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.
Gar Alperovitz in his book The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb mentions all the leading generals and admirals who opposed the use of the atom bomb. Truman and the other civilians in deciding to use the bomb rejected the military advice that they were getting.
Obviously the increasingly prevailing view that the dropping of the atomic bombs were meant as warning shots to Russia, is not as prevalent as I thought, well at least here !
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-real-reason-america-used-nuclear-weapons-against-japan-it-was-not-to-end-the-war-or-save-lives/5308192
Hello @The Hampshire Connection!
ON LUDWIG LOWENSTEIN
Thanks for your excellent contribution!
Ludwig Lowenstein – I’m very glad you mentioned him, and I hope the old bastard gets jailed before he snuffs it.
He could be as big a case as Jimmy Savile. Once upon a time he was highly respected professionally, just as Savile was for “fixing it” for children.
Lowenstein is all the things you say, including notorious among lawyers. As Director of the Assessment and Guidance Centre for “maladjusted boys with learning difficulties” in London and Winchester he was directly personally involved at Winton House. Several victims named him as an abuser before the CPS stopped the first investigation.
He hasn’t just used his enormous property Allington Manor as the HQ for his “professional” racket. (You’re right about the Winchester College connection, by the way, but I’m not sure he leased it – he may have bought the freehold). He also used it to house a licenced care home for children, until he got closed down by Hampshire County Council. He called it a “therapeutic community for maladjusted children”. That was so as to ensure that he and those he employed – after administering a “personality test” of his own making and ignoring police checks – would have access to the inmates at any time of day or night.
He was the biggest figure in the county in child psychology. Although his activities as an abuser were well known, for years he was untouchable. But even when the writing started to appear on the wall for paedophiles working as institutional “carers” and “experts”, he still thought he could do anything.
Things came to a head when he insisted on continuing to employ a paedophile called Roger Small as a “carer” for the boys he’d referred to his own “care” at his own house, even after Small’s history came to official notice. Some of the officers at the County Council could hardly believe that he could be so blatant. As you say, he’s well connected.
Lowenstein was stopped from working for the Council on the grounds that he “could not be recommended for employment with young or vulnerable people”.
Exposure is only a matter of time, and I’m glad the police are investigating.
One key notion used by child psychologists who are paedophiles has been “Parental Alienation Syndrome”. Lowenstein is one of the main proponents. He loves it when children fall out with their parents – you can guess why. The notion is in the same stable as “False Memory Syndrome”, promoted by Richard Gardner and Ralph Underwager to advance the cause of paedophilia. Lowenstein was also a big figure in promoting the use of “pindown” against children. When he falls, he’s going to fall big.
“Parental Alienation” is cited by Lowenstein and Co when, for example, a child claims he has been sexually abused by someone outside the family, such as in a school or other institution, the “psychologists” say the child is mentally ill and telling lies, and his mother refuses to accept that. It is the mother who gets called abusive for believing her child. Giving “expert” evidence to support that line is one of Lowenstein’s specialities. He’s a very sick man.
Have you seen the material published at “Zoompad’s” blog?
“Zoompad” publishes the tribunal’s judgement when they dismissed Lowenstein’s appeal against the removal of his “care home” licence. In the comments you can read things like this:
“i lived with this nutter at allington manor in the early 80`s, the only way to describe it is HELL ON EARTH, not sure if im reading things right but far more than 6 kids lived there at any one time”
That last point is very interesting, because although only up to 6 children were supposed to live there, in actual fact most of the time many more were there, including several who were off the records.
Put two and two together.
He also set up a “community or maladjusted children” in Poland, and you’ve got to wonder whether he’s been implicated in trafficking.
Some people call Lowenstein “Dr Frankenstein”.
Another commenter says:
“DR.Lowenstein had a telphone conversation with my daughter about how incest was ok!!!!My daughter is going through a court battle with her husband as the two children had said that their father had sexually abused them and he told my daughter that this is normal…..I was horrified to here what she told me and thought what can we do to protect our children when professionals lie!!!”
Another:
“I was a pupil at that horrible place Allington Manor, back in the seventies. What I can remember of him, Dr Ludwig Lowenstein is one evil man! I could not settle at that place, would not eat and would often run away, I was very unhappy. He got me sat at his desk one day and told me to write a letter to my mam saying how happy I was there, I was crying as I wrote that letter, because deep down I wasn’t happy and wanted to go home. He checked the letter and saw that I put ‘I want to come home’ he made me write another one, read it and said he will post it. I was crying, but I sneakily wrote another letter to my mam telling her what he wanted me to put in that first letter and told her I wanted to come home as I did not like it there. I also remember that silly point system minus points if you miss behaved or points if you were good, mine for a majority of that time was minus! I also remember, another pupil had stolen something and he stopped everyone’s pocket money, he made us all suffer for that, we didn’t see any pocket money. I also remember he had wrestled a boy to the ground and held his arms behind his back, :o. My records about my history from a child, seem to have gone missing while I was down there in the seventies, wish I kne what happened to them.”
I know for a fact that there are decent individuals in the Hampshire police who are going all out to nail this guy. Power to their elbow.
Typo above; “well at least not here !”
Another anniversary produces this important article, dealing with the re-writing of recent history & the outlawing of questioning of “genocide” facts & figures;
http://dissidentvoice.org/2015/08/the-srebrenica-massacre-turns-20-years-old/
RobG
5 Aug, 2015 – 8:54 pm
“… all trying to play down the allegations against Ted Heath.”
“In my opinion, these creatures in the media should also be put on trial.”
……………………………………………………………..
I agree RobG. The media had a different attitude towards Jimmy Savile.
They didn’t refer to Savile as Sir James in their articles but they still refer to Ted Heath as Sir Edward.
But I am not going to be cross-examined by some cocky twat on the internet. Of course I haven’t posted all the information I have got. Nor will I.
You sneeringly tell me to contact the police. If you read what I’ve posted, you’ll find out far more about what the Hampshire police are ‘investigating’ in the Heath case than you will from their own refusal to say. But their refusal won’t last long.
When I see some overbearing tinfoil-hat twat on the internet posting a raft of unsubstantiatable allegations, together with dissenting interpretations of what information he has got from the public domain, I naturally want a little more detail.
I wasn’t “sneeringly” telling you to contact the police. I was quite serious. Given the current media hysteria, there will never be a better time to get serious allegations of this sort investigated. It occurred to me that you yourself had some knowledge of something, and that rather than posing as a guardian of secrets not vouchsafed to mortal man, a planned approach to ensuring investigation would be the way to go.
Of course there is always the possibility you know fuck-all beyond whatever muck you can dig up from unattributable sources on the web.
I’ll go with that.
Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, who, unusually for a historian, has command of Japanese, Russian, and English and who has had access to the documents in all those languages, argues in Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan that it was Russian entry into the war that was decisive in leading Japan to decide to surrender unconditionally.
@DougScorgie
“They didn’t refer to Savile as Sir James in their articles but they still refer to Ted Heath as Sir Edward.”
That’s an excellent point!
There’s a photo on Google of Dr. Lowenstein (google his name) that has him (I assume it’s him) in a U.S. Army officer’s uniform of World War Two vintage, I believe. (As I’ve had to state repeatedly on this forum, I have never been a member of the U.S. Army, so I’m not an expert on its uniforms.) How did he end up in England?
One more bit of unwanted advice, Hampshire: Be rather careful about the MP for Worthing. He successfully sued the Mail on Sunday in 1989 for making allegations of paedophile involvement about him, and last year promised to do the same to any substantial publisher of similar libels. I’d hate to see Craig getting taken down on your account.
Happy Bomb Day everyone!
Worth knowing that more innocent people were killed by the Japs in the Nanking Massacre alone than by both A-Bombs combined.
And just look at them now. From raping, torturing, looting, pillaging, aggressive fascist state — to 99% pacifist. In a generation. And no more world wars since.
You folks in the UK have an idiotic law of libel (although a most convenient one for big shots). Here in the notoriously plutocratic U.S., we have a law of libel that makes it quite difficult for a plaintiff to win a case, especially when the plaintiff is a public figure. And the rich and prominent nevertheless do very well here, thank you.
Estimates of the death toll from the Nanking Massacre range from 40,000 to 300,000. Within the first two to four months after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the dead from both bombings numbered between 129,000 and 246,000. “During the following months, large numbers died from the effect of burns, radiation sickness, and other injuries, compounded by illness and malnutrition.” The non-atomic fire bombings of other Japanese cities killed hundreds of thousands more.
Anon1, good to see that Dr Strangelove is alive and kicking.
Your knowledge of modern day Japan could be written on the back of a postage stamp.
When I first saw Worthing mentioned, I thought the reference was to Tim Loughton, who seems to have fought for “Establishment” paedophiles to be exposed.
As for Peter Bottomley, I have no idea what he is innocent or guilty of.
Bottomley says he
“(backs) the idea of a wide-ranging inquiry into claims that senior figures were involved in child sex abuse, provided it (does) not interfere with police investigations“.
Fine.
But he also dismisses suggestions that there was “a major conspiracy to cover up abuse by Establishment figures”. And isn’t that part of what there’s supposed to be an inquiry to determine? Saying there wasn’t such a conspiracy while the police are still seeking evidence surely discourages people from coming forward. The idiot seems to want to have it both ways.
Russian Alexander Perepilichnyy death ‘reprisal killing’
1 hour ago
Surrey Police said Alexander Perepilichnyy’s death was not suspicious
The death of a wealthy Russian businessman could have been a “reprisal killing” linked to the deaths of Alexander Litvinenko and lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, a pre-inquest review heard.
Alexander Perepilichnyy, 44, collapsed and died in the road while running in Weybridge, Surrey, on 10 November 2012.
Traces of a chemical found in a toxic plant were found in his stomach.
The review heard Mr Perepilichnyy had been working on uncovering a Russian money laundering operation.
Mr Perepilichnyy’s death was originally attributed to natural causes until traces of a chemical that can be found in a poisonous plant were later found in his stomach.
/..
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-surrey-33810535
~~~~
The wheels of British justice do grind exceedingly slowly. Nearly three years later, they have got as far as this pre inquest review. Inquest itself in Sept
RobG
You’d better put me on trial and have me shot then.
lol
Anon1
Like you actually give a fuck about the West.
@Anon1 “Happy Bomb Day everyone!”
Just for you you sad sod. Maybe you should go and live in the Atomic museum I reckon you
belong there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUQBb3KWPIY
Like a child, showing off how provocative it can be, Anon1 makes that revolting comment at the top of this page.
There has been a pleasant troll-free period on the blog. Now sadly ended.
Dave Lawton, what is ECCR and who is Lady Barbara?
Yes, one criticism is that the widely accepted estimate of the damage to health due to radiation, promoted by the UNSCEAR, is largely based on studies of the victims of the atomic bombs detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Horrific though these deaths and injuries were, most of the radiation was delivered externally rather than being ingested. Consequently, the recommendations for “safe levels of background radiation” are stupidly, dangerously high if the radioactivity is coming from mobile, biologically active isotopes like strontium and iodine, which were not particularly high after the bombings. UNSCEAR use this model to declare that only a low number of cancers are caused by nuclear pollution, so the WHO ends up allocating nuclear-induced cancers to other carcenogens, the declared cancer rates for which are also estimates.
Daniel,
a nuclear weapon core contains just a few kilos of nuclear fuel, some of which is transmuted into fission products during explosion. Each nuclear reactor contains many tonnes of nuclear fuel, which is constantly being transmuted into fission products – highly radioactive isotopes, several common ones being biologically active too, ie. when available are actively absorbed and used by our bodies, where they can release radiation, actually within our cells where damage is most likely to start cancer. Each reactor’s worst-case contamination hazard is probably comparable with the entire fall-out from a nuclear world war. And three are currently still melting down at Fukushima – this hasn’t been fixed, those cores cannot be considered as “contained”, so we cannot yet quantify the total contamination release. The Fukushima disaster has caused illness and will continue to cause more; we only have (possibly manipulated) estimates of how much. Even in seventy years time we won’t have the full tally of all illness they’ll have caused.
OK, better regulation could have minimised the fallout from Fukushima, but how many incidents like this can we tolerate? We’ve already had several. How much more cancer do we want? I say that NO more major releases are acceptable. But there are already hundreds of power reactors worldwide, plus their related facilities – enrichment, fuel fabrication, reprocessing, waste storage… The longer we keep doing nuclear power, the more releases we’ll accumulate, the pollution and its effect on health will be cumulative because some of the isotopes last for generations. Even immediately planning and implementing a shut-down of the existing nuclear power industry could not be guaranteed to pass without disaster or lesser release.
Sorry, I still haven’t got to the politics. But you see the problem; Fission power’s danger stems from its necessary scale. Physics, biology and Murphy’s law conspire to make it incompatible with organic health in the long term.
The very awful Fogh of War, Rasmussen, has become a Goldman Sachs hireling.
Goldman Hires Ex-NATO Chief to Guard $1.5 Billion Danish Stake http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-08-05/goldman-hires-ex-nato-chief-to-guard-1-5-billion-danish-stake
August 5, 2015
On February 1989, two years before the fall of the Soviet Union, a research paper by Georgian historian Roy Aleksandrovich Medvedev published in the weekly tabloid Argumenti i Fakti estimated that the death toll directly attributable to Stalin’s rule amounted to some 20 million lives (on top of the estimated 20 million Soviet troops and civilians who perished in the Second World War), for a total tally of 40 million.
http://www.ibtimes.com/how-many-people-did-joseph-stalin-kill-1111789
Mao’s Great Leap Forward ‘killed 45 million in four years’
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/maos-great-leap-forward-killed-45-million-in-four-years-2081630.html
These two statistics make the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings look tame by comparison.
My own opinion is that the USA dropped the atomic bombs on Japan to see the consequences and the effects such weapons would have on humans, then and in the long term.
Perhaps on the anniversary of Hiroshima we need a bit of light relief.
So, this song is dedicated to Anon1 and Habba, et al.
‘I give all my money to millionaires and I don’t give a fuck about you.’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqwWUNZlTOA
(I did try busking for a while, until the pigeons got up a petition)
Besides killing a couple of hundred thousand Japanese right away, those atom bombs proceeded to terrorize most of the human race for the next few decades.
“Happy Bomb Day everyone!”
Remind me again of your problem with the Holocaust?
Russia has been the only country with information about the downing of MH17 to publicly share that information. Here its rationale for using its veto is presented. It is not opposed to a tribunal. But first there is an ongoing investigation led by the Dutch Safety Board in accordance with UN resolution 2166 (21/07/14) which has yet to report its findings and it would be premature to hold a tribunal before its final report. You will notice that Russia believed when it shared its information that it was a BUK missile which brought down MH17.
http://nsnbc.me/2015/08/06/rationale-behind-mh17-tribunal/
As to the picture provided by Kempe which Ba’al entuses so much about it is clearly a bullet hole.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2015/07/aaronovitch-blusters-to-a-well-of-silence/comment-page-5/#comment-542580
The reason for the tear is due to the angle at which the bullet hit the pilot seat. For confirmation look at the bottom of the tear where the the projectile entered. It is a classic bullet hole. No argument as far as I can see. By the way, any of you guys drilled a square hole in thin plate steel using a round drill? I did it as an apprentice. I can teach you how to get round it too.
Interesting that an apologist for the plutocrats should still use the term “Japs”.
“By the way, any of you guys drilled a square hole in thin plate steel using a round drill?”
Not me. Surely the corners were a bit rounded?
ROS; “These two statistics make the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings look tame by comparison.”
Does that make the dropping of those bombs any less horrific & immoral ?