Why Rupert Murdoch considers it worth his while to pay David Aaronovitch a large six figure sum for such puerile antics as tweeting that I am insane, is a conjecture I find difficult to resolve. Today this exchange occurred on twitter:
David Aaronovitch: This suggestion that if elected Corbyn could be quickly ousted is utter bollocks. Democracy allows Labour to commit Hara Kiri.
Mark Doran: @DAaronovitch I hope everyone is watching how these servants of the micro-elite try to paint “attracting popular support” as “committing suicide.”
Mark Doran: @DAaronovitch Craig finds the elite-serving contortions every bit as funny as I do
David Aaronovitch: @MarkJDoran I tend to find Craig Murray unpersuasive on the grounds of him being unhinged. I can see why you like him, though.
Mark Doran: Says the man who managed to find Bush and Blair credible. I can see why you liked them, though.
It is remarkably ironic that on being referred to an article which argues that views outside a very narrow neoliberal establishment narrative are marginalised and ridiculed by the media, the Murdoch hack’s response is that the author is unhinged. Aaronovitch could not have more neatly proved my point.
But something else struck me about the twitter record. Aaronovitch’ twitter account claims to have 78,000 followers. Yet of the 78,000 people who allegedly received his tweet about my insanity, only 1 retweeted and 2 favourited. That is an astonishingly low proportion – 1 in 26,000 reacted. To give context, Mark Doran has only 582 followers and yet had more retweets and favourites for his riposte. 1 in 146 to be precise, a 200 times greater response rate.
Please keep reading, I promise you this gets a great deal less boring.
Eighteen months ago I wrote an article about Aaronovitch’s confession that he solicits fake reviews of his books to boost their score on Amazon. In response a reader emailed me with an analysis of Aaronovitch’s twitter followers. He argued with the aid of graphs that the way they accrued indicated that they were not arising naturally, but being purchased in blocks. He claimed this was common practice in the Murdoch organisation to promote their hacks through false apparent popularity.
I studied his graphs at some length, and engaged in email correspondence on them. I concluded that the evidence was not absolutely conclusive, and in fairness to Aaronovitch I declined to publish, to the annoyance of my correspondent.
Naturally this came to mind again today when I noted that Aaronovitch’ tweets to his alleged legion of followers in fact tumble into a well of silence. I do not even tweet. The entire limit of my tweeting is that this blog automatically tweets the titles of articles I write. They are not aphorisms so not geared to retweet. Yet even the simple tweet “Going Mainstream” which marked the article Aaronovitch derided, obtained 20 times the reactions of Aaronovitch’s snappy denunciation of my mental health. This despite the fact he has apparently 10 times more followers than me. An initial survey seems to show this is not atypical.
In logic, I can only see two possible explanations. The first is that my correspondent was right and Aaronovitch fakes twitter followers like he does book reviews. The second is that he has a vast army of followers, nearly all of whom find him dull and uninspiring, and who heartily disapproved en masse of his slur on my sanity. I opt for the second explanation, that he is just extremely dull, on the grounds that Mr Aaronovitch’s honesty and probity were never questioned, m’Lud.
Just seen Mr Goss last post – which crossed with mine.
As I said
“Mr Goss of course will always take the official KGB line as being more reliable when it comes to the personal affairs of those who oppose Putin.”
“There would have been nothing untoward about his visiting Berezovsky in the same time frame”
Well no, but it’s not the visit that’s at issue here. The articles imply that the polonium was found in places that Litvinenko had visited. What is less clear is how the polonium actually got there. Was he carrying it around in a bag or was he already infected and microscopic traces were emanating from his skin and clothes? If it was found predominantly on chairs and door handles I’d go for the latter but if it was found in cupboards and storage areas I’d be less convinced.
Habbabkuk (la vita e’ bella)
1 Aug, 2015 – 5:49 pm
@Republicofscotland
“State backed Lloyds Banking group, have paid out a whopping £13 billion quid so far over the PPI scandal.”
……………………………………………………………
@ Habbabkuk:
“I should have thought that this would be good news.”
“Why then do you seem so unhappy about it?”
………………………………………………………….
Well Habbabkuk; this massive fraud has seen no person prosecuted in a criminal court.
I think the point is that people who commit crime should be taken to court and, if found guilty, punished appropriately (perhaps you disagree).
Another point Habbabkuk: where did Lloyds get the £13 billion from to pay back?
Did they not get a £20 billion bail-out from taxpayers?
Mt Scorgie
Good to hear from you again, your posts always cheer me up.
“Well Habbabkuk; this massive fraud has seen no person prosecuted in a criminal court.
I think the point is that people who commit crime should be taken to court and, if found guilty, punished appropriately (perhaps you disagree).”
__________________
Please refer to my post at !9h27, above.
Mr Scorgie
BTW, I notice you “replied” on behalf of Republicofscotland.
Were you unable to contain your indignation or have you some sort of arrangement with him? 🙂
@Doug scorgie
1 Aug, 2015 – 9:04 pm
As a bunch of criminals with billions sloping around, one wonders why they don’t employ an army of trolls to come on comment threads and defend them…
Habbabkuk (la vita e’ bella)
1 Aug, 2015 – 7:27 pm
“But have you stopped to consider why no one went to prison?”
“Could it be because the mis=selling, reprehensible as it was, was not a criminal offence?”
………………………………………………………………….
Miss-selling IS a crime Habbabkuk; read the fraud act 2006:
False representation; failing to disclose information; abuse of position etc.
” Meanwhile, this American wrote almost the direct equivalent of what Chris Spivey wrote about Woolwich in the UK, about Boston in the USA. ”
Maybe he hasn’t tried to contact any of the next of kin or posted their addresses online.
Spivey doesn’t need imprisoning, he needs professional help.
Ken Clarke: police investigate second claim of indecent assault…
http://www.exaronews.com/articles/5624/ken-clarke-police-investigate-second-claim-of-indecent-assault
There was more to the Ben Fellows trial than meets the eye.
I’m glad some honest rozzers are finally going after these feckers.
Yes I read that earlier about Kara Murza’s father still believing he was poisoned (without a shred of evidence) despite hair samples being sent abroad at the time of his hospitalization, despite him having been recouping in the US and all because he belongs to an opposition party that has no standing except in the west. It’s on Kara Murza’s web page. Instead of thanking the Russian doctors (who as the article says are unable to comment because of medical etiquette) his father chooses to go down the same line as you. Blame Putin.
The article also mentions him being a leading light in the disgraced and imprisoned oligarch Khodokovsky’s ‘Open Russia’ the western-supported equivalent of Yatsenyuk’s ‘Open Ukraine’. Lo and behold it is supported by some of the same organisations, US Department of State, US House of Representatives, French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Members of UK Parliament, Amnesty International and includes individual support from David Miliband, Malcolm Rifkind, Lech Walesa, Catherine Ashton, Nick Clegg, David Cameron, William Hague, Angela Merkel, Hilary Clinton, Barack Obama and many more right wingers who would like to see Putin deposed.
You can probably work out where the funding is coming from. Its mouthpiece appears to be your favourite rag The Interpreter.
In Russia this organisation, Open Russia, is in terminal decline due to the Civil War in Ukraine. Russians are not stupid and the parallel between the two “Open” political organisations cannot have gone unnoticed. Russia does not want a civil war. It trusts the President it has whose popularity is soaring.
Khodokovsky = Khodorkovsky
Was he carrying it around in a bag or was he already infected and microscopic traces were emanating from his skin and clothes?
I don’t know. And neither do you. So that’s a pretty pointless question. But the latter would be plaausible, especially given that he had ingested a very large dose. More here, with particular reference to hair – though excretion via shed skin flakes, sweat and urine also occurs:
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=7N3nEX6eL_MC&pg=PA326&lpg=PA326&dq=polonium+excretion&source=bl&ots=GaJUGsWwws&sig=Vgr5bM49pYGA-ySLj69XjhNgC9s&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CFAQ6AEwB2oVChMI17iAkeOIxwIVaiPbCh3F7wxQ#v=onepage&q=polonium%20excretion&f=false
“Spivey doesn’t need imprisoning, he needs professional help.”
It’s concerning that this idiot has such a following. Better not to give him the oxygen of publicity he craves. The story concerning a suspicious package found at the Fed X cargo facility near Stanstead airport yesterday evening that was thought to have been a pipe bomb, turned out to have been a false alarm.
Also yesterday, the Bin Laden plane wasn’t blown up as many nut job conspiracy theorists claimed, it simply crashed – as did the other two planes at air shows.
These incidents were not connected, rather they were merely coincidences. There was no conspiracy.
But it’ll be hard to persuade morons like Spivey and his followers – some of whom follow this blog – of this fact. Instead, supporters of the conspiracy thesis will say things like, “ah, but that’s what the government WANT you to think.
Spivey is probably concocting some kind of conspiratorial link between these incidences as we speak. Sadly, huge numbers of people fall for this kind of nonsense.
@Ba’al Zevul
1 Aug, 2015 – 10:09 pm
Polonium 210, which is generally accepted to have killed Alexander Litvinenko, is extremely rare in nature. Most polonium 210 comes from the fission process in a nuclear reactor. As a rigorous alpha emitter, it only takes micro amounts of polonium 210 to kill someone if it gets inside their body.
http://www.ems.psu.edu/~radovic/Polonium_specs.pdf
But don’t worry folks, you’ve all been breathing it in for the last four years, along with other nasties like plutonium.
“Miss-selling IS a crime Habbabkuk; read the fraud act 2006:”
Unfortunately the Fraud Act 2006 came in after the problem of mis-selling had been recognised. The selling of young ladies has however always been a crime.
As we are now well away from the topic, an announcement for devotees of the Third Way: the semi-divine Dear Global Leader is now on holiday in Campania, as a prelude to something even more exclusive and surrounded by large men with mikes in their cuffs, in Sri Lanka:
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2015/02/an-apology/comment-page-2/#comment-541924
We understand that on this occasion he will not be visiting Puglia to convince the locals that a large industrial complex at the landfall of the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline will be preferable to their ancient olive groves, though this indeed is what he has been contracted to do by the part-Azeri consortium building the gas distribution facility.
But, for most of this month, at least the Labour Perty should get a break from him.
@RobG “Polonium 210, which is generally accepted to have killed Alexander Litvinenko, is extremely rare in nature. Most polonium 210 comes from the fission process in a nuclear reactor. As a rigorous alpha emitter, it only takes micro amounts of polonium 210 to kill someone if it gets inside their body.”
And you could buy on the Internet which contradicts the claim the only place it could have come from would have been Russia.
People will believe anything the newspapers tell them.
We know little or none of the truth of anything. Even some of the Limp Ics jamboree winners are not what they seem.
eg Leaked IAAF doping files reveal ‘extraordinary extent of cheating’
Athletics is facing a new crisis after fresh allegations of suspected doping emerged following a leak of test data.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/athletics/33749208
Lord Coe wishes to become president of the IAAF and said last weekend in an interview at an athletics meeting that he is terminating his ties to Nike and has travelled 700,000kms in journeys to lobby national federations.
Much the same in this piece.
http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/13499016.IAAF_presidential_candidate_Lord_Sebastian_Coe_staring_down_home_straight_in_bid_to_move_athletics_up_the_sporting_field/?ref=arc
He is chair of the sports management firm CSM and there has been some deal with Bell Pottinger. He retains 2 company directorships from an original list of 21.
http://companycheck.co.uk/director/906408077
This caught my eye ref the discussion here on Lloyds Bank bailed out for £billions.
‘He provides a glimpse of his modus operandi when discussing the benefits of sponsoring London 2012. Coe was instrumental in raising £750m from British sponsors such as Lloyds TSB. “I took the idea to [former Lloyds chairman] Victor Blank, who is a good friend of mine. He got it within 30 seconds. I sat down and said to him ‘this has you written all over it’. And, within a couple of minutes, he said yes. We shook hands and then our teams went away and crunched numbers for six months.”
He made a similar call to Justin King, then CEO of Sainsbury’s, which resulted in the supermarket sponsoring the Paralympics. “What am I good at?” Coe asks. “I can get to talk to people and I understand sport without rose-tinted glasses.”‘
http://www.prweek.com/article/1354754/lord-seb-coe-talks-sponsorship-olympics-politics-fifa
Tomorrow President of the IAAF. Where next for the very ambitious Lord Coe?
the claim the only place it could have come from would have been Russia.
97% certainty ain’t too bad. Polonium can only be produced in lethal quantities in a nuclear reactor. And Russia produces 97% of the world supply; it’s equipped to extract and purify the material. I’d say that if the likes of Luguvoi were involved, a pretty close connection with the Russian state is a no-brainer. Circumstantial maybe, but where’s your evidence for anything else? I’d also say that someone mailing polonium from their Ebay store would have to be clinically insane. And detectably radioactive.
If you insist that the Russian state had nothing to do with it, a much more likely route is from a legitimate user of polonium. And still begs the question of who, other than Putin, had a motive.
Means, motive, opportunity…
“People will believe anything the newspapers tell them.”
Thank you Dave Lawton for adding a little common sense to the issue.
—————————————————
As for the billions misappropriated by former oil oligarch Khodorkovsky. Who got the shares stolen from the Russian people? Guess? You won’t be surprised. This is the alternative Resident Dissident would like to see to Vladimir Putin. Now wonder he’s in a huff with all his puff and puffball dust.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2003/nov/2/20031102-111400-3720r/
I’d agree that it’s more likely to have been on his skin and clothes because it was detected in several places, including a restaurant. The fact that it was present on the plane suggests that the polonium was ingested before he arrived in the UK, but it’s odd that he didn’t set off alarms at the airports. I don’t know where he flew in from.
These are the kind of nut cases who are the cause of all the killing in Ukraine.
And its all the usual suspects and have their fingers in the arms industry
Institute of Peace’s Hawkish Chairman Wants Ukraine to Send Russians Back in Body Bags.
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/08/01/u-s-institute-peace-chair-calls-military-response-global-conflicts/
“And you could buy on the Internet which contradicts the claim the only place it could have come from would have been Russia.”
But you would have to buy millions of pounds worth and have some very elaborate equipment to isolate enough out to kill anybody. It’s sold in incredibly tiny amounts either electroplated into the eye of a needle or incorporated into resin disks.
That Institute of Peace is as inappropriately named as “Open Ukraine” and “Open Russia”.
“The fact that it was present on the plane suggests that the polonium was ingested before he arrived in the UK, but it’s odd that he didn’t set off alarms at the airports. I don’t know where he flew in from.”
MJ, according to the Russian Insider article Litvinenko flew BA to and from Isael.
“Litvinenko had been in Israel to visit Yukos’s CEO, just shortly before he died. And it’s an open secret that Israel has nuclear weapons, the only place without nuclear safeguard or inspections. Traces of polonium were also on the British Airway planes that Litvinenko took to and from Israel.”
“And still begs the question of who, other than Putin, had a motive”
It seems almost purposefully elaborate, melodramatic and messy. It leaves clues everywhere and they’re guaranteed to point to Russia. A discreet car crash or suicide would be cleaner and attract less attention. It might be Putin sending a thinly-veiled warning to others or it might another party who wanted Litvinenko dead and who also wanted to cause Putin some discomfiture.
Don’t worry about it, Tony.
The biggest cnut is to try to explain to people what elements and isotopes are, particularly artificial isotopes.
I’m sure that when they all start dropping dead like flies in the years ahead it will concentrate the mind wonderfully.
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/feb/03/worldwide-cancer-cases-soar-next-20-years
The level of denial is quite breathtaking.
I can no longer be bothered with it all.
I now just document the last days of the human race.
Hullo Ben
I Hope i am Correct, or They are correct… But it looks like jericho, is alive n well… The wee cubs Have hope.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/lion-brother-jericho_55bd1261e4b0d4f33a030d2b
Glory be for Some Good News.
Fuckers…. Bad for killing Endangered Animals Suddenly… Bad Bad…..SUDDENLY. Wealthy Scum Bastards
American Sniper…Hollywood… Good Good… Hero. Wee Fkn Monster. He Loved it…Said he wished he’d Taken out More ( mostly Innocents )
Rob G
From Dr Helen Caldicott –
In her brief speech outdoors in bitterly cold weather, you can see her speaking more slowly than in her usual lecture, so that not one word or grisly fact is missed by her international audience. But you can almost sense her frustration at boiling down into just over six minutes all that she knows about the dangers of atomic weapons and nuclear plants. While inside the Bella Center, no official who really counted was bothering listening to her – or the protesters:
She told the crowd:
The Earth is in the intensive care unit, it is acutely sick. We are all now physicians to a dying planet …
The nuclear power industry has used global warming to say “we’re the answer.” All the money to go into nuclear power, 15 billion dollars per power plant, is being stolen from the solutions to fix the earth – solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, conservation. The nuclear power industry is wicked. The nuclear power industry was formed by the bomb makers – it’s the same thing. Nuclear power plants are bomb factories – they make plutonium. Two hundred and fifty kilos a year of plutonium that lasts for 250,000 years. You need five kilos to make a nuclear bomb. Any country that has a nuclear power plant has a bomb factory.
If the Second World War were fought today in Europe, none of you would be here; Europe would be a radioactive wasteland because all the nuclear power plants would melt down like Chernobyl. So, war is now impossible in Europe. Do the politicians understand that?
Nuclear power produces massive quantities, hundreds of thousands of tons of radioactive waste, which will get into the water, concentrate into the fish, the milk, the food, human breast milk, fetuses, babies, children. Radioactive iodine causes thyroid cancer. Twelve thousand people in Belarus had thyroid cancer. Radioactive Strontium 90 causes bone cancer and leukemia, [it] lasts for 600 years. Cesium 137 – all over Europe now – in the reindeer, in the lands, in the food, lasts for six hundred years, causes brain cancer. Plutonium, the most dangerous substance on Earth, 1 millionth of a gram cause cancer, lasts for 250,000 years. Causes lung cancer, liver cancer, testicular cancer, damages fetuses so they are born deformed. Nuclear power, therefore, nuclear waste for all future generations will cause cancer in young children because they are very sensitive, [will cause] genetic disease, congenital deformities. Nuclear power is about disease, and it’s about death. It will produce the greatest public health hazard the world has ever seen for the rest of time. We must close down every single nuclear reactor in Europe and throughout the world…
That’s hardly the spirit of acceptance granted the nuclear industry as part of a hoped-for climate deal by world governments and environmental groups.
She was there for the first week as a guest of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and a science adviser to the Spanish government. But for a woman whose organization, PSR, won the Nobel Peace Prize and who has been cited by the Smithsonian as one of the most influential women of the 20th century, she was still unable to wangle even a three-minute opportunity to address the delegates. After she returned home to Australia, she saw the dreary news about the chaotic final days of the conference and the loophole-laden climate “accord.”
“I was deeply depressed,” she said. “I hadn’t done anything, and the world hadn’t done anything in the face of an impending catastrophe.”It also reinforced her anger at those environmental groups that haven’t strongly opposed nuclear power while they’re supporting legislation that sees nuclear energy as a vital element in reducing carbon emissions. “They’ve sold their souls,” she said bluntly, while attacking the ties of some key groups to the energy industry, especially in such alliances as the US Climate Action Partnership that includes such outfits as Duke Power and the Natural Resources Defense Council. The well-funded coalition is widely credited as having set the template for both the main House and Senate climate bills that have passed the full House and the Senate Environment Committee – all containing provisions for nuclear energy.
Al Gore’s advocacy group, RePower America, also includes environmental and industry groups; a spokesperson said it hasn’t issued any statements on nuclear power and declined to answer charges that by failing to actively oppose nuclear power, it was allowing the spread of nuclear plants to undermine renewable solutions to global warming. (In his writings and some interviews, Al Gore has offered some criticisms of nuclear power, but the Nobel Prize winner hasn’t used his international platform to attack its role in pending legislation or potential treaties.)
In her interview with Truthout, she ripped into those environmental groups that didn’t take strong, public stands against climate bills that included nuclear power, even while she, in turn, has been derided as a Luddite or politically naive. “Some of the people within these organizations are not well educated about the biological effects of radiation and mutation, and what actually happens in the human body and the food chain,” she said. “So, they’ve gone soft on opposing nuclear power, and because they’re all very worried about global warming, they’re about to leap from the global warming frying pan to the nuclear fire.”
She continued, “You don’t replace one evil with another. Anyone who promotes an industry that will induce a global nuclear war that will mean the end of most life on earth, the final epidemic of the human race; or anyone who promotes an industry that down the time track will induce hundreds of thousands of cases of childhood cancers and leukemia, and babies being born grossly deformed; or anyone who would promote an industry that actively promotes disease when we’re so worried about cancer and spend all this money trying to cure it – well, they have sold their souls as far as I’m concerned.”
I noted, “They say they’re not promoting it,” they’re just not actively opposing it.