitur in awkwardly to join in. You guys may not realize this but REAL scientists (not PBS performers with their own little cardboard starship sets) have been documenting the effects of nuclear weapons for over fifty years from real testing and they've done a damn good job of it, too. Funny how some astronomer who wrote for the popular press and the television equivalent of "Ask Dr. Science" thought he'd just stagger into the nuclear field dragging some Soviet agitprop on the KGB payroll screaming about how the sky is falling.

Nobody needed Sagan to open his mouth, that didn't stop him from prophesying the black clouds of Kuwait shutting off the Earth from the Sun because somebody busted some oil wells open and set them on fire. The guy was a friggin' doofus, then he dropped dead. I've read all of Carl Sagan's books, He's a complete jackass and a poseur swishing around the room in his purple robe speaking in big words playing at the role of enlightened thinker. Hey, he sold a lot of books to the peasants and got himself a big swimming pool. Good on him, every dork can make a million in America. I hope he's somewhere up there even now cruising around at the helm of his Xmas bulb spaceship blubbering about billions of this and that and making grandiloquent statements about his own patient mastery of logic and cold analysis. To me the guy was just another leftist klown.

[Jason McCullough]

Yeah, fermi, teller, and von neumann didn't think nukes were that big of a deal. Right.

[Cleve Blakemore]

Yeah, fermi, teller, and von neumann didn't think nukes were that big of a deal. Right.

Can you write down all your drab, mindless received ideas on a piece of paper for me and then clutch them as hard as you can in one fist? If you hold on tight enough, later maybe I can come back out here and extract it from your bleached white boney talons to have it laminated for future generations. Thanks.

(Sound of two ton vault door closing on hydraulics)

[Chowhound]

Cleve is pretty funny. I want him on Jerry Springer or one of the other poor white trash talk shows.

[Jason Levine]

Since Mr. Blakemore is, by his own admission, a genius, I'm sure he can explain to us how he is keeping that several thousand litres of diesel that he has stored underground stable over a period of years.

[Cleve Blakemore]

Since Mr. Blakemore is, by his own admission, a genius, I'm sure he can explain to us how he is keeping that several thousand litres of diesel that he has stored underground stable over a period of years.

Diesel requires "turning" and regular dosing with antifungal fuel stabilizer on a twice a year basis. Properly stored without moisture leaks, diesel will last up to twenty years and still retain some integrity as a fuel. A diesel tank must be equipped with a handling arm internally that allows the fuel to be circulated from the bottom to the top of the tank to prevent it from settling.

Gasoline/Petrol, by contrast, especially today's inferior brands, last roughly three months in a car before it begins to break down.

Biodiesel can be readily produced from animal waste with the right equipment and will run virtually unsupplemented in most regular diesel engines.

[Gary Whitta]

I've read all of Carl Sagan's books, He's a complete jackass and a poseur swishing around the room in his purple robe speaking in big words playing at the role of enlightened thinker.

And this differentiates him from you, how?

[Captain Cookiepants]

I've read all of Carl Sagan's books, He's a complete jackass and a poseur swishing around the room in his purple robe speaking in big words playing at the role of enlightened thinker.

And this differentiates him from you, how?
Gary you're on the invite list from now on.

[Tom Chick]

I don't normally play in these kinds of threads, but Gary definitely deserves a high five for that one.

-Tom

[Cleve Blakemore]

I don't normally play in these kinds of threads, but Gary definitely deserves a high five for that one.

-Tom

Definitely you should give it it a girly-running try but I suspect you'd both end up on your boney asses after you missed each other's hands.

[Jason Levine]

Diesel requires "turning" and regular dosing with antifungal fuel stabilizer on a twice a year basis. Properly stored without moisture leaks, diesel will last up to twenty years and still retain some integrity as a fuel. A diesel tank must be equipped with a handling arm internally that allows the fuel to be circulated from the bottom to the top of the tank to prevent it from settling.

Gasoline/Petrol, by contrast, especially today's inferior brands, last roughly three months in a car before it begins to break down.

Biodiesel can be readily produced from animal waste with the right equipment and will run virtually unsupplemented in most regular diesel engines.

Exactly the same information that I read on the petroleum company web sites. Brilliant.

[steve]

And this differentiates him from you, how?
http://www.grimoire.com.au/image/entity.jpg

[Cleve Blakemore]

Exactly the same information that I read on the petroleum company web sites. Brilliant.

There's a guy who lives down the mountain on my north face who was showing me his backup generator the other day and he claimed he was regularly running it with diesel he stored back in 1982. He told me if you know how to store diesel properly and you don't get water in it, the real shelf life is indefinite.

Of course, if "nuclear winter" manifests itself as one cold year followed by perfectly normal weather, I've got a colossal array of solar panels I picked up last year where I was actually paid to haul them off somebody else's property. I plan to mount these up the slope in a narrow canyon underneath a radar reflective camouflage net for all the free energy I could ever want or need. That's another great feature of sunny Queensland, Australia, the survivalist capital of Earth.

Meanwhile, you'll be into your sixth month of the "war where everybody would just die instantly" with your hair falling out and blood in your urine, trying to raise rats for food in a little wooden cage you built inside a hollowed out television and drinking contaminated rainwater, accumulating an ever growing dose of radionucleotides in your internal organs and brain that will finally kill you in the most agonizing way humanly imaginable over a three week period, probably concluding with a 24 hour nonstop anal savaging at the hands of diversity friends, who will then roast and eat you over a hot spit. That's the Frank Capra version, of course, the one with the upbeat feelgood ending. You don't want to here the downside scenario.

[Tom Chick]

You don't want to here the downside scenario.
http://www.grimoire.com.au/image/entity.jpg

[Gary Whitta]

Going back to basics here... I don't know who this guy Cleve is, but can anyone explain to me why is he so fascinated with the full horror of post-nuclear life and death, and with relaying it to everyone else in great detail at every chance he gets?

I remember being terrified and obsessed with nuclear war in the mid-eighties, around the same time that THREADS and THE DAY AFTER came out, and when I was still a kid. These days I try to limit my worries to things I can control in my normal everyday life; seems to me that constantly obsessing about the exact pattern in which my hair will fall out and my insides will rot as a result of radioactive fallout is somewhat pointless, unproductive, and let's be honest, a bit sad.

[westyx2]

bwahahahaha

mounting solar panels *under* camoflague netting? woah, smart move that. and it's *radar* reflective!!!!

ignoring the fact that the only people who are going to be running around with radars in the air are .. the australian air force. yeah, uhuh, fighter planes are gonna be gunnin' for your solar panels, cleverly hidden underneath camoflauge netting after the bombs have dropped. if you were actually smart, you'd use IR camo stuff. those solar panels are really going to stand out once they get hot. well, if the sun could get through the camo netting, of course.

as for survivalist capital of *anthing*? queensland? the only survivalist nuts running around that i remember were the freedom scouts, a bunch of nutjobs who are scarily into in far north queensland succession and the one nation party. you'll forgive me if i don't quite believe you :)

it's not as if there will be much left of queenland. townsville gets a nuke or 2 (air force base - including the ready action battalion, army base, army aviation (blackhawks), bloody huge port). brisbane gets one (army, capital, not sure about navy/air force). then there are the ready airfields up north, tho i think they're more in the northern territory.

it's not nuclear winter that's gonna kill ya - it's the long lived radioactive stuff in the soil.

[Anders Hallin]

This thread is making me a bit of an urge to continue reading Tad Williams' Otherland now, just to find out how it goes for the characters hiding out in the abandoned South African military base below ground.

[Dave Markell]

Badly, as you would expect. Not my favorite series by a long shot. I enjoyed the first couple books, but then Williams seemed to get very lost.

[Cleve Blakemore]

it's not nuclear winter that's gonna kill ya - it's the long lived radioactive stuff in the soil.

"Stuff!"

You're a moron. You're one of these kinds of morons who mostly deals with other morons and therefore never got called out on being a moron and tends to think everybody is a moron like himself. You're altogether mediocre and so limited in your experience you believe everyone is like you - slow witted, poorly read and largely oblivious to the world around you.

Nothing that comes out of nuclear warheads is long-lived. Sometimes nuclear detonations fuse rare substances already in the crater with ash that can form soil "hotspots" that persist for long periods of time. It can always happen. In any event, none of this will matter to you because you'll be be dead during the first two weeks when the real hot stuff saturates the environment. Cleaning up hotspots is part of post-war decontamination and reconstruction.

You should read THE EFFECTS OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS and then come back here with a little understanding under your belt.

Townsend? Yes, I'll probably feel a little vibration in the hand holding a teacup if Townsend gets hit. "That must be Townsend," I'll say, then I'll finish the tea.

I'm ashamed for you morons trying to sound like you speak with authority on this subject. You have little connection with the serious research of the past fifty years on the effects of nuclear weapons and most of your knowledge on the subject comes from watching old episodes of Gilligan's Island.

Tell me again how the "stuff" is "going to get me" when I'm 32 feet underground behind 16 inches of concrete and corrugated steel. Hmm, let's see, unless the nukes change the laws of physics, it would seem to be necessary for aboveground radiation to be in excess of that comparable to the surface of a white dwarf or higher in order to raise levels in the shelter to a dangerous degree. How does that work, again?

Remember, since I live on a slope, every rain washes particles off the mountain and away from me. So let's say for argument's sake that aboveground is 10,000 rads an hour, possible if around a hundred nukes are detonated on the ground deliberately in Queensland. That means radiation inside the shelter will be roughly equivalent to the same levels you get from glow-in-the-dark nontoxic tape. I see what you mean. Of course, the hotter today, the shorter the half-life.

[Cleve Blakemore]

I remember being terrified and obsessed with nuclear war in the mid-eighties, around the same time that THREADS and THE DAY AFTER came out, and when I was still a kid. These days I try to limit my worries to things I can control in my normal everyday life; seems to me that constantly obsessing about the exact pattern in which my hair will fall out and my insides will rot as a result of radioactive fallout is somewhat pointless, unproductive, and let's be honest, a bit sad.

How touchy-feely ... it was like an Oprah hug-in! Obviously you think surviving a nuclear war is another consumer choice like cappuccino or moccacino.

Don't worry - be happy. You won't suffer much longer anyway.

[Met_K]

-113pts and may God have mercy upon your soul.

[Cleve Blakemore]

-113pts and may God have mercy upon your soul.

Nutter!

[Gary Whitta]

How touchy-feely ... it was like an Oprah hug-in! Obviously you think surviving a nuclear war is another consumer choice like cappuccino or moccacino.

Don't worry - be happy. You won't suffer much longer anyway.

What, exactly, is the point of obsessively worrying about this kind of shit? Unless, of course, your life is so pointless and boring that the only way you can get through the days is to fixate constantly on how you're going to maximize your wretched lifespan in an irradiated wasteland?

If this is really what you devote a lot of your time to, I pity you - you're the saddest kind of survivalist nut, deferring the normal life you should be living in order to prepare for a situation that will most likely never arise. But no doubt you'll have the last life as you roam the blasted deserts of Queensland (note: when you wake up each morning, how do you actually know if there's been a nuclear war overnight or not?), trying to find other survivors who you can show your QT3 print-outs to and brag about how you were right all along. I suppose even a post-apocalyptic society will need a few blow-hards.

You're a sad, sad, man. And no matter how great the intolerable suffering of post-nuclear life may be for us ignorant and unprepared proles, I can't imagine it's any worse than listening to you ranting on and on and on about it.

[Cleve Blakemore]

Queensland (note: when you wake up each morning, how do you actually know if there's been a nuclear war overnight or not?), trying to find other

I have monitoring equipment on the mountain using commercially available sensors that sounds an alarm in the event of anybody even trying to use a dirty bomb or other sneaky terrorist attack:

http://www.blackcatsystems.com/GM/

I work within ten minutes of my home. My children's school is within ten minutes of that. My entire family can be inside the shelter with the blast door sealed inside of ten minutes.

I was stunned to find out that locally here around Brisbane, there is no government monitoring program. You could be up to your knees in the stuff from a dirty bomb for weeks before the government might tell you that you were breathing and eating deadly radioactive particles.

As screwed up as the U.S. is, Australia's "civil defense" program consists of some refrigerator magnets and a little flyer telling you to report suspicious activity by your neighbors. More bodies for the bulldozers. Australia could benefit more from a Swiss-style civil defense program than any nation on Earth but by the time the Australians start to act like sane people, it will only be because they are running around screaming hysterically and crying and generally acting like big stupid apes who just got a hell of a surprise. Reality is not amenable to social perceptions. It is what is is. Nowadays any nation should have a radiation monitoring system throughout all its inhabited centers. A sane nation, anyway.

[Gary Whitta]

Can you actually get and sustain an erection for a woman? Because you're like a lite-brand male, almost like a male with testicles but no functional hormones. I'd expect you to be sterile and largely incapable of reproduction. You're like a large, quacking fembot.

I'd respond to this part were it not for the fact that it's completely irrevelant to the discussion we're having. But if you're more concerned with flinging pointless insults than addressing the questions I asked, I'll simply let this section stand on its own as a perfect example of why you are one of the most consistently ridiculed and baited posters on this board. It's not a coincidence that everyone is constantly berating you, you know, nor is it random; nobody picked your name out of a hat and decided that everyone on QT3 should keep telling you you're an idiot. It's because you ARE an idiot.


Luckily for us, our ancestors had better genes than you do.

As you're an Australian, I presume the ancestors you're referring to are the thieves, murderers and rapists that us Brits kicked out hundreds of years ago. Hardly the cream of the gene pool, if you ask me, but I can certainly see how the abilities to steal, murder and rape might come in handy when surviving in a feudal, post-nuclear world. I therefore happily concede this point to you - you are genetically far better equipped to survive long-term than us law-abiding Eurotrash.

[Sparky]

You're like a large, quacking fembot.
Ooh, you might want fire up Poser and add this Large Quacking Fembot character to Grimoire -- it's even better than the golden baby.

[Cleve Blakemore]

I'd respond to this part were it not for the fact that it's completely irrevelant to the discussion we're having. But if you're more concerned with flinging pointless insults than addressing the questions I asked, I'll simply let this section stand on its own as a perfect example of why you are one of the most consistently ridiculed and baited posters on this board. It's not a coincidence that everyone is constantly berating you, you know, nor is it random; nobody picked your name out of a hat and decided that everyone on QT3 should keep telling you you're an idiot. It's because you ARE an idiot.

(Appeals to the group in general to try to get support for his convictions, classic female behaviour - conclusive evidence his very brain tissue is formed largely by the action of estrogen, not testosterone)



As you're an Australian, I presume the ancestors you're referring to are the thieves, murderers and rapists that us Brits kicked out hundreds of years ago. Hardly the cream of the gene pool, if you ask me, but I can certainly see how the abilities to steal, murder and rape might come in handy when surviving in a feudal, post-nuclear world. I therefore happily concede this point to you - you are genetically far better equipped to survive long-term than us law-abiding Eurotrash.

I'm originally from America, Gary, I moved here ten years ago after the Los Angeles Riots. Do you know why I moved, Gary? Because I have good masculine animal instincts. I can sense trouble. I can hear the hoofbeats coming in the ground. You wouldn't know about any of these things, your instincts atrophied away a long time ago and left a chattering high strung little girl in the place of strong intuition and good causal perception.

You rely too much on verbal knowledge, a classic female shortcoming. It's proof your brain is essentially female in physical structure, your tiny shrunken testicles notwithstanding.

Don't be ashamed, it's a worldwide phenomenon, the effemination of males throughout the animal kingdom. Husky studs like me are the new abnormal. You'd fit in perfectly with the rest of your pencil-thin, shrill little weeping fembots seeking their inner child on Oprah. It would be me who is the weird one by contrast, because I have fully descended testicles which produce viable male hormones that assisted my brain development. I'd be the freak in the modern world because I'm not firing blanks like yourself.

[Ignatius P. Reilly]

I'm originally from America, Gary, I moved here ten years ago after the Los Angeles Riots. Do you know why I moved, Gary?

Because you're a frightened white coward?

[Cleve Blakemore]

I'm originally from America, Gary, I moved here ten years ago after the Los Angeles Riots. Do you know why I moved, Gary?

Because you're a frightened white coward?

These kinds of guys are particularly funny.

So I guess anybody white who has left California in the past thirty years is a coward, eh? (60 million causasians)

Well, you make sure nobody thinks you're a coward. Stay aboveground when the blast hits and stick out your chest like a manly ape.

This guy has no idea of what is going on around him. He's another she-bot completely out to lunch. It's a strange dreamworld that exists between televitz-reality and Starbucks. Nothing sobers like an air burst followed by a blast wave. Then, you'll be smart.

(Sound of vault door closing on hydraulics)

[Troy S Goodfellow]

(Sound of vault door closing on hydraulics)

See, it's these little touches that convince us that you are completely sane. How could we doubt you?

Troy

[Gary Whitta]

[quote]
(Appeals to the group in general to try to get support for his convictions, classic female behaviour - conclusive evidence his very brain tissue is formed largely by the action of estrogen, not testosterone)



There's really no need for me to "appeal" to anybody on this issue. I'm just stating a fact about the way you and your comical opinions are perceived by the majority population of this board. You only have to read through the hundreds of archived Cleve-belittling posts to see documentary evidence of this fact.

I don't need, nor do I expect anybody to pile into this thread and say "Yeah! I agree with Gary!", because I know that, while I'm relatively new to this board - new enough to have not yet grown tired of the novelty of poking you with a stick - the vast majority of more experienced posters here have long since wearied of challenging your meaningless collections of words that you so amusingly present as argument.

Actually, I take that back. I have now officially grown tired of it. It's fun for a few posts, but it soon gets old. I therefore now dispense with you, Cleve. Thanks for the (albeit unintentional) humor you continue to provide, but I no longer feel any need to engage you in order to get my jollies. I'm happy to join the rest of the QT3 crowd laughing at you from afar up in the peanut gallery. So by all means, please continue to post more and more details about your latest home-made water filtration system or anti-government aluminum foil hat. It's just way too funny for you to ever stop.

[Cleve Blakemore]

I don't need, nor do I expect anybody to pile into this thread and say "Yeah! I agree with Gary!", because I know that, while I'm relatively new to this board - new enough to have not yet grown tired of the novelty of poking you with a stick - the vast majority of more experienced posters here have long since wearied of challenging your meaningless collections of words that you so amusingly present as argument.

(Classic female thought processes, believes social reality = reality. Appeals to group consensus to form ideas about the world. Literally aflush and glowing with rich stores of estrogen in his bloodstream.)



Actually, I take that back. I have now officially grown tired of it. It's fun for a few posts, but it soon gets old. I therefore now dispense with you, Cleve. Thanks for the (albeit unintentional) humor you continue to provide, but I no longer feel any need to engage you in order to get my jollies. I'm happy to join the rest of the QT3 crowd laughing at you from afar up in the peanut gallery. So by all means, please continue to post more and more details about your latest home-made water filtration system or anti-government aluminum foil hat. It's just way too funny for you to ever stop.

(Gary swishes away with a self-righteous air of indignation trailing pink taffeta gown behind him)

Gary gets a surprise first thing in the morning, February 2nd, 2006.

http://www.atomicarchive.com/Photos/Images/MIKE.jpg

Revelation 6:15-16: "And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains; And said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb."

[Sparky]

(Swishes away with a self-righteous air of indignation trailing pink taffeta gown behind him)
You can borrow my tiara, Cleve -- it matches.

[Jason McCullough]

I think in survivalist mythology, nukes are used by the book of life to to cast people into the lake of fire. If you live, god likes you, damn it!

[Gary Whitta]

Revelation 6:15-16: "And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains; And said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb."

Quoting from the Bible - always a sure-fire way to lend credibility to any contemporary argument.

But seriously, folks - I think Cleve might be right; he IS one of the chosen survivors. In that entire apocalyptic passage from Revelation, there's not a single mention of any laughably self-important game programmers coming to any grief!

[Cleve Blakemore]

Revelation 6:15-16: "And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains; And said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb."

Quoting from the Bible - always a sure-fire way to lend credibility to any contemporary argument.

But seriously, folks - I think Cleve might be right; he IS one of the chosen survivors. In that entire apocalyptic passage from Revelation, there's not a single mention of any laughably self-important game programmers coming to any grief!

Ohhh, so fashionably secular humanist, Gary, you're so trendy! Everybody knows that sophisticates nowadays simply don't believe in all that pooh-pooh nonsense! Why, such a fine figure you cut in your suit of cynical maxims! It's almost as if you had some kind of consistency - or not!

(Gary has now completed his transition to fully female brain physiology)

Wisdom begins with the fear of God. It's true. Not your god, either, or some wishy washy hippie herbal Jesus or any of your existing convictions. Fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.

[MikeJ]

(Sound of vault door closing on hydraulics)

I believe that this forum should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this year is out, of wearing out the hydraulic system on Cleave's vault door, thus interring him safely in the Earth.

[Robert Sharp]

Actually, the people in the quote Cleve used don't survive. They are being mocked by that passage, but apparently Cleve's high IQ doesn't see that.

But what really bothers me is that Cleve has a family that he terrorizes with this shit. Can you imagine telling a kid that nuclear war is imminent and teaching him/her how to get to the shelter in time? That was done during the Cold War here in the U.S., especially in the early 60s. I have talked to people who still remember that "lesson" with terror.

[Andrew Mayer]

Fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.

Experience is the beginning of Wisdom.

Fear is the mind killer...

[Jim F.]

I have a real, nonmocking curiosity here though...

Cleve continues to mention a U.S. vs Russia nuclear exchange being the end of the world. Unless I traveled back to 1982, when disco was dead and destruction was mutually assured, I fail to see much of a credible threat of world ending nuclear war.

Am I missing something? Did Russia suddenly have an economic boom where they can afford to maintain their nuclear arsenal?

China may be a possible source for some nuke tossing, but I just don't understand this Russia angle.

[Gary Whitta]

That's because it doesn't make any sense. It is funny to read though, and it saves me the trouble of going all the way down to the street corner to listen to that guy who smells like piss shouting at everyone to repent, as the end of the world is nigh.

[MikeJ]

Am I missing something? Did Russia suddenly have an economic boom where they can afford to maintain their nuclear arsenal?

China may be a possible source for some nuke tossing, but I just don't understand this Russia angle.

This (http://www.cdi.org/nuclear/database/nukestab.html) has some estimates of current nuclear arsenals. Now maybe not all of Russia's would work if they tried to launch them. Even if only a quarter worked though, that's still a lot of ass-kicking.