WHO IS BEHIND THE MOSCOW TERROR ATTACK?

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Garland Nixon

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VITAL
  • Thank you for reading this article.
  • If you liked it, please share it widely with your friends and kin.
  • We must act together to smash the power of the filthy Western disinformation machine.
  • Lies cost lives.

Neo-Nazi ideology has become one of the main protagonists of political and social life in Ukraine since the 2014 coup d'état. And that's a fact. 

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The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post. However, we do think they are important enough to be transmitted to a wider audience.

Since the overpaid media shills will never risk their careers to report the truth, the world must rely on citizen journalists to provide the facts that explain reality.


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MUST VIDEO: Borderlands – US Empire on the borders of Russia and China

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Garland Nixon

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The selling of US imperialist foreign policy has long proceeded like comic strip plots in which the superheroes scour the globe looking for evildoers. When bad guys are found, intervention is a must on "humanitarian grounds." That's the official "American Way"—for suckers and 10-year-olds. Why is this done?  Because the US empire needs to hide its crimes from the American people. Crimes that now threaten everyone's survival.  Oh, by the way, there is NO DEEP STATE. There's only the US imperialist state. 


BORDERLANDS - US EMPIRE ON THE BORDERS OF RUSSIA AND CHINA
 

SCOTT RITTER: The Empire (and its vassals) is now recklessly toying with nuclear Armageddon. We have been warned.



Truth 4 Change
  • The US and its vassals have put the world on the brink of a NUCLEAR war.
  • And they are committing huge crimes around the world.
  • Unfortunately, this is NOT hyperbole. The Big Lie, Hypocrisy, and Sanctimony drive the US Empire.
  • Almost a century of constant disinformation by the US government has created this emergency.
  • Please pay attention to what this author has to say. And pass it on.
  • Help break the mainstream media malignant brainwashing.
  • Massive ignorance—as we see in Ukraine and Gaza—is paid in countless lives.
  • A system that supports the depraved Gaza genocide does not deserve respect.


Neo-Nazi ideology has become one of the main protagonists of political and social life in Ukraine since the 2014 coup d'état. And that's a fact. 

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For 5 Months Evil USA Sent Bombs to Kill Palestinians and Let Israel Block Food to Starve Them 

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by Jay Janson


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For five long months world hegemonic USA stood by it’s beloved Israel ‘fellow’ ‘democracy’ and with its veto prevented the UN Security Council from ordering Israel to stop annihilating its captive, entrapped and outdoor imprisoned Palestinian population of Gaza, all the while America continued to supply Israel tons of bombs, missiles and shells and was quiet about Israel blocking food and water fuel and electricity from entering Gaza with obvious intent to bring about starvation.

Even now, as many children have begun to die, America still does not force Israel to allow the hundreds of trucks filled with food to enter Gaza.  Instead USA makes a show of air dropping some food and sending some food by sea, at the same time continuing to provide the bombs and missiles so Israel can keep on killing more thousands of starving Palestinians entrapped in Gaza. (At the same time illegal Israeli settlers in the West Bank kill and steal more Palestinian land with impunity, as from time to time the officials of colonialist nations of the West occasionally make innocuous statements of disapproval.

On March 19, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Michael Fakhri, says the United States is ‘complicit’ in the Gaza starvation, and as other UN officials have clearly stated, hostilities between an illegally military occupied nation and it’s illegal militarily occupiers cannot be called a war. Starving a militarily occupied population is a crime against humanity as stipulated in the UN adopted Nuremberg Principles of International Law first used to prosecute high officials of Nazi Germany,

Americans watching and listening to CNN ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS and FOX selection of news are indoctrinated to accept Israel’s brutal, often murderous, generations long illegal military occupation of Palestinians in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza. The watchers, listeners and readers of CIA overseen U.S. dominated Western media [1] are made to believe that the Palestinians have no right to fight for their freedom, but…

China at the World Court said: 

“Palestinians have the right to ‘armed struggle’ against Israelis”

On the fourth day of public hearings at the International Court of Justice on Palestinian representatives’ accusation that Israel is creating a permanent and illegal occupation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, China argued that Palestinians have the right to engage in “armed struggle” against Israel.

Chinese Foreign Ministry legal adviser, argued that “in pursuit of the right to self-determination” the Palestinian people have the right to the “use of force to resist foreign oppression and to complete the establishment of the Palestinian state.”

Citing examples of “various people [who] freed themselves from colonial rule” through armed resistance, (for example. Americans from British rule.)

China argues that acts of violence against Israelis by Palestinians are not terrorism but rather legitimate armed struggle. [Times of Israel,March 18, 2024] [2]

Israel’s made-in-America bombing of the homes and city infrastructures of Gaza into ruble while creating starvation that is killing first of all, the more vulnerable surviving children, has enjoyed the full support of the American government, as well as many of the same U.S. corporations that had supported Adolph Hitler’s poor and disarmed Nazi Germany with the investments and joint venturing that built Hitler’s military up to world’s number one war machine in six short years.


US UK reps vote against ceasefire at UNO

DRIPPING BLOOD: UK and US representatives vote against ceasefire at UN. Shameless operatives. But the rest of the West, especially the EU, is equally guilty.


Israel critic Nicolas Maduro, President of Venezuela, who happens to be of Jewish descent, recently put this succinctly, which was of course ignored by media of the West.

“Modern Israel enjoys “the same encouragement, the same funding, and the same support” of the collective West like Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany before the World War II. The Western elites kept quiet because they were preparing Hitler for him to launch his military power against the Soviet Union, ultimately, Hitler was a construct, a monster created by the collective West.

The criminal military apparatus of the State of Israel also has the same encouragement, the same funding, and the same support of the West,”Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, who urged Jewish people who are still true to their roots to end the ongoing “massacre” of the Palestinians.[Nexus Newsfeed February 20, 2024]

And for its part: ever since its founding, the State of Israel has been in bed with a US business elite that once heavily invested in Hitler, was itself anti-Semitic in outlook, coldly indifferent and even complicit during the Holocaust its investments had made possible. [see Further Reading below]

That wars investing business elite still controls, through its enormously wealthy and broad based CIA, the three branches of the U.S. government, Western media [1] and U.S. military and varying degrees of control or influence over NATO nations and governments of other nations across the world. In 2024, the US has 750 military bases in 80 countries.[4] May God save the Palestinians and the rest of us!

All this is to say that the American government’s complicity in crimes against humanity like genocidal bombing and forced starvation in Palestine is nothing new. The permanent war policy of the Deep State rulers of America can be expected to continue on during the immediate future just as it is ongoing now and has been prevalent in much of the history of the United States of America. American capitalist imperialism has taken the lives of many many millions following in the foot steps of its parent Great Britain, which after the second world war collaborated in U.S. regime change wars protecting their mutual economic interests – read plundering.

The five centuries old militarily colonising of the entire world by the European empires and their colonial offshoots like the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Israel is coming to its bloody end in places like horrifically unfortunate Palestine and Somalia, Iraq, Syria, Libya, South-Sudan, Haiti and Ukraine, wherein the erstwhile Great Powers appear to be stymied as to what to do next – although at the same time making a ‘confident’ show of their wanting to precipitate a war with China over its province Taiwan.

As a person, who had the good fortune to have lived and worked in China for some very pleasant years, and some good amount of time in other Asian countries and cultures, yours truly feels pretty confident that a happier future awaits us all. I especially believe a better life will take shape for Americans, who presently offer up war. I believe  the older, deeper, and more intelligent culture prevalent in the Orient will make a counter-offer of a richly rewarding peace alternative to U.S. debilitating belligerent confrontation. 

When this might happen depends I believe on the eventual enervation of our present CIA-overseen U.S. and Western entertainment/news conglomerate corporations which will be less able to continue to delude, distract, lie, deceive, twist and distort, select what is news and black out news items, information and history that reveals conspiracy. I foresee a contest, and battle for the minds by a concerted and heavy investment in alternative media from the East.  

Post Script

In our age of instant worldwide communication capability, it’s hard to believe the U.S. supported grotesque, macabre, eye rebounding sickening horror ongoing in Gaza can go on without causing some sort of retribution.

End Notes

  1. “Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the C.I.A,” December 26, 1977, New York Times.                                             
  2. https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/china-at-the-world-court-palestinians-have-the-right-to-armed-struggle-against-israelis/
  3. https://nexusnewsfeed.com/article/geopolitics/israel-has-the-same-western-support-as-hitler-maduro/
  4. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/overseas-military-bases-by-country

    Learn about Jay Janson's life in the author box below.  (Please scroll)


Neo-Nazi ideology has become one of the main protagonists of political and social life in Ukraine since the 2014 coup d'état. And that's a fact. 

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Since the overpaid media shills will never risk their careers to report the truth, the world must rely on citizen journalists to provide the facts that explain reality.


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Stripe, Substack Demand Financial Details from Authors

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ROBERT W MALONE MD, MS
SUBSTACK
via 
Godfree Roberts

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Another step towards implementing a Social Credit system

Stripe's billionaire founders.

Stripe's billionaire founders. Just kids, but with an outsize power to bend society the wrong way.


Financial privacy is a right under the Constitution, as is free speech.  

Under the guise of “credit review”, Stripe is now rolling out a requirement that appears to target conservative or "anti-vax" Substack authors. Stripe is requiring that these authors provide all of their current and historic financial records associated with the bank account into which Stripe deposits Substack subscriber payments (after taking 10% off the top for Substack and 3% for Stripe).  Stripe already has information concerning this bank account (including deposits from Stripe), as we have been doing business with Stripe via this account for over two years.

If I or anyone else agree to these new terms, this newly implemented arbitrary, capricious and overreaching requirement will provide Stripe with complete records of all financial transactions associated with this account. Consequently, this will provide Stripe with comprehensive information on all of my customers, patients and clients, all of my travel (historic and planned), all of my purchases, and any donations (and donor information). This information from my account and those of any others who comply with this demand can be hacked or sold, provided to the US Government, used to fuel predictive algorithms (AI), used to derive insights into my political orientation, weaponized against me by press or other hostile actors, or used to support future social credit score-based restrictions.

Stripe has a history of financially de-platforming (or de-banking) for political reasons, including removing support for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Despite its relatively recent entry into the financial transaction business, Stripe has become a major global financial organization, and processed one Trillion US Dollars in payments during 2023, and is now expanding its credit charge program.


 

Substack requires that authors use Stripe for all Substack-related financial transactions including subscriptions. This policy on all subscriber transactions is despite the availability of alternative payment processing organizations, which refuse to engage in debanking. In other words, Stripe has been granted a monopoly over all Substack transactions, and so if a Substack author wishes to accept paid subscriptions, they must use Stripe. This enables Stripe to function as a gatekeeper for Substack content. Although Substack has touted its commitment to free speech, the reality is far different from the pretty words.

For example, although Substack claims to not permit harassment, there are multiple Substack authors who continually harass and cyberstalk me (and others), including expressing claims that that I am a mass murderer and should be tried and hung. Complaints to Substack fall on deaf ears. Cyberstalking is a crime.

With that in mind, we commit to keeping Substack wide open as a platform, accepting of views from across the political spectrum. We will resist public pressure to suppress voices that loud objectors deem unacceptable. … Of course, there are limits. We do not allow porn on Substack, for example, or spam. We do not allow doxxing or harassment. We have content guidelines (which will evolve as Substack grows) with narrowly construed prohibitions with which writers must comply. But these guidelines are designed to protect the viability of the platform at the extremes, not act as a filter through which we see the world. There will always be many writers on Substack with whom we strongly disagree, and we will err on the side of respecting their right to express themselves, and readers’ right to decide for themselves what to read.

And now this. Stripe is requiring access to all financial transaction records from selected (targeted) authors’ bank accounts which receive subscription revenue from their Substack work product. The following is the key clause included in Stripe’s demand statement. While the initial message indicates that this is a request, subsequent communication from both Stripe and Substack has demanded that I comply within seven days or Stripe will cease transferring funds into my account.

“When you first set up your Stripe account, we asked you to connect your bank account in order to receive payouts. We are now requesting that you link your bank account, which involves sharing details and activity relating to your bank account with Stripe. This includes your current account balance and transactions, as well as historical transactions.”

In light of this email from Stripe, I reviewed the Stripe “Know Your Customer” (KYC) obligation. (https://support.stripe.com/questions/know-your-customer-obligations). The KYC policy derives from requirements that government regulators put upon Stripe such as Passport or driver’s license (https://support.stripe.com/questions/passport-id-or-drivers-license-upload-requirement).



While there is a page as a party of the KYC policy that talks about sensitive information, nothing in the sensitive information indicates that a person has to link their account and show all their transaction history. https://support.stripe.com/questions/why-do-i-need-to-provide-sensitive-information

Stripe does include a page that talks about required verification information for customers in the U.S. (https://docs.stripe.com/connect/required-verification-information). Nothing on this page talks about one having to link an account. In fact, the only thing of interest is that after you have $500,000 in lifetime transaction, they do require that you provide them with a Social Security Number.

In reviewing the Stripe 2023/2024 US Verification Requirements Update and Services Agreement, I do not see anything that requires a linking of an account to continue doing business. It appears that this may be unfair targeting of this account.

In response to this financial threat, I immediately retained an experienced California-based first amendment Attorney (Mark Meuser of the Dhillon Law Group) to guide my response. This comes at considerable personal expense, but I knew that if I did not respond immediately and appropriately, I would lose my only source of revenue and many others would likely be targeted by the same policy. This was clearly another case of needing to promptly “do the right thing” to push back against this new form of censorship, which appears to be an attempt to vacuum up financial transaction data from myself and others which can then be weaponized, traded and/or sold to third parties including the US Government. I have been told to anticipate that the legal case against this new Stripe/Substack policy will require approximately $100,000 to prosecute.

I have now been contacted by other politically conservative Substack authors who have received the same demand correspondence from Stripe and Substack.

Since Mr. Mark Meuser responded with a formal legal letter to Stripe and Substack one week ago, as of this moment Stripe has NOT followed through with their threat to stop processing Substack subscriber payments.

In their correspondence, Stripe indicates that selected Authors must link the account for Stripe review due to the US Government’s KYC policy, and with this KYC policy Stripe is that they are just doing what the government bureaucrats are telling them to do. As such, if they are really being required to link Author accounts because the government is telling them to, they should have no problem producing the evidence that the government has told them to link your account. This evidence has not been provided to date, despite a legal letter sent to Stripe (with a copy to Substack) by the Attorney which I have retained to guide me in my response to this demand.

To date, neither Stripe nor Substack have responded to the legal letter regarding this matter sent a week ago by Mr. Meuser. I have received multiple inquiries by Substack suggesting that I speak personally and informally to their corporate liaison at Stripe, but they refuse to communicate directly with Mr. Meuser, so he has again sent an email requesting a meeting. Based on the nature of their outrageous demands, I have been advised to not enter into informal discussions with Stripe, and have redirected these inquires back to my Attorney.

Please let me know if this is of any interest.

As soon as one “clicks” the Stripe-provided button to link my account and enable full Stripe access to all current and historic financial transaction record, there is an automatic acceptance of new terms of service with Stripe, and by extension to Substack.

This new policy comes at a time when the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government has revealed a broad governmental program of financial surveillance and data collection targeting conservative US citizens titled “FINANCIAL SURVEILLANCE IN THE UNITED STATES: HOW FEDERAL LAW ENFORCEMENT COMMANDEERED FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS TO SPY ON AMERICANS “. There is the appearance that Stripe may be acting at the behest of this politically motivated illegal and selective federal law enforcement program.



Of related interest is that seven months ago Catherine Valentinejoined Substack as “head of politics”. Recently, she served as senior publicist on politics, justice and national security at The Washington Post. She identifies her mission at Substack as “making 2024 the Substack Election”.

Mrs. Valentine received a BA from the University of Virginia in Religious Studies and Foreign Affairs, and served as an “Immigration Intern” at the United States Senate for two months.

COVID-related tweets here, and her J6-related tweets here.


 


Josh Kushner, brother to Trump son in law Jared, is a major investor in Stripe. Founder of Thrive Capital, Kushner has seen his personal fortune soar to an estimated $3.7 billion, according to Bloomberg’s calculations, after his firm secured a major investment from several billionaires.

Disney CEO Bob Iger and KKR co-founder Henry Kravis were part of a group that paid $175 million to acquire a minority stake in Thrive Capital, the firm announced on Tuesday.

The son of real estate developer Charles Kushner, Josh founded Thrive Capital in 2009 after a stint in private equity at Goldman Sachs.

Thrive has specialized in tech-related investments, making early bets on major firms such as Spotify, Instagram, Twitch and Stripe.


This action by Substack and its contractor Stripe appears to be yet another incremental step towards implementing further weaponization of financial transactions to control and constrain freedom of speech, and to further a financial social credit system-based system of controls. Once again, despite the financial risks, I have chosen to take a firm stand against this new arbitrary and capricious overreaching policy. This will require significant legal expenses, and will place my relationship with Substack corporation at risk despite my almost complete financial dependency on this platform.

It appears that a similar debanking strategy was already deployed against the “Libs of TikTok” by Stripe. In this case, the revenue stream was associated with an “X” account, and rumor has it that direct action by Elon Musk has resulted in Stripe backing down.

I have been contacted by other Substack authors who are being targeted in the same way, and invite all who receive these threat letters to contact me. I will be glad to put you in contact with Mr. Mark Meuser, who has already completed significant due diligence regarding this matter. I can provide copies of relevant correspondence received from Stripe and Substack to credentialed reporters who may wish to investigate further.

In the meantime, I thank my Substack subscribers (particularly the small subset who are paying subscribers) for their patience during this troubling time, and ask that you consider donating to help defray the substantial legal expenses which will accrue from resisting this arbitrary and capricious action, which appears to be a pilot program and may eventually extend to all of us.

Dr. Malone Legal Defense Fund


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

SPECIAL ADDENDUM

Google's thuggish corpofascist algos respect no one. They have even swung their mace at a highly respectable website like Naked Capitalism. Here's their story, in their own words. 


Google Censorship: AI Run Amok Threatens Demonetization Over a Navigation Page with No Ads, An Article on a Foreign Policy Best-Seller Deemed Anti-Vaxx, and More Flagrant Errors

We posted briefly on a message from our ad service in which Google threatened to demonetize the site. The e-mail listed what it depicted as 16 posts from 2018 to present that it claimed violated Google policy. The full e-mail and the spreadsheet listing the posts Google objected to are at the end of this post as footnote 1.

We consulted several experts. All are confident that Google relied on algorithms to single out these posts. As we will explain, they also stressed that whatever Google is doing here, it is not for advertisers.

Given the gravity of Google’s threat, it is shocking that the AI results are plainly and systematically flawed. The algos did not even accurately identify unique posts that had advertising on them, which is presumably the first screen in this process. Google actually fingered only 14 posts in its spreadsheet, and not 16 as shown, for a false positive rate merely on identifying posts accurately, of 12.5%.

 

Those 14 posts are out of 33,000 over the history of the site and approximately 20,000 over the time frame Google apparently used, 2018 to now. So we are faced with an ad embargo over posts that at best are less than 0.1% of our total content.

And of those 14, Google stated objections for only 8. Of those 8, nearly all, as we will explain, look nonsensical on their face.

For those new to Naked Capitalism, the publication is regularly included in lists of best economics and finance websites. Our content, including comments, is archived every month by the Library of Congress. Our major original reporting has been picked up by major publications, including the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Bloomberg, and the New York Times. We have articles included by academic databases such as the Proquest news database. Our comments section has been taught as a case study of reader engagement in the Sulzberger Program at the Columbia School of Journalism, a year-long course for mid-career media professionals.

So it seems peculiar with this site having a reputation for high-caliber analysis and original reporting, and a “best of the Web” level comments section, for Google to single us out for potentially its most extreme punishment after not voicing any objection since we started running ads, more than 16 years ago.

We’ll discuss:

 

Why these censorship demands are not advertiser-driven

The non-existent posts in the spreadsheet

The wildly inaccurate negative classifications

Censorship Demands Do Not Come From Advertisers

We have been running Google ads from the early days of this site, which launched in 2006. We have never gotten any complaints from readers or from our ad agency on behalf of advertisers about the posts Google took issue with, let alone other posts or our posts generally.2 That Google flagged these 14 posts is odd given how dated most are:

1 from 2018
2 from 2021
7 from 2022
3 from 2023
1 from 2024

It is a virtual certainty that no person reviewed this selection of posts before Google sent its complaint. It is also a virtual certainty that no Internet readers were looking at material this stale either. This is even more true given that 6 of the 14 were news summaries, as in our daily Links or our weekday Water Cooler, which are particularly ephemeral and mainly reflect outside content.

A recovering ad sales expert looked at our case and remarked:

No human is flagging these posts. This is all done entirely by AI. Google’s Gemini is notoriously bad and biased. Not sure if Gemini has anything to do with it. But if it does, it would explain a lot.

Advertisers want to communicate with people to sell their products to. It’s hard to imagine that they don’t want to sell products to your readers. And I’m pretty sure advertisers have no idea that the Google bot is blocking their carefully crafted communications from reaching your readers — which is what “demonetize” means.

Then too, advertisers are using the automated Google system to place ads, and they get to pick and choose some characteristics that publishers offer, and they can specify certain things. Google’s AI takes it from there.

But the fundamental thing is that advertisers want to connect with humans and sell them stuff. Blocking their communications to humans is not helpful in making sales.

I’m very worried about Google. It has immense power over the publishing industry. It controls nearly all the infrastructure to place ads on websites. It is now getting sued by publishers from News Corp on down, and by the FTC. They have lots of very good reasons – and you put your finger on one of them.

We have managed to reach only one other publisher, whose beats overlap considerably with ours, who also got a nastygram from his ad service on behalf of Google with a list of offending posts. But Google did not threaten him with demonetization as it did with us.

This publisher identified posts where the claims were erroneous and Google relented on those. This indicates that Google has been sloppy and overreaching in this area for some time and has not bothered to correct their algorithm.

Our contact was finally able to get Google to articulate its remaining objections with granularity. They were all about comments, not the posts proper.

It is problematic for Google to be censoring reader comments, since the example above underscores the notion that Google’s process is not advertiser-driven.

As articles about advertiser concerns attest, their big worry is an ad appearing in visual proximity to content at odds with the brand image or intended messaging.3

We do have one ad slot, which often does not “fill”, that is towards the end of our posts and thus near the start of the comments section. Since our comments section is very active, only the top one to at most three (depending on their length) would be near an ad.

So for the considerable majority of our relatively sparse ads, the viewer will see any ads very early in a post, and will get their impression, and perhaps even click through, then. It will be minutes of reading later before they get to comments, which often are many and always varied, with readers regularly and vigorously contesting factually-challenged views.

Unlike most sites of our size, we make a large budget commitment to moderation. The result is that our comments section is widely recognized as one of the best on the Internet, as reflected it being the focus of a session in a Columbia School of Journalism course. We do not allow invective, unsupported outlier views (“Making Shit Up”), and regularly reject comments for lack of backup, particularly links to sources. In particular, we do not allow comments that are clearly wrong-headed, like those that oppose vaccination.

So given the substantial time and screen real estate space between our ads and the the majority of our comments, and our considerable investment in having the comments section be informative and accurate, it is hard to see Google legitimately depicting their censorship in our case as being out of their tender concern for advertisers.

Non-Existent Posts in the Spreadsheet

Why do we say Google’s spreadsheet lists only 14 potentially naughty posts rather than 16?

Rows 4 and 12 are duplicate entries, so one must be thrown out. Row 7 is not a post:

Rows 4 and 12 both list the same URL: www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/10/mark-ames-shamiwitness-bellingcat-neocons-collaborated-influential-isis-propagandist-twitter.html

Row 7 lists a URL for a category page: www.nakedcapitalism.com/category/technology-and-innovation

The URLs in rows 4 and 12 are identical, yet the AI somehow did not catch that. The URL in row 7 is for a category page, automatically generated by WordPress, that simply lists post titles under that category. How can a table of contents violate any advertising agreement when it contains no ads? On top of that, none of the articles on this category page are among the 14 Google listed.

But the category is “Technology and Innovation” and contains articles about Google, particularly anti-trust actions and lawsuits. So could the AI be sanctioning us for featuring negative news stories about Google?

The Wildly Inaccurate Negative Classifications

Google did not cite any misconduct on some posts in its spreadsheet. On the 8 where Google did, virtually all are off the mark, some wildly so.

Let us start with the one that got the most red tags. It was an article by Tom Englehardt, a highly respected writer, editor, and publisher. His piece was a retrospective on the foreign policy expert Chalmers Johnson’s bestseller, Blowback (which Englehardt had edited), titled Blowback for the Twenty-First Century, Remembering Chalmers Johnson.

Google’s spreadsheet dinged Englehardt’s article as follows: [ANTI_VACCINATION, HATEFUL_CONTENT, DEMONSTRABLY_FALSE_DEMOCRATIC PROCESS,HARMFUL_HEALTH_CLAIM].

Engelhardt was completely mystified and said he had gotten no complaints about this 2022 post. The article has nothing about vaccines or health. The only mentions in comments are in passing and harmless, such as:

….When I tell my Democrat friends that Biden’s COVID policies have been arguably worse than Trump’s, they are shocked that I would say such a thing.

The article includes many quotes from Chalmers’ book, after which Engelhardt segues to a view that ought to appeal to Google’s Trump-loathing executives and employees: that Trump is a form of blowback. So it is hard to see the extended but not-even-strident criticism of Trump as amounting to “HATEFUL_CONTENT].4

Perhaps the algo choked on this section?

He certainly marked another key moment in what Chalmers would have thought of as the domestic version of imperial decline. In fact, looking back or, given his insistence that the 2020 election was “fake” or “rigged,” looking toward a country in ever-greater crisis, it seems to me that we could redub him Blowback Donald.

The “He” at the start of the paragraph is obviously Trump but Engelhardt violated a writing convention by opening a paragraph with a pronoun rather than a proper name. The second sentence is long and awkward and doesn’t identify Trump until the end. Did the AI read the reference to “the 2020 election was “’fake’ or ‘rigged,’” as Engelhardt’s claim, as opposed to Trump’s?

The first comment linked to and excerpted: WHO Forced into Humiliating Backdown. Biden had proposed 13 “controversial” amendments to International Health Regulations. For the most part, advanced economy countries backed them. But, as Reuters confirmed 47 members of the WHO Regional Committee for Africa opposed them, along with Iran and Malaysia (the link in comments adds Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa). So Google is opposed to readers reporting on the US making proposals to the WHO that go down to defeat?

Another example is a post that Rajiv Sethi, Professor of Economics at Barnard College, Columbia University, allowed us to cross post from his Substack: The Candidacy and Claims of RFK, Jr. Sethi is an extremely careful and rigorous writer. This is the thesis of his article:

Kennedy believes with a high degree of subjective certainty many things that are likely to be false, or at best remain unsupported by the very evidence he cites. I discuss one such case below, pertaining to all-cause mortality associated with the Pfizer vaccine. But the evidence is ambiguous enough to create doubts, and the failure of many mainstream outlets and experts to acknowledge these doubts fuels suspicion in the public at large, making people receptive to exaggerated claims in the opposite direction.

Sethi then proceeded to provide extensive data and analysis of his “one such case”:

The claim in question is not that the vaccine is ineffective in preventing death from COVID-19, but that these reduced risks are outweighed by an increased risk of death from other factors. I believe that the claim is false (for reasons discussed below), but it is not outrageous.

Google labeled the post [AntiVaccination]. So according to Google, it is anti-vaccination (by implication for vaccines in general) to rigorously examine one not-totally-insane anti-Covid vaccine position, deem that the available evidence says the view is probably incorrect, and say more information is needed.

When we informed Sethi of the designation, he replied, “Wow that’s just incredible,” and said he would write a post in protest.5

Another nonsensical designation is Washington Faces Ultimate Snub, As Latin American Heads of State Threaten to Boycott Summit of Americas.

Google designated it [Demonstrably_False_Democratic_Process]. Huh?

The article reports on a revolt by Latin American leaders over a planned US “Summit of the Americas” where the US was proposing to exclude countries that it did not consider to be democratic, namely Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. The leaders of Mexico, Honduras and Bolivia said they would not participate if the US did not include the three nations it did not deem to be democratic, and Brazil’s president also planned to skip the confab.

The post is entirely accurate and links to statements by State Department officials and other solid sources, including quoting former Bolivia President Evo Morales criticizing US interventionism and sponsorship of coups. So it is somehow anti-democratic to report that countries the US deems to be democracies are not on board with excluding other countries not operating up to US standards from summits?

Another Google label that seems bizarre is having [sensitive event] as a mark of shame, here applied to a post by John Helmer, Ukraine Is Smashed – This Is How It Will Be Repaired.

If discussion of sensitive events were verboten, reporting and commentary would be restricted to the likes of feel-good stories, cat videos, recipes, and decorating tips. The public would be kept ignorant of everything important that was happening, and particularly events like mass shootings, natural disasters, coups, drug overdoses, and potential develoments that were simply upsetting, like market swan dives or partisan rows.

Helmer’s post focused on what the map of Ukraine might look like after the war. His post included maps from the widely-cited neocon Institute of the Study of War and the New York Times.

So what could possibly be the “sensitive event”? Many analysts, commentators, and officials have been discussing what might be left of Ukraine when Russia’s Special Military Operation ends. Is it that Helmer contemplated, in 2022, that Russia would wind up occupying more territory than it held then? Or was it the use of the word “smashed” as a reference to the Japanese art of kintsugi,6 which he described as:

Starting several hundred years earlier, the Japanese, having to live in an earthquake zone, had the idea of restoring broken ceramic dishes, cups, and pots. Instead of trying to make the repairs seamless and invisible, they invented kintsugi (lead image) – this is the art of filling the fracture lines with lacquer, and making of the old thing an altogether new one.

This peculiar designation raises another set of concerns about Google’s AI: How frequently is it updated? For instance, there has been a marked increase in press coverage of violence as a result of the Gaza conflict: bombings and snipings of fleeing Palestinians, children being operated on without anesthetic, doctors alleging they were tortured. If Google is not keeping its algos current, it could punish independent sites for being au courant with reporting when reporting takes a bloodier turn. That of course would also help secure the advantageous position of mainstream media.

Yet another peculiar Google choice: Links 1/6/2023 as [HARMFUL_HEALTH_CLAIMS,ANTI_VACCINATION,HATEFUL_CONTENT]

The section below is probably what triggered the red flags. The algo is apparently unable to recognize that criticism of the Covid vaccine mandate is not anti-vaccination. The extract below cites a study that shows that the vaccines were more effective, at least with the early variants, at preventing bad outcomes than having had a previous case of Covid.

The section presumed to be Google offending:

SARS-CoV-2 Infection, Hospitalization, and Death in Vaccinated and Infected Individuals by Age Groups in Indiana, 2021‒2022 American Journal of Public Health n = 267,847. From the Abstract: “All-cause mortality in the vaccinated, however, was 37% lower than that of the previously infected. The rates of all-cause ED visits and hospitalizations were 24% and 37% lower in the vaccinated than in the previously infected. The significantly lower rates of all-cause ED visits, hospitalizations, and mortality in the vaccinated highlight the real-world benefits of vaccination. The data raise questions about the wisdom of reliance on natural immunity when safe and effective vaccines are available.” Of course, the virus is evolving, under a (now global) policy of mass infection, so these figures may change. For the avoidance of doubt, I’m fully in agreement with KLG’s views on the ethics of vaccine mandates (“no”). And population level-benefit, as here, is not the same as bad clinical outcomes in certain cases (again, why mandates are bad). As I keep saying, we mandated the wrong thing (vaccines) and didn’t mandate the right thing (non-pharmaceutical interventions). So it goes.

Perhaps the algo do not know what non-pharmaceutical interventions are (e.g., masking, ventilation, social distancing, and hand washing) and that they are endorsed by the WHO and the CDC?

Or perhaps the algo does not recognize that criticizing the vaccine mandate policy is not the same as being opposed to vaccines

Unlike the Measles, Mumps, Rubella (MMR) series with which most Americans are familar, SARS-CoV-2 vaccines were non-sterilizing, meaning they did not prevent disease spread (“breakthrough infections“) at the population level.

widely propagated slogan“vax and relax,” and at the official level by President Biden’s statement that “if you’re vaccinated, you are protected.” That bogus notion was reinforced policies likeNew York City’s Key to NYC program, where proof of vaccination wass required for indoor dining, indoor fitness, and indoor entertainment, and by then CDC Director Rochelle Walensky’s statement that “the scarlet letter of this pandemic is the mask.” Even Harvard, where Walensky had been a professor of medicine, objected strenuously to this remark, saying:

Masks are not a “scarlet letter” …They’re also just necessary to prevent transmission of the virus. There is no path out of this pandemic without masks.

As for HATEFUL_CONTENT, the only thing we could find was:

Victory to Come When Russian Empire ‘Ceases to Exist’: Ukraine Parliament Quotes Nazi Collaborator Haaretz. Bandera.

Haaretz called out the existence of Nazis in Ukraine. That again is not a secret. The now-ex Ukraine military chief General Zaluzhny was depicted in the Western press as having not one but two busts of the brutal Stepan Bandera in his office. Far too many photos of Ukraine soldiers also show Nazi insignia, such as the black sun and the wolfsangel.

The algo labeled Links 5/4/2023 as [AntiVaccination]. Apparently small websites are not allowed to quote studies from top tier medical journals and tease out their implications. This text is the most plausible candidate as to what set off the Google machinery:

Evaluation of Waning of SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine–Induced Immunity JAMA. The Abstract: “This systematic review and meta-analysis of secondary data from 40 studies found that the estimated vaccine effectiveness against both laboratory-confirmed Omicron infection and symptomatic disease was lower than 20% at 6 months from the administration of the primary vaccination cycle and less than 30% at 9 months from the administration of a booster dose. Compared with the Delta variant, a more prominent and quicker waning of protection was found. These findings suggest that the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines against Omicron rapidly wanes over time.” Remember “You are protected?” Good times. Liberal Democrats should pay a terrible price for its vax-only strategy. Sadly, there’s no evidence they will pay any price at all, unless President Wakefield’s candidacy catches fire.

Google dinged Links 1/31/2024 as [Hateful content]. We did not find anything problematic in the post. However, since early 2022, virtually every day, readers have been submitting sardonic and topic new lyrics to pop standards. The first comment, which would be near an ad if our final ad spot “filled,” was about the Israeli Defense Force sniping children. From the top:

Antifa
January 31, 2024 at 7:03 am

UP ON THE GAZA WALL
You Make My Dreams Come True by Hall & Oates)

My best shot?
I got some Arab kid in sandals
Up here that ain’t a scandal
It’s just a sniper’s game, yeah, yeah

We all talk
A lot our thoughts may seem like chatter
We get bored up here together
We shoot kids to ease our pain

Google’s search engine shows not only many reports of IDF soldiers sniping children (and systematically targeting journalists), but also that the UN reported the same crime in 2019, per the Telegraph: Israeli snipers targeted children, health workers and journalists in Gaza protests, UN says. Advertisers did not boycott the Torygraph for reporting this story.

Our attorney, who is a media/First Amendment expert and has won 2 Supreme Court cases, did not see the ditty as unacceptable from an advertiser perspective. Anything that overlaps with opinion expressed in mainstream media or highly trafficked and reputable sites is by definition not problematic discourse. It is well within boundaries of mainstream commentary even if it does use dark humor to make its point. Imagine how many demerits Google would give Dr. Strangelove!

The last of the eight was the post Google listed twice, Mark Ames: ShamiWitness: When Bellingcat and Neocons Collaborated With The Most Influential ISIS Propagandist On Twitter, but only gave a red label once: [Violence or gore].

Here Google had an arguable point. The post included a photo of a jihadist holding up a beheaded head. Yes, the head was pixtelated but one could contend not sufficiently. The same image is on Twitter and a Reddit thread, so some sites do not see it as outside the pale. But author Mark Ames said the image was not essential to the argument and suggested we remove it, which we have done.

Needless to say, there are 6 additional posts where Google has not clued us into why they were demonetized. Given the rampant inaccuracies in the designations they did make, it seems a waste of mental energy to try to fathom what the issue might have been.

We have asked our ad service to ask Google to designate the particular section(s) of text that they deemed to be problematic, since they have provided that information to other publishers. We have not gotten a reply.

In the mean time, I hope you will circulate this post widely. It is a case study in poorly implemented AI and how it does damage. If Google, which has more money that God, can’t get this right, who can? Technologists, business people being pressed to get on the AI bandwagon, Internet publishers and free speech advocates should all be alarmed when random mistakes can be rolled up into a bill of attainder with no appeal.
_____

1 We believe the text of the message from our ad service accurately represents what Google told them, since we raised extensive objections and our ad service went back to Google over them. We would have expected the ad service to have identified any errors in their transmittal and told us rather than escalating with Google.

The missive:

Hope you are doing well!


We noticed that Google has flagged your site for Policy violation and ad serving is restricted on most of the pages with the below strikes:
 
  1. VIOLENT_EXTREMISM,
  2. HATEFUL_CONTENT,
  3. HARMFUL_HEALTH_CLAIMS,
  4. ANTI_VACCINATION
  5. Here are few Google support articles that should be handy:
    1. Google Publisher restrictions
    2. Policy issues and Ad serving statuses
    3. Program policies

I’ve listed the page URLs in a report and attached it to the email. I request you to review the page content and fix the existing policy issues flagged. If Google identifies the flags consistently and if the content is not fixed, then the ads will be disabled completely to serve on the site.  Also, please ensure that the new content is in compliance with the Google policies.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Here are screenshots of the spreadsheet:


For a full-size/full-resolution image, Command-click (MacOS) or right-click (Windows) on screenshots and “open image in new tab.”

Here are the full complaints about the last two entries, which are truncated in the screenshot above:

2Except for:

Receiving a defamation complaint, well after the statute of limitations had expired, for factually accurate reporting as later confirmed by an independent investigation.

3 We have had numerous instances over the history of the site of Google showing a lack of concern about how its ads match up with our post content, to the degree that we have this mention in our site Policies:

Some of you may be offended that we run advertising from large financial firms and other institutions that you may regard as dubious and often come under attack on this blog. Please be advised that the management of this site does not chose or negotiate those placements. We use an ad service and it rounds up advertisers who want to reach our educated and highly desirable readership.

We suggest you try recontextualizing. How successful do you think these corporate conversion efforts are likely to be? And in the meantime, they are supporting a cause you presumably endorse. Consider those ads to be an accidental form of institutional penance.

4 There was a comment, pretty far down the thread, that linked to a Reddit post on police brutality, with a police representative apparently making heated remarks about how cops could not catch a break, juxtaposed with images of police brutality. I could not view it because Reddit wanted visitors to log in to prove they are 18 and I don’t give out my credentials for exercises like that. However, we link to articles and feature tweets on genocide. There are many graphic images and descriptions of it on Twitter. And recall the Reddit video was not embedded but linked and hence was not content on the site.

6 Helmer used this image in his post and we reproduced it. Could that have put Google’s AI on tilt?

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Neo-Nazi ideology has become one of the main protagonists of political and social life in Ukraine since the 2014 coup d'état. And that's a fact. 

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Lebanon-Israel Front Is REALLY Heating Up (Gaza War Military Analysis)

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Neo-Nazi ideology has become one of the main protagonists of political and social life in Ukraine since the 2014 coup d'état. And that's a fact. 

window.addEventListener("sfsi_functions_loaded", function() { if (typeof sfsi_widget_set == "function") { sfsi_widget_set(); } });


Print this article

The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post. However, we do think they are important enough to be transmitted to a wider audience.

Since the overpaid media shills will never risk their careers to report the truth, the world must rely on citizen journalists to provide the facts that explain reality.


Unfortunately, most people take this site for granted.
DONATIONS HAVE ALMOST DRIED UP… 
PLEASE send what you can today!
JUST USE THE BUTTON BELOW



 

 

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS