You Have Been Warned

 This email from Google's Blogger platform arrived in my inbox yesterday:

Blogger <no-reply@google.com>	Tue, Apr 25, 6:29 AM (1 day ago)
to me

     Hello,

     As you may know, our Community Guidelines 
(https://blogger.com/go/contentpolicy) describe the boundaries for what we allow-- and don't allow-- on Blogger. Your post titled "Let Them Eat Birth Control Pills - Or, Black and Bloomberg'd" was flagged to us for review. 
This post was put behind a warning for readers because it contains 
sensitive content; the post is visible at 
http://kmgarcia2000.blogspot.com/2011/01/let-them-eat-birth-control-pills-or.html. 
Your blog readers must acknowledge the warning before being able to read the post/blog.     We apply warning messages to posts that contain sensitive content. If you are interested in having the status reviewed, please update the content to adhere to Blogger's Community Guidelines. Once the content is updated, you may republish it at 
https://www.blogger.com/go/appeal-post?blogId=974773076690597683&postId=8333506209108351613. 
This will trigger a review of the post.

     For more information, please review the following resources:

     Terms of Service: https://www.blogger.com/go/terms
     Blogger Community Guidelines: https://blogger.com/go/contentpolicy

     Sincerely,

     The Blogger Team

Mind you, since this post is more than a dozen years old and among the first that I ever published, I  doubt that a human being actually read, let alone flagged, it. I'm guessing that a machine was alerted by the headline rather than the actual body of the article.  Compared with other things I've written here over the years, it was quite innocuous. It had to do with then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg's appointment of his crony Cathie Black as New York City schools chancellor, despite her having no education experience, either as a teacher or administrator. Before her brief tenure ended, she'd bemoaned the state of overcrowded schools in a poor section of the city, and said right out loud: "Can't we get some birth control down here?"

Since I don't know what was so allegedly offensive about the post, other than the above quote, I'm not going to 

respond to Google by rewriting it, reposting it and thereby triggering a further review. As I said, nobody is going to search out a 12-year-old post. Even if they Googled all the keywords, it would not lead readers to this article.. Search results for my blog, as well as for many others outside the mainstream, have been suppressed by Google  My "hits" thus began decreasing quite drastically several years ago.

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a bit spooked by this email, especially after reading "The Racket's"s latest salvo aimed at the increasingly vicious activities of Censorship-Industrial Complex.  I did get a bit of a chuckle, though,  out of the blogger "guidelines". After insisting that it does not censor bloggers on its platform, Google then proceeds to gaslight writers  Since they don't inform you what is so offensive or insensitive about your material, they leave it up to you to figure it out and to go censor yourself.

 

I can't help but wonder if this out-of-the-blue warning from Google is only the first among many, and will eventually lead to all of my nearly 2,000  posts eventually disappearing. Maybe I'm being paranoid, but after reading Taibbi, I think paranoia is a perfectly reasonable reaction, despite the comparatively low visibility of this particular blog.

Meanwhile, if you're not craving a big fat bowl of crunchily delicious Russian Bots™ after watching the following video  then you're simply not getting with the subliminal advertising program!

How Corporatism Is Co-Opting Socialism

Have you noticed that more and more corporate media pundits are paying some positive attention to socialism these days? If they can't beat such attractive upstarts as Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, they might as well at least pretend to join them in the pre-midterms interim. There'll be plenty of time after November to curb both their enthusiasm and ours.

Color me skeptical, but when neoliberal scribes Paul Krugman and Michael Tomasky write pro-socialist op-eds in the New York Times on the very same day it does tend to send my bullshit detection radar into high alert.

Krugman even took a break from his European bicycle tour vacation to wax rhapsodic about Denmark's social welfare state. It seems like only yesterday when he was waxing funereal about Bernie Sanders's call for single payer health care and free higher education. O.K., so it was more than a year ago, but time flies when millions of desperate people are logically thinking that their time is running out.

Tomasky, editor of the centrist journal "Democracy" and a columnist for the Clinton-supporting Daily Beast (Chelsea Clinton sits on its board of directors) is not so much enthusiastic about socialism as he is worried that capitalistic greed is creating too much socialistic enthusiasm in the great unwashed masses.

So if you were a person of modest or even middle-class means, how would you feel about capitalism? The kind of capitalism this country has been practicing for all these years has failed most people.

Yes, it’s given us lots of shiny objects to gush about. A smartphone that can display slow-motion video is a wonder. But an affordable college education, though perhaps not a wonder, is a necessity for a well-ordered society. So is a solution to a national drug crisis in which 115 people die every day, as well as a lot of other problems that the capitalism of our era has simply ignored.

I have mixed feelings about this socialism boomlet. It has yet to prove itself politically viable in general elections outside a handful of areas, and by 2021 we could wake up and see that it’s been a disaster for Democrats.

 Mind you, Tomasky mainly has the interests of the plutocrats at heart. His column is an appeal to their alleged altruism and understanding of the lesser people and by no means a list of remedies to ameliorate record inequality. He doesn't go so far as to agitate for single payer health insurance, a living wage, increased Social Security benefits, a federal jobs guarantee or new taxes to fund affordable housing. He only asks that wealthy "thought leaders" care, or more accurately, pretend to care. Otherwise too many leftists might get elected and take away their perks.

Nevertheless, both he and Krugman are being widely praised for saying such pretty, inclusive words. They are good soldiers who will do whatever it takes to get disaffected Democrats to the polls in November.

Meanwhile, since I wanted to find out if socialism is getting even more popular among disaffected young people, I Googled "millennials/socialism/polls" to get some numbers.

Surprisingly or not surprisingly, the very first entry in the Google search results was from a site calling itself "Victims of Communism.Org."

It wants to warn struggling, indebted young people about their deluded thinking. If they persist in wanting guaranteed medical care and other nice things, they might end up in a Stalinesque gulag. Or to be really realistic about it, Maduro's Venezuela!

Unfortunately, Americans are as ignorant of the developing situation in socialist Venezuela as they are of the definition of socialism itself. Six out of every ten Americans surveyed were wholly unfamiliar with Venezuela’s socialist dictator, Nicolás Maduro, and the economic crisis and human rights abuses that have occurred under his rule.
So, 100 years after the Bolshevik Revolution, the majority of the largest generational cohort in America show great enthusiasm for socialism while completely failing to correctly identify its definition when asked or examine its consequences. It gets worse.
Seven in ten Americans drastically underestimate the number of people killed at the hands of communist regimes over the last century. This is unsurprising, given the fact that half of all Millennials say they have never heard of Mao Zedong, a man whose policies killed nearly 60 million people, making him the greatest mass murderer of the twentieth century.

 It goes on to equate the neo-Nazi provocateurs at Charlottesville with the anti-fascist protesters "with hammer and sickle flags" despite the fact that the anti-fascists are not members of the Communist Party.

A click on the miniscule link to "Leadership" reveals that, unsurprisingly, the people in charge of Victims of Communism.Org hail from conservative think tanks, the finance industry and the security state. The executive director, Marion Smith, is a Heritage Foundation alumnus. Look for his re-education campaign on CNN, MSNBC, ABC, Fox and other echo-chamber outlets of the corporate propaganda consortium.

Chairman of the Board is Lee Edwards, also of the Heritage Foundation, who cut his own anti-socialistic teeth as director of communications for Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign.

Not that the Victims of Communism organization is totally Republican, of course. Since "bipartisan" is establishment-speak for "noble, altruistic and honest," there is even a congressional Victims of Communism Caucus to more ably represent the interests of unfettered capitalism.

Marcy Kaptur (D-OH) and Dennis Lipinski (D-IL) joined with their GOP colleagues in urging EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker to boycott the unveiling of a statue of Karl Marx (a gift from China) in his hometown of Trier, Germany this past May in honor of his 200th birthday. No matter that Marxism was co-opted by such despots as Joseph Stalin in order to do some truly evil things. According to the official US corporate bipartisan consensus, Karl Marx personally was and is responsible for all manner of global evil.

To his credit, Juncker not only ignored the US politicians and right-wing hecklers, he publicly derided them in his speech at the statue's dedication:  

Mr Juncker said: "Anyone would do well in remembering Marx because remembering and understanding are part of securing the future.
"Without memory and thought, without understanding memory, there will not be much for the future.
"Marx isn't responsible for all the atrocities his alleged heirs have to answer for.
"One has to understand Karl Marx from the context of his time and not have prejudices based on hindsight, these judgments shouldn't exist".
He went onto discuss Marx's influence on the European Union, saying that Marx's philosophy taught Europeans that it was the “task of our time” to improve social rights.

No word on whether the Bipartisan moralizers back in the USA will demand that Marx's books be banned as well. But no matter. In the American Land of the Free, Marx is rarely, if ever, taught in institutions of higher learning. And most important of all, curious learners anxious to learn about socialism and polls and young people always have the Google to set them on the right-wing path.

Google, you might remember, has not only given the reactionary website "Victims of Communism" the top spot as a result of this query, it has actively suppressed such leftist groups as the World Socialist Website from its results pages.

Here are the other top hits to the query "socialism/polls/millennials" on Google's front page of results:

"Majority of Millennials Want to Live In Socialist, Communist or Fascist Nation Rather Than Under Capitalism" (Washington Times)  According to the lead, "this troubling turn highlights widespread historical illiteracy in American society."

Sound familiar? Maybe it's because the source of this scare-mongering piece is none other than the above mentioned Marion Smith of the Heritage Foundation. For a guy so concerned about education, he certainly has a parallel agenda of the destruction of public education in the United States. He also has an addiction to false equivalency, the way he equates socialism with fascism.

Third-ranked on the Google search results page is a Chicago Tribune piece titled "Why Are Millennials So Hot on Socialism?" (Hint: they are woefully uneducated, not knowing such uncomfortable factoids as "the forcible removal of ghetto children" from their parents in Denmark... so they can go to school for 25 hours per week!) Also too, the American millennials who favor socialism are the same depraved individuals who believe in birth control and extramarital sex.

It's only until you get halfway down the Google search results page that you get to read more objective and relatively unbiased articles about young people and socialism, which are largely centered around the upset primary victory of Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. Still, as CNN reported on the recent polling, millennials still like capitalism and free enterprise right along with their newfound enthusiasm for socialism. So all is not lost. As long as there's Google to supplant critical thinking skills and the deep study of history, there's life in the old Oligarchy yet.

So the corporate media will keep their fingers crossed until such time as they can get back to business after the November midterms. They'll keep inviting reactionary shills like Marion Smith on their air to keep the conversation balanced, the concern for the poor as shallow and perfunctory as possible, and the capitalistic cancer in fake remission even as it grows and multiplies under all the concern-controlling and co-optation and snake-oil treatment.

Critiquing Evil On Evil Platforms

The main reason I never "monetized" this blog with Google AdSense, Amazon affiliate ads and the like is that getting paid mere pennies while enriching major corporations off my labor was an offer I could very easily refuse. I write here because I enjoy it, because it's cathartic, and because there is no pressure to meet deadlines and quotas or adhere to repressive standards.

Even so, I find that certain keywords and topics in my blog posts do have this weird way of translating themselves into ads which follow me wherever I go on the Internet. After publishing my last piece critiquing Obama's presidential library, for example, I suddenly got inundated with photos of his smiling face, urging me to congratulate him on a job well done. Naturally, a click took me directly to a page soliciting money for his $500 million presidential library.

I've tried free trials of gizmos like AdBlocker, which only slowed down my already slow Internet connection on my ancient operating system. A slick marketer promising me complete protection from other slick marketers is another highly refusable offer. So whenever I remember to, I just temporarily clear my browser cache of "cookie" trackers. And voila, Nobama! For now.

I've previously written about my mild discomfort using the "free" Google Blogger platform to write my posts, especially in the wake of revelations that the Silicon Valley tech giant was joining forces with the "intelligence community" to censor content from independent writers and suppress certain sites on its search engine. Their "Don't Be Evil" public relations slogan from yesteryear gets more ironic by the day.

A new revelation that Google is now partnering directly with the Pentagon to track human beings via drones makes me even more uncomfortable. As reported by Gizmodo,

Google’s pilot project with the Defense Department’s Project Maven, an effort to identify objects in drone footage, has not been previously reported, but it was discussed widely within the company last week when information about the project was shared on an internal mailing list, according to sources who asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the project.
Some Google employees were outraged that the company would offer resources to the military for surveillance technology involved in drone operations, sources said, while others argued that the project raised important ethical questions about the development and use of machine learning.

 Google’s Eric Schmidt summed up the tech industry’s concerns about collaborating with the Pentagon at a talk last fall. “There’s a general concern in the tech community of somehow the military-industrial complex using their stuff to kill people incorrectly,” he said. While Google says its involvement in Project Maven is not related to combat uses, the issue has still sparked concern among employees, sources said.

Eric Schmidt sounds like he's been canoodling with Obama and taking a page from his placatory playbook. Schmidt says that the tech community, like any other citizen-subject category, has this emotional problem leading them to crazily believe that the War Cartel is killing people incorrectly, rather than as legally permitted by a once-secret opinion written by former Attorney General Eric Holder. Holder ramped state-sanctioned murder up a huge notch, from killing people legally (via capital punishment, during the fog of war, and whenever the backs of black and brown people present an existential threat to police officers) to killing them "correctly." The correct use of drones, as former Obama CIA Chief and current NBC analyst John Brennan once outlined in his proudly leaked "Disposition Matrix" manual, is defined as the downgrading of people from human beings with civil rights to "militants," or any nameless pseudo-humans existing in the prime of their lives.

Forget about Don't Be Evil. Google's new motto should be "Don't Be Incorrect."

Gizmodo continues,

The project’s first assignment was to help the Pentagon efficiently process the deluge of video footage collected daily by its aerial drones—an amount of footage so vast that human analysts can’t keep up, according to Greg Allen, an adjunct fellow at the Center for a New American Security, who co-authored a lengthy July 2017 report on the military’s use of artificial intelligence. Although the Defense Department has poured resources into the development of advanced sensor technology to gather information during drone flights, it has lagged in creating analysis tools to comb through the data.

This is one small step for the Pentagon and one giant leap for official unaccountability.  Notice how the Neoliberal Thought Collective always uses the weasel word "efficiency" to justify everything from draconian cuts to domestic social programs and education, to the killing and maiming of people through the endless War On Terror. The poor confused warmongers just can't keep up with all that vast death-data as they scramble to decide who to track and kill next.

But look on the bright side:

Although Google’s involvement stirred up concern among employees, it’s possible that Google’s own product offerings limit its access to sensitive government data. While its cloud competitors, Amazon and Microsoft Azure, offer government-oriented cloud products designed to hold information classified as secret, Google does not currently have a similar product offering.
A Google spokesperson told Gizmodo in a statement that it is providing the Defense Department with TensorFlow APIs, which are used in machine learning applications, to help military analysts detect objects in images. Acknowledging the controversial nature of using machine learning for military purposes, the spokesperson said the company is currently working “to develop polices and safeguards” around its use.

There can be no accountability for digital death product, because nobody will know what they're doing anyway. Google, lacking the same secret status as the oligopoly known as Amazon, will never have its sensitivities bothered by the actual sight of mangled human bodies.  Perhaps Google can borrow John Brennan from NBC for a little while, so he can craft a new manual of safeguards absolving them from prosecution should their artificial intelligence ever accidentally kill more than the acceptable number of innocent people.

***

It's probably unfair to just pick on Google, when the whole Internet is bloated with so many other amoral, state and corporate-sanctioned, platforms.  When the acceptable content providers are not deliberately dressing evil up in shiny propaganda for American consumption, they're just being plain mind-numbing and innocuous. Take the New York Times -- or as I find myself doing more and more these days, leave it.

Like many other people, I enjoyed Adam Rippon's skating and offbeat humor during the otherwise stultifying Olympics telecasts on John Brennan's network. I especially admired Rippon's refusal of a job as a paid commentator for NBC before the Olympics even ended, because it would have entailed moving out of the low-rent Olympic Village and leaving all his friends.

So anyway, now that Rippon is the latest new bright $hiny iconic thing, the New York Times is on it.  

 "He became well known in America in less than a month. After his figure-skating Olympic bronze, what's next? We grilled him about where he's going," the Times burbled in the digital front page intro. Why not? He is now a "for-real" famous person!

For real. The questions asked by a whole posse of reporters and editors could have been lifted straight out of a Hard Copy or Inside Edition interview instruction manual. Read the whole thing, right down to the edgy vernacular language that is de rigueur for any hip digital journalist trying to beat the Click pack. They, like, really like using the word "like" a lot as they try to goad the skater into slipping into their own shallowness. Here's my published response:

I got a kick out of Adam Rippon during the Olympics.

I didn't get such a kick out of reading this "grilling" of him. By their questions you shall know them... and mourn for the Paper of Record's sad descent into tabloid journalism. If there is one thing that Donald Trump has accomplished as reality show president, it's been to bring the level of discourse, if not down to his level, then at least very close.

One of the grilling questions is how Rippon's celebrity status has affected how "brands and sponsors approach you." One of the reporters actually said "I feel like, just from someone who wasn't in Korea, the narrative blah blah blah." Is this real, or is this an "Onion" parody about how many shallow buzzwords can be forced into one annoying media question?

And, like, would celebrity life even be worth living without agonizing over "pushback on social media?" To engage with trolls or not to engage -- that is the grilling question on the minds of Americans, the majority of whom don't even have $200 in savings to pay for an emergency car repair.

And oh, just because we question you over and over and over again about your "body image" doesn't mean that "people" are saying you're fat. But again, how about those advertisements and endorsements? And for even more clicks, we'll ask if the Olympic village was "really like a hotbed... of sexual Tinder, Grindr, everything." Because inquiring minds want to know.

Soggy grilled cheese replaces depth journalism. Sad.