Apologies if someone's already said this, I haven't followed the whole of this thread – but the map on the official website shows a route from China to France; isn't it more likely that this monument marks the proposed end of a road route from China to Europe (which would explain the "Eurasia" name) and that the convergence with LaRouche's plan is conicidental? (Note: I have absolutely no opinion on LaRouche or shipping)?

http://www.ldz.gov.cn/english/inv_traf_2.asp on the same site suggests it is a rail link - but I agree on the coincidence, especially as LaRouche appear to their plans in terms of MagLev and so on.

Changing the subject slightly, but MagLev is never going to be a winner if you use energy simply to offset gravity. I was not aware that friction in wheels was so great that it was going to be more energy efficient to lift a load by magnetism to propel it forward with reduced friction - especially when you think about heavy freight loads. MagLev in the UK was developed in an era of infinite and nearly free clean nuclear power.

I get the feeling that La Rouche and L Ron Hubbard would have got on very well.

I take no position on the underlying issue, but it is with great amusement that I read this:
I cannot wait to see the fireworks when someone has the balls to use that argument against Slim's many, many inclusions of controversial self-published material in her animal-rights articles. What an astonishingly brazen hypocrite she is!

Doesn't matter because we've already run out of possible sides:



Thanks for the tip.

As I understand it the advantage of maglev isn't the energy saving, but the easier acceleration and higher maximum speed, and a reduced risk of derailment (crack in a rail at high speed = trainwreck; crack in an electromagnet at high speed = momentum carries the train on to the next coil unscathed). I'd imagine that somewhere with very flat terrain and a lot of sunlight a network of solar-powered electromagnetic tracks could pay for itself by reducing the need for air traffic; IIRC Bush actually proposed such a thing when he was Governor of Texas.

Like I was sort-of saying before, the main thing here is that the landbridge project itself is real, even if it's only just now getting off the ground. Frankly, I suppose that if I'm one of the leaders of this particular Chinese city, or of the LaRouche Organization, and I have a choice between using Photoshop to add an English translation of the Chinese inscription on a Terminus monument vs. having potential investors (not to mention political leaders and even voters) who mostly can't read Chinese just see a big anchor on a pedestal with a Chinese inscription on it, I'd probably add the English inscription too. I might also add Photoshopped Hindi, Turkish, Persian, Farsi, and Greek inscriptions in other "versions," just to ensure maximum confusion.

OTOH, if I were trying to get the US/UK governments to buy in, I'd definitely leave the photo alone...

If Slimmy and Will Beback use this as an excuse for keeping all mention of the project out of Wikipedia, that's a very small price to pay - most of the countries on the landbridge route aren't going to be reading the English language Wikipedia anyway, so the biggest risk as far as WP is concerned is that Slimmy & Co. are going to take the trouble to learn one of the aforementioned languages just for the sake of carrying the anti-LaRouche campaign onto the Wikipedias for those languages. And even then, people in those countries probably aren't likely to care one way or the other. They might have heard of LaRouche and might even be somewhat wary of him, but he doesn't carry anything like the baggage he does in the US and the UK.

It could even be that the LaRouche folks could use this to their advantage, though I doubt it would occur to them to even bother - IOW, they could say that the "Western oligarchies" want to suppress the project in order to keep land-locked Asian countries poor and isolated, and for evidence, "look how they're even trying to expunge any mention of it from the internet."

That's great blast-from-2006 stuff, Hershel. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Her...lkrustofsky/anb


Though by now in 2009, when history and the language has changed, it needs some translation:


[1] Statement by User:174. Hi! I'm user:174. I'm Russian historian! I feel need to add unsourced comments about Lyndon LaRouche's views to pages that have nothing to do with LaRouche. I feel safe in this, because I know no one will block me for advancing a "POV." On the contrary, when such comments are removed by Hershelkrustofsky, THAT will be POV. As decreed by SlimVirgin. These become LaRouche articles as soon as I add LaRouche material. It doesn't have to be sourced, or even correct. Nobody checks! Nobody cares! What a place WP is.

BTW, in a few years I'll be leaving Wikipedia, posting a copy of somebody else's rant: One simple fact that must be accepted as the basis for any intellectual work is that truth – whatever definition of that word you may subscribe to – is not democratically determined. And another is that talent, whether for soccer or for exposition, is not equally distributed across the population, while a robust confidence is one's own views apparently is. If there is a systemic bias in Wikipedia, it is to have ignored so far these inescapable facts. Hey, I just noticed this. But now, in 2006, I can act to advance this sort of systemic problem with WP myself, using unsourced edits that reflect my own biases. Without feeling guilty. Hey, I don't have a time machine.

[2] Statement by Cberlet. Hi, I'm Chip Berlet. I've been warring with HK. I've only been warned for my POV additions by Arbcom, whereas he got topic banned. Why? I kiss major ass. You see, I have great people-skills, like Mantanmoreland (who fooled Durova, QED). That means when you agree with people all the time in public, they like you! Yes, they do. In a couple of years I'll be leaving WP myself, in a snit bacause may ass is not being kissed back. Obviously some people here do NOT have people skills. Ungrateful SOBs. But meanwhile, I'm deviling HK in 2006. I don't have a time machine.

[3] Statement by Jayjg. Hi! I've recently determined by a use of my shiney new checkuser power that user:BirdsOfFire, who HK asked to look at the user:174 addition statement about LaRouche, is using the same IP range (though not the same IP) as HK. So they're both editing with AOL out of LA in a similar way. So SlimVirgin is indef bocking BirdsOfFire as a sock of HK. Because HK asked him to look at something, and he disagreed with user:174's unsourced addition. That's meat-puppetry! Even if it is not sock puppetry. We don't like it when people disagree with us, and agree with HK. Clearly they are socks or meats and must go from the project. Doesn't matter who FIreBird is, even if not HK; this puppy is gone. I'm an uninvolved admin, inasmuch as I've never heard of LaRouche, or his views of the Jews, and I hardly know SlimVirgin, so it doesn't get much more objective than that.

N.B. In a few years I'll have checkuser taken away from me because nobody trusts me with it. You bastards. But right now, it's 2006 and nobody here has a time machine to foresee that.

[4] Hi, I'm SlimVirgin. I'm just here making sure HK doesn't insert his POV into articles by removing other people's uncited POVs in articles. That makes sense, doesn't it? We don't even have to worry about the truth of the statement, or its references, since HK has been topic-banned. And this addition of user:174 is on-topic: LaRouche! BirdsOfFire, who doesn't have that many edits and who I just indef blocked as a sock, it's true, hasn't previously been topic-banned, or even warned. But what do you want? Bby virtue of agreeing with HK rather than user:174 and myself, he's a MEAT, and thus bannable.

N.B. In a few years I'll be stripped of my admin bit for Biting Newbies and using my admin powers in service of my POV in disputed articles. But that's years in the future and I don't have a time machine. So nothing to see here.

Slim, CBerlet, 174, Jayjg, altogether: "Here we are in 2006, where anything goes! 2008-9 will suck for all of us as regards WP and our relationship to it, but meanwhile we get to screw HK all we want in 2006. You don't have a time machine, either, so you can't see our futures. Neener." Too bad, HK! We wouldn't be able to do all this 3 years from now, but it's not 3 years from now, now. Now is it?

I have discovered more photos of this monument, which also appears to be real.
http://www.lyggyl.com/attachments/month_09...CTJiLR28riR.jpg
http://blog.cnii.com.cn/batch.download.php?aid=17166
http://blog.cnii.com.cn/attachments/2007/1...11081604051.jpg
http://blog.cnii.com.cn/attachments/2007/1...11081555001.jpg
http://www.nbradio.com/node2/zt/08ggkf/rep...es/00024217.jpg
http://news.eastday.com/c/20080512/images/01273755.jpg

The Chinese inscription I translated above is clearly visible in each of these. However one of the English inscriptions appears to be real too.
http://blog.cnii.com.cn/batch.download.php?aid=17168

This leaves hzlterm.jpg from the shiller institute as the only obvious fake. Could be they needed to compensate for inconveniently photographing Helga on the wrong side of the monument.

However there is one more question to be answered. Despite all these photos, we've still only seen three sides.

*The side facing the rails, on which is written "新亚欧大陆桥东端起点", let's call this the front.
*The side to the right, err... counter-clockwise from that, featuring the wild Cǎoshū scribbles.
*The back side, opposite the rails, with the English inscription "THE EASTERN TERMINAL OF THE\n
NEW EURASIA LANDBRIDGE"

The fourth remains a mystery, but I can almost guarantee it's not a duplicate of the English side, nor anything in Tibetan or Uyghur.

Damn! Is there no end to the fiendish cleverness of those LaRouche people?

Apparently there is an end. The end is when they photoshopped a picture of a landmark to move the inscription and thus make it inconsistent with other photos.

Which wasn't very clever.

Here's a good photoshop story about a Labour politician in the UK.

Congrats to Charlotte and Dogbiscuit for some good debunking. Who needs Captain Disillusion?

Since we are considering all possible angles on this, let us also consider the element of time. The photo with Helga Zepp-LaRouche standing in front of the monument was taken in 1996. According to the web page where the image is displayed, the inscription at that time was "Eastern Terminal of Eurasia Landbridge." I would not rule out the possibility that the inscription was subsequently changed to include the word "the."


To make your accusation consistent, are you also claiming that Google photoshopped their photo as well on the Panoramio site, but did it with a slightly different wording?

Not likely?

I take it you mean this:
http://static.panoramio.com/photos/original/21169483.jpg

The English inscription here is (and the position of the sculpture—anchor, rails, and chain are) consistent with this photo which features what appear to be Chinese construction guys in the foreground:
http://blog.cnii.com.cn/batch.download.php?aid=17168

It's not entirely coincidental. I found this chronology of the LaRouche campaign for the landbridge. It says that the Chinese had their own version of the idea as early as 1993. In 1996 China held a conference to discuss the various proposals, and Helga Zepp-LaRouche was an invited speaker. It was during that trip that the disputed photo was taken. According to a speech by Helga Z-L, Sir Leon ended up attending the conference to speak against the proposal.

The decor suggests that it (or at least this part of it) is a rail route, ending—or perhaps beginning—in a shipyard amid several stacks of con-ex boxes.

I would. The "of" goes right to the end in http://www.schillerinstitute.org/graphics/...lga/hzlterm.jpg, and the text certainly appears to be carved into the monument by the lighting in the picture. How would they fit the "the" in there?

No. I'm stating that the photograph featured on the LaRouche site here has been doctored. The other photographs are consistent with each other. The LaRouche photo has an inconsistent inscription.

The most likely explanation is, as Charlotte notes, to compensate for inconveniently photographing Helga on the wrong side of the monument.

According to the article where the photo appeared, there was no "the" at the time the photo was taken. The Chinese could have replaced the entire inscription some time in the past 13 years.




What would be the motive? SlimVirgin, of course, was arguing that since there was no such thing as the Eurasian Landbridge, the inscription could not possibly be correct: I don't think this POV is tenable at this point.

See above.


Regardless of Slim's typical bullying manner, the fact remains that no unattached researcher in their right mind would have looked at the available evidence, doctored photo and all, and written it up in a credible journal in the way you'd have liked. There are several of us on this thread looking right at it, and we still can't figure it out.

1. The nature of this Landbridge is still too vague and needs substantiation
2. LaRouche is surrounded by misinformation, and downright lies on occasion, meaning that everything would need to be examined with a toothcomb.

Fortunately for you, Wikipedia is not a credible journal, and is full of unsubstantiated misinformation, so as far as I'm concerned, these articles can say what they like!

All that would be appropriate, to my mind, would be to say that LaRouche made a proposal to do X,Y,and Z, and he made it beginning in the early '90s. That's actually in the "Views of LaRouche" article now, and I see no problem with it. The problem with the "LaRouche articles" historically has been that Slim, Will, the Chipster and Dennis King want to frame those articles in such a way that LaRouche's ideas and proposals, the actual basis for his notability, are obscured by the Berlet/King theories about secret coded messages in his writings.

By the same token, LaRouche's wife is notable for energetically campaigning all over the world for her husband's ideas (and some of her own.) She manages to get access to ranking politicians in order to discuss them. SV wishes to suppress any mention of this in the BLP, substituting some vague innuendo that since Ms. LaRouche is German, she must have lurking Nazi sympathies, like her countryman, Martin Luther.

The problem is that LaRouche and supporters seem to have a completely different perception of his influence to most other people. By most other people, I mean those who have even heard of LaRouche. Like other fringe figures, LaRouche exploits tenuous links between himself and a major figure or important incidents to give the impression of exaggerated credibility. Supporters seem either gullible, or knowingly prepared to further exaggerate LaRouche's involvement for political reasons.

I've seen plenty of examples of this. A recent example was during a discussion here, you crowbarred a LaRouche BBC interview into the Andrew Gilligan affair. You insinuated they may be related. I know that LaRouche's minor interview on a Radio Station that interviews hundreds of people a day played no part in the affair.

I also know that Helga LaRouche is prepared to tell extraordinary false stories about events. She made a bold claim about Thatcher and Kohl that I know to be false, for example.

Given these facts, people should treat LaRouche claims with extreme skepticism. Even announcements by LaRouche of proposals should be treated with caution, because the chances are that they are being used to exaggerate LaRouche's influence and create a distorted picture of events for political reasons.

All this is immaterial to Wikipedia really, because that place is such an uneven mess it deserves to have LaRouche propaganda appearing all over the place. And it is unfortunate that the combatants are SlimVirgin and Willbeback who are difficult to defend. But the facts remain that when they question claims made by LaRouche, they are doing what anyone in their right minds would do if they were creating a credible report on the subject.

All said, the involvement of Berlet and King was an outrage and helped debase the whole business long ago, and I said that back in the day. Compared to them, the LaRouchies seem like naive martyrs.

Regardless, the idea of a railway or road across the Bering Strait seems incredibly naive to me.

The problem seems to be the tundra. This book has some excellent descriptions of the situation. Here, a 140 odd years ago, Western Union is doing a feasibility study about stranding telegraph wire across the strait to Europe (with the side benefit of going to China). Ultimately it proved that an overseas cable worked and was surprisingly repairable.

In the summertime, the permafrost on the tundra melts leaving a milkshake like goo that's best to ignore. The time to travel is in the winter, when it's 20 below and colder than you know what you know where. However, in Siberia, you can trudge across the tundra mile after mile, and never sight a St. Alphonzo's Pancake Breakfast place like you can in ca.

Point is, any transportation path is going to have to be elevated for a very long ways.

At least one of us is mistaken about the meaning of that word.

(Hey, remember when I used to spend my time on WR offering valuable commentary about things Wikipedia-related? Me neither.)

Yo, I've got it on good authority that the top layers can thaw a bit during the summer

Doh, I haven't tried it out yet. Must be here for the lulz. Sorry, I'll go into lurk mode again.

There'll never be another Frank.

[edit]This is the quote from the book that I had in mind:

This seems to suggest the real route has been in use since 1992.

However the following things remain unclear:
*The proper English name for this infrastructure
*The LaRouches' actual level of involvement
*What the fuck I saw half-crossing Lake Baykal in the satellite photo

Guess I'll do some more research tomorrow or the next.

Google earth has a pic. From the website http://panoramio.com/photo/21169475

If you say that LaRouche published a business plan in the 90s, I believe you. My follow-up question would be, "Doesn't it need to be updated?" If they want some publicity, they should make a big to-do when they release the new plan. If it gets reported in the ''Wall Street Journal'' or some other business sheet, voila! into Wikipedia mention of it goes.



I agree, SV's and Will's support for those two "journalists" was appalling. Anyway, it could be that mention of the landbridge was made in Chinese newspapers at the time of the construction of that statue. If anyone can find those articles, and I doubt that they're posted on the web, we'll have our reliable sources and we can mention the landbridge all over Wikipedia. Can anyone here read Chinese and has access to archives of old Chinese newspapers?

But thats the great thing about wikipeida. I could go and edit the article and take out that bit and even find a half baked source to justify it.

I was going to bring this up also, which is the weather in that area of the world. I've done some reading about that area, because I eventually plan to improve the Wikipedia articles about the Aleutian Islands Campaign. From what I've read, the weather around the Barents Sea is absolutely atrocious. Gale-force winds are the norm, rough seas, continual, dense fog, and ice storms. How are trucks and trains supposed to keep on schedule moving through weather like that? Even if the bridge over the Barents is a tunnel, there's still the exposed road and railways on either side approaching the tunnel entrances. Even with the benefits of milder weather that global warming may be bringing to the Arctic areas, I still think that severe weather will be a factor in the viability of that transportation corridor.

The prevailing idea is to build a tunnel.

I think he's talking about getting to the tunnel – as anyone who's been in Alaska during summer knows, the ground there (and I assume in Siberia as well) has the structural soundness of oatmeal as the frost melts, so any tracks would either need to be elevated, floating in some way, or anchored to bedrock. It's not insurmountable – Russia has a lot of railroads this far north – but it would add to the costs (and we no longer have the "slave labor" option used by the Russians).

I think that Lyndon is quite literally missing the boat. In the late 70's and early 80's he was advocating massive development of fusion reactors, which he deemed ought to be concentrated in India, although I don't think anyone asked India what it thought. Why not a synthesis of these two ideas? Massive "trophy container ships" powered by fusion reactors? The first one could even be called the "Helga" without so much as raising an eye brow. Widen the Suez and Panama canals for good measure. Fits in with the global warming "bonus" of a navigable Arctic.

I need me an Institute.

I found in the PDF version of Mr. Cerny's article a postscript of sorts, which includes this assertion:

I would add my own observation that the question of costs is a very "relativistic" one, depending on whether you are talking about short term or long term, or a local project versus the sort of global conception LaRouche presents. Beware of accountants. But to give a simple illustration: the Chinese MagLev line between Shanghai and its airport is fairly expensive per mile to build. But the much larger routes that they are presently contemplating will be much less expensive, due to economies of scale.

And then, when you are discussing infrastructure, you need to take into account the nonlinear effects, the complex ways in which an economy benefits from building it. LaRouche often uses the Transcontinental Railroad in the U.S. as an example of this. Another example, which may seem unrelated but is not, is the Apollo Program -- by conservative estimate, the US government got back $14 in increased tax revenue for every dollar invested in the project, due to spin-off technologies and whole new categories of businesses that sprang up around them.

I'm pretty sure that LaRouche believes that global warming is scientific fraud. Correct me if I'm wrong.

As opposed to the Wikipedian "Correct me even if I'm not wrong."?

You're not wrong.

Further, having spent the lesser part of two evenings reviewing, I cannot bless the conduct of either side of the main topic, the Herschelkrustofsky ban. While Herschelkrustofsky and his cadre were using Wikipedia as a promotional tool, which I despise, Bertlet was doing exactly the same thing.

I would have banned everyone.

Why weren't both sides banned? In the recent Israel/Palestine case, both sides were, basically, banned. In 2005 and 2006 in the LaRouche cases, only one side was banned. Does this mean that Wikipedia's treatment of such issues is improving or becoming fairer?

I'm tempted to say that you can't really compare the two situations because the potential for bad PR in the Israel/Palestine case is so much greater, but IMO the only people who should have been banned (or rather, "topic-banned") in the LaRouche dispute were Dennis King and Berlet - they're waaay too close to the situation to be "neutral," not to mention the fact that they were using their own writings as source citations. You could also make that argument for SlimVirgin and Will Beback, because they were facilitating them, but that's not quite the same thing.

That's not to say that the related articles shouldn't have been watched closely for insertion of questionable content sourced to LaRouche publications too, of course. I'm just saying that if they'd somehow removed Berlet and King from the equation, they would have had a fairly ordinary ideological dispute, with no need for extreme one-sided measures like the ones that were taken.

Those following this need to go back to the early stages of this thread because it is all there.

http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?s=&sh...ndpost&p=167667

Not only did the anti-LaRouche crowd, led by SlimVirgin, completely over react by attacking anything associated with LaRouche completely outside process (deleting articles without discussion / banning random people by fiat etc), they fostered a nasty culture, where totally innocent people who had nothing to do with LaRouche were accused.

I showed an example of someone being falsely accused here. If you follow Slim's replies to my example, you can see she doesn't acknowledge it, and tries to misdirect my complaint.

LaRouchian nonsense notwithstanding, I stand by my original observation of the causes behind the dispute:



If LaRouchies were really to blame, this would have been an isolated incident. But it wasn't. The same practice occurred all over Wikipedia on numerous topics; Naked Short Selling, Israel and so on.

Actually, the edit by Mbhiii would have set off major alarms within the anti-LaRouche camp, because according to Will Beback's "LaRouche under the bed" doctrine, mentioning Alexander Hamilton, Friedrich List and Henry Carey in the same breath is tantamount to quoting LaRouche. This was essentially the technique used to drive me off the project: you can't bring up ideas that LaRouche is known to favor.


For all intents and purposes, Berlet and King have been removed from the equation, Berlet by way of a spectacular tantrum, and King because he doesn't seem to have the stamina to do it without Berlet. Slim & Beback are canny enough to be reluctant to engage in persistent violations of policy; they had a symbiotic relationship with Berlet and King, where Berlet and King would do the dirty work, and then Slim & Beback would wikilawyer and rationalize their behavior, with minimal risk to their own WikiStatus.

Since Berlet and King left, the LaRouche articles have essentially become a "fairly ordinary ideological dispute."

And no history of Wikipedia for the years 2005-2009 will be complete without mentioning this. Are any of the POV-pushers and bullies who took refuge with that loose cabal still left or operating in the same manner? Jayjg's gone (at least for now), Jossi is banned, JzG, MONGO, JPGordon, and Crum375 are editing quietly, SV appears to be toeing the line, Berlet and King are gone, the ID Cab has been keeping their heads down, Gary Weiss is effectively banned, Will Beback has been more or less following the rules (he was slapped on the wrist in the recent Rawat case), FloNight left that group over a year ago, and I haven't seen ElinorD (or whatever she's called now) around lately. I haven't checked to see if IronDuke has been keeping his POV-pushing in check. If not, then he may be the last one standing.

If anyone wants to discuss the current status and legacy of the former Ruling Clique, then perhaps we should start a separate thread on it. As Kato says, that group was responsible for a lot of abuse in addition to the LaRouche situation, and that's their legacy.

Show me anyone still standing and I'll show you an unwitting decoy.

Yes, it could be that some of them have simply changed their methods. If so, then that may be a topic worth exploring sometime.

That particular clique seems to have faded away. That doesn't mean there isn't abusive stuff going on there, of course, but it's being done by different people on different topics.

News flash -- Will Beback has gone ballistic. He has suffered a rash of minor defeats lately, including the reversals of his POV-speedies on Wilhelm Lautenbach and Stanislav Menshikov, and his failed attempted to suppress a Russian source that worked to his disadvantage in a LaRouche dispute. In the latter instance, SlimVirgin briefly stepped in on his side, so it was old home week for a few days, but she withdrew from the dispute after testing the wind. So Will Beback, frustrated and alone, seems to have gone kamikaze. He has resurrected an old draft by Chip Berlet which "exposes" LaRouche as a raving homophobe, using the typical array of misquotes, bogus quotes, and some serious dumpster-diving among his press clippings, looking for any scrap of gossip. He is demanding that this concoction be substituted for the current flawed but semi-reasonable section of "Views of LaRouche."

Views of Lyndon LaRouche is an ambiguous title and should clearly be renamed depending on whether we are referring to "Lyndon LaRouche's views", or "[Other people's] views of Lyndon LaRouche [and of LaRouche's views]".

But first we'd need to agree on which one it is.

Historically it has meant "Lyndon LaRouche's views," but Will is going for mission creep: first, LaRouche's views that are deemed notable by the press, and now, LaRouche's views as paraphrased by the press (no primary sources.)

And now Will sets out to recruit new allies here.