Lithuanian Vladimir Shalak

What was Shalak’s motive for his content analysis of an apparent US/UK Twitter campaign to swamp Germany?

The Slog offers a classic example of how social media can swamp the Truth

Eight days ago, a content-analysis of nearly 20,000 tweets by Vladimir Shalak offered compelling evidence of a Twitter campaign advising migrants from Turkey to ‘choose’ Germany or Austria. The high minority were tweeted from US and UK accounts.

Mr Shalak developed the ICAS for Twitter, and his recent study of refugee-related original tweets  demonstrated that 71% mention Germany and Austria as the most refugee-welcoming countries in Europe. Of these, Germany alone is over half of all tweets analysed:

Crucialyl however, well over a third of all of tweets came from the US and UK:

Now, accepting that the US is by far the biggest tweet centre on the planet, I can tell you from four years of bitter experience that if it didn’t happen in the States (or directly involve/threaten the US) most Americans don’t pay much attention to – or tweet about – European affairs. The 17% figure is abnormally high….and the near 20% of UK-derived tweeting looks downright suspicious.

Richard Nixon was of course the trailblazer of this sort of self-created crowd, and I suppose we should just be happy that the old villain was long gone before a functioning internet arrived. But the Black Dude has form when it comes to crowd-poking.

So: what of Vladimir Shalak? He was born in 1955 in Kaunas, Lithuania. He is a distinguished graduate of the Russian Academy of Sciences, specialising in data application to large scale reactions of one sort of another….especially on the internet. However, this does of course mean that, for all of his formative life and into middle age, as a valuable research scientist he would have been close to the Soviet Zil lanes.

Notable in Shalak’s Google entries is the tell-tale ‘some entries may have been removed’ which – thanks to the Eunatics – has now become a carte blanche for all miscreants with something to hide.

Further, he does have his critics. One Irviing H. Anellis, who worked in similar fields, noted in 2010:

‘While the concept of logic as a semiotic and normative science is familiar to historians of logic, regrettably Shalak does not give any evidence of the existence of the distinction between the traditional and Boolean squares of opposition, in which the validity of inferences depends upon the question of the existential import of propositions’

Many’s the time I’ve said the same thing myself when the dinner party banter was sagging. Scientists remain as ever completely up themselves, but in English what Anellis meant was that Vladimir is inclined to draw a conclusion when others may be equally valid. Nudge, nudge.

So now one must ask: did Anellis have connections that suggest an ulterior motive for rubbishing Shalak? And the answer is no, he didn’t: he seems to have been a highly respected and open-minded bloke from Iowa with no politics at all regarding iron curtains or otherwise. He died from a heart attack in 2013.

Welcome to the world of Smiley’s People. And here in this yes no maybe whoTF knows place, we’re left trying to make a judgement about who had the strongest motive for putting Germany on tilt: would that be Russia – whose leader Vlad Putin said only two days ago that America “uses disinformation to destabilise régimes in every corner of the world” – or the US….which is said to be concerned that Germany and France are moving away from American influence towards a more independent Russia policy…and which of course owes Germany rather a lot of gold.

Or would it be the UK, where Cameron would love to be negotiating with a more humble Merkel for the next round of ‘treaty change’ haha negotiations?

We do not know, and we cannot be certain.

At an early stage in this Refugee/Migrant fiasco, I posted to the effect that there was a second wave of influx bearing little similarity to the first one. This would be my hunch. I think it entirely possible that a joint CIA/MI5 black ops was launched to put pressure on Germany to stay ‘within the fold’ by demonstrating US power. And equally, I suspect the analysis was both encouraged and given credibility by a Russian security service to pump it out at full volume. Why, after all, would an obscure Twitter scientist suddenly choose to do that analysis and become that high profile?

Whereas a Russian leader keen to show Berlin just how duplicitous the US can be had everything to gain from bigging up the research results. If they were real in the first place…which I don’t know, because oddly enough Shalak hasn’t shared them with me, the miserable bastard: never writes, never phones….and perhaps Erdogan told the Syrians all to go for it, and get them out of his hair.

Nothing is real. Nothing to get hung up on.

Yesterday at The Slog: How Rabid Right is giving credibility to Looney Left