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Ukraine Propaganda – BBC Tries To Sell Telegram Rumors That Make No Sense
Do they really think that the people are dumb enough to believe such shit?
Russian media: retired Russian major general killed in skies over Ukraine
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Which 'Russian media' one might asks:
A [Russian] fighter has been shot down in the skies over Ukraine, and Kanamat Botashev, a retired Major General of the Russian Air Force, was killed.
Source: Russian edition of BBC with reference to Botashov's three former subordinates
Details: Subordinates who had kept in touch with Botashev after leaving the service agreed to comment on condition of anonymity for reasons of personal safety.
Oh, the 'Russian media' is in fact the Russian language site of the BBC World Service which is financed and directed by the British government's Foreign Office. The same BBC World Service which since March has suspended its operation in Moscow and which had its its website blocked in Russia.
That BBC World Service will surely have reliable sources for making such nonsense claims:
One of Botashev's former colleagues confirmed that a retired general was carrying out missions in a Su-25 aircraft in Ukraine.
In one of the Russian Telegram channels, this participant reported on Botashev's death …
'Russian Telegram channels' are anonymous and also widely used by Ukrainians. They are often unreliable.
The picture above is somewhat curious too. Its resolution is too low to read the name patch of the pictured officer who does totally not look like 63 year old retired man.
The plane the Ukrainians allegedly shot down was a Su-25 ground attack aircraft. Why then is the 'retired Major-General Botashev', should he actually exist, pictured in front of an Su-34, a supersonic fighter-bomber. According to Tineye the photo was first published on May 23 by a news site in Tbilisi, Georgia. There is no metadata in the picture and I am unable to find any caption for it.
The whole story makes absolutely no sense:
It is unclear how the 63-year-old retired general found himself at the controls of the Su-25 in Ukraine.
…
Botashev commanded a regiment of the Guards Air Base in Voronezh. His military career came to an end in June 2012, when he was accused of crashing a Su-27 fighter near Petrozavodsk. The general asked his friend-colonel to let him fly a Su-27, a flight permit he did not have.
So the dude was kicked out of the military? He hasn't flown military planes for 10 years? Somehow he steals an Su-25, which he probably did not know how to fly, and gets shot down over Ukraine? Yeah, that makes totally sense …
What will the BBC World Service editors try to sell us next? Bridges?
Posted by: oldhippie | May 26 2022 13:35 utc | 245
“A poster above referred to my father as monkey scum. And further claimed to understand his motivation. Yeah, ascribing motivation always works. The poster would clearly know my father better than I did. The personal insult seriously pisses me off. And makes me wonder why I bother to be present in company of such fools.”
That’s unasked-for behavior and I don’t condone it – but I’m 0% responsible for it or even related to it, so don’t get mad at me because of what somebody else did.
Or do, I mean, it’s not like I can stop you.
I’m not trying to hype thorium reactors, I just have on one hand “talk on the grapevine” that it’s a potential avenue of development for nuclear energy in the near future; on the other hand I have you saying that it is outright impossible.
But it’s not an exotic matter reactor, it’s just a fission reactor; I’m curious as to what concrete, substantive arguments you have in favor of it being outright impossible (not difficult, not inefficient, not uneconomical: impossible).
You even said there have been small experimental reactors built, these experiments probably have yielded some evidence on the matter one way or another. But it’s not like the Michelson-Morley experiment where the hypothesis (aether exists and it carries light as waves) turned out to be entirely at odds with reality.
The hypotheses for thorium reactors would be along the lines of “Thorium radioactivity and those of the short-lived byproducts of its nuclear reactions can be engineered into a sustained chain reaction through which enough energy can be released so as to perform work”. This in itself doesn’t seem to go against the laws of physics, it’s the same thing that uranium and plutonium do, the questions are whether thorium has the appropriate properties, whether the conditions required can be created in an industrial setting and whether it’s a worthwhile thing to do or no.
If it does indeed go against physics, give me some lead as to why the radioactive properties of thorium do not allow for a worthwhile nuclear reaction: Thorium decay doesn’t produce the appropriate particles to generate the reaction, the intensity of the reaction doesn’t allow for anything better than a vanishing proof of concept, the role of thorium itself in the reaction is accessory, it’s too stable, it’s too unstable, whatever.
You also said that it’s a sales pitch, again: if it’s a sales pitch – who’s the salesman, who’s the mark, and where’s the catch?
“I have mentioned the personal history here before. My father, Robert Arthur Wilson, was in charge of the Com Ed reactor fleet. Even with 50 and 60 year old reactors finally being shut down that is still the biggest fleet in US. Someone here once talked to someone who called himself a nuclear engineer. I knew my father’s entire staff. The man he left in charge on retirement, Rom Gatandi (sp?), was a metallurgist. He told me thorium did not need new alloys of supermetal, it required new laws of physics. He had worked on the 1960s Indian demo thorium reactor.”
Your appeal to authority sounds reasonable enough at first glance, and that’s the reason why your appeal to authority makes me want to listen to your arguments, but for that to happen you have to actually produce them. An appeal to authority is meant to back the arguments, not replace them.
“I could go on. Fuck you all. Eat advertising and die.”
Hey, calm yo tits, b!tch.
I haven’t attacked you in the slightest regarding the feasibility of thorium reactors or their lack thereof.
It’s not my business when, or how, or where, you were convinced that thorium reactors are impossible; or by whom, or what f***ing hat they were wearing.
I’m interested about WHAT (facts) and WHY (chain of reasoning) convinced you that thorium reactors are impossible.
Because who told you and what was he drinking that sunday has zero bearing on the actual properties of thorium or nuclear reactions.
If you want to take this as an attack against yourself personally and to your father and his coworkers, that’s your own choice and self-inflicted suffering; I don’t approve of it but again, it’s not like I can stop you, so enjoy overreacting to plain commentary about radioactive elements, I guess?
Posted by: Arganthonios | May 26 2022 14:52 utc | 251
@Jon_in_AU | May 27 2022 9:12 utc | 274
On a LCOE (Levelised Cost of Energy)-basis, both wind and solar-PV, even when you include battery storage and FCAS (Frequency Control Ancillary Services), are around 25% of the cost of nuclear power.
It doesn’t matter one whit how much they cost if they can’t supply enough energy to power our economies by manufacturing and delivering the goods needed to maintain our current quality of life.
I got news for ya, Jon_in_AU: they currently can’t (not even if we were to massively ramp up core-tech production) and likely never will be able to (buried in the dregs of that link there is the note that half the time Denmark had to import energy from other–coal-burning and nuclear-powered–countries).
Then there is the problem of storage: we likely won’t be able to make enough batteries to store the power in a way that we could use 24/7 (and that 24/7 is of course the only benchmark to accept).
Not only that, but they are ‘immediately’ deployable,
Utter nonsense. Currently wind/solar make up about 24% of our electrical needs, and even if they increase production by 100% will only make up about 26% by 2024.
90-95% recyclable,
Again: utter nonsense. Solar panel production and installation are each notoriously harmful to the environment (just ask the Aguaro cactuses), and both Solar and Wind use so many plastic parts that the idea they could be “90-95% recyclable” is just pre-school fanstasizing. Do you know how “recyclable” PET bottles and aluminum cans are? 100%. Do you know how many actually get recycled? About 5%. The rest get dumped into landfills. Computers are something like 80% recyclable just at an average recycling facility, but again: they are almost always just dumped.
Finally: how do you reckon we’re “weaning” ourselves from “fossil fuels” and “petroleum products” when our primary energy drivers are going to be ubiquitous plastic contraptions installed on every roof, in every yard, in every park, and along every coastal area of the planet?
are proven technology,
Yap: proven to be more expensive and less reliable (just ask Texas and Arizona–when California’s renewable grid couldn’t supply enough energy, the state forced Arizona to make up the difference causing blackouts in Arizona). Currently, in order to have full 24/7 reliable electricity for a (middle-class US) household of four, that household would need to purchase a battery pack perhaps several cubic meters large. That battery pack would take them ~15 years to pay off yet may need to be replaced in as little as 7.
don’t leave hazardous waste for future generations to have to sort out,
Check out my comment about “plastics” up there, and I honestly can’t imagine anything more unsightly than an old wind turbine that’s not generating any more because it’s down (and they’re often down). Also, when nuclear power is properly executed (Tokamak Fusion reactors, for instance; or the thorium reactors China is investigating, or the full nuclear treatment cycle that Russia has implemented) nuclear waste is negligible and easily dealt with: we can just get SpaceX to shoot one of those cheap rockets they build into the heart of the sun. It’ll burn up into its constituent elements long before it ever reaches the surface and just go into orbit, if not outright annihilated by the temperatures and reactions.
and don’t contribute to the proliferation of very naughty boom-boom stuff.
This just betrays an immature understanding of nuclear energy. Thorium reactors cannot be used to make nuclear weapons, nor can the vast majority of reactors around the world.
You can confirm what I’m saying by reading International Energy Agency Reports, or data from Bloomberg New Energy Finance, and elsewhere.
I trust Bloomberg only for its knowledge about financial markets. The IEA is a more reliable source but it is also a captured international agency, much like WHO, IMF, WTO, WEF, and so many of the UN agencies. The IEA has taken as its mission the promotion of wind and solar at the expense of, say, natural gas and nuclear. IEA actually has an easily identifiable bias against nuclear energy, while at the same time it’s prone to paper over extremely problematic policies like Germany’s decision to shift some of its “green initiatives” over to “biofuels”–by which it means “cutting down forests and burning them for fuel in bio-furnaces” (currently one of the tricks Germany is resorting to in order to flout its “green credentials”). IEA fully endorsed that without even flagging the practice in a footnote!
I’m not lying. It is the best information I have available on the issue.
Trust me, then: you really need to get better sources.
I have worked in the solar PV industry in Australia since 1999, but I really wouldn’t give a flying whatsit if something more efficient and deployable came along.
Great. Then I trust we can agree that nuclear is the best option for moving away from fossil fuels, right?
We have one planet. We are a evolutionary disgrace if we trash the joint.
Full agreement here.
Posted by: Pacifica Advocate | May 27 2022 11:57 utc | 275
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