I know of a case whereby a pulpit Rav was found by an objective Beis Din to have been completely untrustworthy and of harming the livelihood and reputations of others; because his victims were few in number they covered up their findings, reasoning that being that most of his congregants still trusted him and looked up to him, if a communal debate over his ouster were to happen, perhaps the congregants would have to decide among themselves by a vote, and divulging the information they had would just result in Chillul Hashem, i.e., laymen losing their trust in him, and by extension, other Rabbinic figures.
At the time, I thought that justice should win, but now I see their wisdom. Putting anything up for a public vote results in too much evil speech, slander, innuendo, and libel. Election season is mudslinging season, and could you imagine the destruction if the Davidic leader of the Jewish people had to win re-election, say, every decade? The results would be disastrous, even if only matters of truth were to come out.
June 3, 2019, Google implemented a broad “core update”1 that in one fell swoop eliminated most Mercola.com pages from its search results. Virtually overnight, Google traffic to my site dropped by approximately 99.9%.
Considering Mercola.com has been the most visited natural health site for the last 16 years, it’s no great surprise that we were listed as one of the biggest losers in Google’s June algorithm update.2
I wrote about the ramifications of Google’s core update in two articles at the end of June 2019. In Part 1, I discussed the effects that the new search algorithm and updated quality rater guidelines is having on traffic to this site.
As mentioned in that article, Google’s “quality raters” are manually lowering the ranking of what they arbitrarily decide is undesirable content and burying even expert views if they think they’re “harmful” to the public.
In Part 2, I revealed how Wikipedia censors information and crafts narratives to benefit certain groups, and how Google raters use Wikipedia’s skewed and biased articles to ascertain the expertise and trustworthiness of any given author or website.
Today’s videos and article will show you just how clearly and deliberately Google has eliminated my articles from its search results.
After more than 15 years of being considered a highly relevant source of content, Google has removed all those high-ranked results, and replaced them with health information from advertising companies that promote junk food and drugs instead. Below, I’ll provide clear examples of how this works.
For many years now, I’ve been warning about how Google’s monopoly presents a clear danger to the free-flow of information, and health information in particular, seeing how holistic health is a direct threat to the drug industry. The fact that Google would eventually grow big enough to dictate what people see and don’t see was predictable, and we’ve now entered the era of blatant internet censorship.
How Google Censors High-Ranked Health Content
A major reason for my success as a physician running my own practice was the ability to resolve extremely challenging cases of arthritis. One of my articles describing my arthritis treatment protocol generated over 1 million views, and was consistently a top search result when doing a Google search for arthritis.
Today, even if you use my name in a search for arthritis, you will not find that highest-ranked article. What you find instead is an article copied from my website — without permission — by a Croatian website operated by Zdravko Mauko, followed by a few articles about arthritis from my pet site, followed by a short piece about arthritis that I contributed to Creations Magazine.
The top search result for “Mercola arthritis” is a tiny, insignificant site that in no way, shape or form could possibly compete with Mercola.com. When you compare the ranking of our sites on Alexa, you find my site (as of October 8, 2019) ranks 9,002 in global internet engagement over the past 90 days.3
And that’s despite having been buried by Google since early June, as two years ago our overall Alexa ranking was 3,708. Compare this to our-arthritis.com, which has a ranking of 9,401,920.4 The first screen shot below is Alexa’s ranking for Mercola.com on October 8, 2019. The second screen shot is Alexa’s ranking for our-arthritis.com on that same day.
Another signal of trust and popularity is based on the number of sites linking in, or the number of sites that reference your own site. There are more than 11,000 sites linking to Mercola.com, and only 2 linking to our-arthritis.com. This is another example of Google’s purposeful censorship.
Despite the fact that our-arthritis.com plagiarized my entire article without permission, and have no credibility in terms of website engagement or ranking, it “owns” the search terms “Mercola arthritis” — above my own site!
Censorship Strategy No. 2 — Content Mix-Up
Giving precedence to a site with a relevance ranking that is 1,000 times lower than my own would be bad enough, but it doesn’t end there. Even if you try to use a restricted search, which allows you to search for results within a specific website, Google has you barking up the wrong tree.
When doing a restricted search for “Mercola.com arthritis,” or “site: Mercola.com arthritis,” which theoretically should provide you with links to the most popular articles about arthritis within my site only, Google provides the top search results for arthritis on our veterinary website!
The entire first page of search results; 10 of 12 of the search results on Page 2; and 6 of 10 results on Page 3 direct you to our Healthy Pets website. How is that for relevance? Google has really outdone itself in “helping” users find relevant information, hasn’t it?
Google-Owned YouTube Uses Similar Obfuscation Tactics
The same misdirection and obfuscation is happening on YouTube, which is owned by Google. If you do a YouTube search for “Mercola arthritis,” links to my many arthritis videos are blatantly pushed aside by irrelevant search results as evidenced in the screen shot below.
In short, it’s not a suspicion but a blatantly obvious fact that Google is doing everything it can to erase my online presence and hide the many tens of thousands of free articles and videos I’ve generated over the last 22 years.
Who Now Dominates Online Health Searches?
Who are the Google-trusted health websites that now dominate health searches? WebMD and Healthline. But are they really the most trustworthy sources on the web? Their track records certainly suggest otherwise.
WebMD is owned by the global investment firm KKR & Co.,5 which also owned RJR Nabisco at a time when it sold junk food and tobacco products. As described in my 2018 article, “Google and WebMD Partner To Be Your Virtual Doctor,” KKR also owns Medscape and MedincineNet.com and, according to Fast Company,6 “is trying to corner the market on internet-based health information dissemination …”
WebMD, as you may recall, was in 2010 caught providing users with a fake depression screening test. The test — in which 100% of quiz-takers ended up having a “high likelihood of major depression” and were directed to talk to their doctor about treatment7,8 — was sponsored by drug giant Eli Lilly, the maker of Cymbalta.
The quiz was in fact direct-to-consumer advertising masquerading as a valid health screen, and this is perhaps the most hazardous kind of drug advertising there is.
Then, in 2017, Google partnered with the National Alliance on Mental Illness, launching a depression self-assessment quiz which, like WebMD before it, funneled querents toward antidepressant drugs.9,10 There simply is no doubt that Google is a proponent for and promoter of pharmaceuticals.
Likewise, WebMD — which pockets millions to promote drugs — is far from an independent source of health information. A quick search of WebMD articles on antidepressants and depression, for example, reveals a clear pattern: They contain ads for antidepressant drugs furnished by Google ad services and doubleclick — both of which are owned by Google.
Mainstream Charedi media are so ashamed of the actual Torah, they will publish long articles glorifying some Goyish institution, without ever mentioning the Jewish, er, “connection”. Case in point: Monarchy.
This trivial trivia-filled trove emphasizes just how many people worldwide still thirst for a proper monarchy (many royal hopefuls have “bands of admirers and, in some cases, even small political parties advocating for their restoration”!), quotes economists who recover some of monarchy’s reputation (missing Hoppe’s classic “Democracy: The God That Failed“, of course), and so on.
But even the obligatory “Torah angle” piece by Rabbi Avraham Y. Heschel carefully avoids the topic of a Davidic monarchy or even an Exilarch.
“Advocates of monarchy have pointed out that even if the tsars were considered tyrannical, the number of political prisoners held in Imperial Russia was in the hundreds, while under Lenin that number multiplied to tens of thousands, and under Stalin to millions — a sign of the limits of monarchy versus other power structures.”
“Monarchical governments, especially if they have some constitutional element, have better records of maintaining stable environments,” Dr. Lee Walter Congdon, author and former professor of history at James Madison University, told Hamodia. “Monarchies are systems that won’t be totally changed by votes, and as such provide more stability to let people live their own lives than democracy.”
So, why won’t they dare apply the same logic to the Jewish people?!
The article quotes a royalist:
“Monarchy will bring an order, good government, prosperity, safety, peace of mind, longevity, wealth, and the good life in our mutual country,” he said. “Monarchy, of course, isn’t perfect — nothing is — but it can make an impressive contribution to the wellbeing of society by providing strength and stability, a calm and dignified center, luster, continuity, unity, traditions, oneness, and even greatness. Perhaps this is because it is patterned after the order of Heaven where the Supreme Creator is the King above all kings.”
The man considered by many to be the intellectual grandfather of modern monarchism, Erik Maria Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, was himself the heir to a defunct Austrian aristocratic line. A prolific writer, he was a master of many languages and was known for his encyclopedic knowledge. Until his death in 1999, he traveled the world warning of the dangers of mass rule and attempting to demonstrate through many books, papers and lectures that monarchs have historically been more effective guarantors of personal liberty than their elected counterparts. In one of his major works, Liberty or Equality, he argues that it is chiefly the drive of the modern world to artificially impose an egalitarian society that robs man of his personal freedoms. He dedicates an entire section to his theory that Nazism was only able to rise to power as a result of the dissolution of monarchical rule in much of Europe following the First World War.
There’s a study, too (obviously):
Last year, Dr. Mauro Guillen, a professor of international management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, released an in-depth statistical study of 137 nations showing that a monarchy generally has a higher standard of living than a republic.
“I was surprised myself,” Dr. Guillen told Hamodia regarding his paper’s results. The economist went on to discuss the theory behind the apparent fact that citizens of monarchies are better off than those living under governments whose heads have all been elected.
“Monarchies limit the power of politicians and reduce social conflict which undermines economic growth,” he said. “A lot of people think of monarchies as anachronistic, but if you move away from focusing on the human being who might be the monarch and look at it as an institution and the political culture it creates, you have a system with more checks and balances that prevent politicians from becoming corrupt or getting carried away with their agendas.”
…
The economic theory at the core of the study pins itself on the idea that strong protection of property rights is the most essential ingredient in a healthy market, as these incentivize investment and foster growth. In its 40 pages, the paper argues that monarchies have done a better job of this than republics.
Another piece of evidence is the relative moderation of monarchies in the Arab world and their greater resilience during the “Arab Spring” turmoil as compared to their republican counterparts.
The paper also shows that constitutional monarchies have far outperformed absolute monarchies. Dr. Guillen cautions that the culture of unity and stability he feels monarchy can bring will only occur in a country that has an established tradition of a hereditary sovereign, saying that attempting to re-create such a system in the United States or Switzerland “would not work.”
Even the faithless refrain of “What will the Goyim think?” loses its luster upon noting plausible, positive theory, and the existence of many, many royalists worldwide.
But would an empowered Jewish king be unprecedented in modern times? Not by much.
From Hamodia, again:
Spain was without a king for more than 40 years following its Civil War and the rule of the Franco regime, but in 1975, Juan Carlos was restored to the throne, which is now occupied by his son, Felipe VI.
Montenegro’s story might give even more hope. Following nearly half a century as part of communist Yugoslavia, followed by 10 years of regional strife, in 2006, the small Balkan nation voted to secede from Serbia and declare independence. In 2011, the royal status of its Crown Prince Nicholas was given official recognition, and he now shares some of the powers of the nation’s presidency.
By the way, both the article and its title (Pretending, But Not Make-Believe) are thoroughly confusing, because the paragraph explaining the term “pretender” only appears three-quarters in:
The term “pretender,” despite its mocking ring in modern English, is actually not a pejorative. In its original Latin and French forms, the word simply means “one who presents a claim.”
A very large literature has built up over the past several decades in the area of so-called “happiness research.” Such research is based on several very dubious assumptions: namely, that utility is cardinal and measurable after all; that interpersonal utility comparisons can therefore be made; and that the great unicorn of economic theory — the “social welfare function” — has finally been spotted. Armed with these assertions, socialists around the world believe they have finally discovered their holy grail. Now that governments supposedly know with “scientific certainty” what constitutes “happiness,” there can be no argument (or so they think) against virtually unlimited government intervention in the name of creating happiness.
Affluence is actually a disease that generates massive unhappiness, says the Australian author of a popular book in this field, entitled Affluenza. The government of Brazil is in the process of enshrining this notion into its constitution, and similar movements exist in Great Britain and other countries.
These assumptions rest on the proclamation that public-opinion surveys are sufficient measures of cardinal utility. The economists who make such assumptions studiously ignore all of the reasons why economists have disavowed such practices — especially the notion of demonstrated preference — for generations. As Murray Rothbard explained in his essay, “Toward a Reconstruction of Utility and Welfare Economics,”
The concept of demonstrated preference is simply this: that actual choice reveals, or demonstrates, a man’s preferences; that is, that his preferences are deducible from what he has chosen in action. Thus, if a man chooses to spend an hour at a concert rather than a movie, we deduce that the former was preferred, or ranked higher on his value scale. … This concept of preference, rooted in real choices, forms the keystone of the logical structure of economic analysis, and particularly of utility and welfare analysis.
Rothbard continued to explain the folly of relying on public opinion surveys, as opposed to the actual demonstrated preferences of economic decision makers:
One of the most absurd procedures based on a constancy assumption [i.e., the false assumption that people never alter their preferences] has been the attempt to arrive at a consumer’s preference scale not through observed real action, but through quizzing him by questionnaires. In vacuo, a few consumers are questioned at length on which abstract bundle of commodities they would prefer to another abstract bundle, and so on. Not only does this suffer from the constancy error, no assurance can be attached to the mere questioning of people when they are not confronted with the choices in actual practice. Not only will a person’s valuation differ when talking about them from when he is actually choosing, but there is also no guarantee that he is telling the truth.
The one economist who is arguably the leader in the field of “happiness research” (at least among economists) is Bruno Frey of the University of Zurich. When I asked him at a conference in Prague several years ago about the age-old criticisms of replacing actual demonstrated preferences with questionnaires, his response was that his “data” were no worse than GDP data. As bad and as unreliable as GDP data are, “happiness research” questionnaire data are at least no worse, he said.
But in fact, much of the happiness-research data are much, much worse.
“Happiness research has indeed been a gold mine for resume-building academic economists whose econometric game playing is no longer limited by the requirement of digging up actual economic data.”
European socialists in fields outside of economics have gone even further with their research of “happiness.” A bestseller in Europe is The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone, by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. The book is an excellent example of the misuse and abuse of statistics by these two British epidemiologists. It is an abuse of statistics because the entire book is a fishing expedition for simple correlations between the degree of material “inequality” in a country and myriad other variables. Wilkinson and Pickett don’t even attempt the use of multiple-regression analysis, as is typical in their own field, in economics, and elsewhere. Consequently, they arrive at contrived statistical conclusions that greater material equality in a country supposedly leads to improvements in community life, mental health, drug use, physical health, obesity rates, intelligence, teenage births, recycling, violence, imprisonment, social mobility, dysfunctionality, anxiety, and self esteem. (One critic of this research mocked its abuse of statistical methods by presenting a scatter diagram that purportedly showed a positive correlation between recycling and suicide, suggesting that the more one recycles, the more likely that one will commit suicide!)
According to these scientific-sounding conclusions (which have been lavishly praised by politicians, of course), the people of the former Soviet Union must have been the happiest people on earth, since the pursuit of equality was always the pronounced objective of socialism. As F.A. Hayek wrote in the 1976 edition of The Road to Serfdom, socialism was originally defined as government ownership of the means of production, and then changed to mean the redistribution of income and wealth through the auspices of the welfare state and progressive income taxation. In each case, “equality” was the ultimate end; only the means changed over time.
Happiness researchers make no mention at all of the long-recognized deleterious effects of welfare statism, including destruction of the work ethic, family breakup, the growth of dysfunctional citizens who are paid by the state to remove themselves from the work force, etc.
Bruno Frey is no socialist, but the area of research that he champions is being very enthusiastically embraced by interventionists, socialists, and would-be central planners within the economics profession. Frey himself explained this in his June 2002 survey article in the Journal of Economic Literature entitled “What Can Economists Learn from Happiness Research?” (with Alois Stutzer). Among the things economists can learn from this strange branch of psychology, Frey and Stutzer approvingly report, are the following:
“Happiness functions have sometimes been looked at as the best existing approximation to a social-welfare function. It seems that, at long last, the so far empirically empty social welfare maximization … is given a new lease on life.”
Income has increased dramatically since World War II, but “happiness” supposedly has not. The counterintuitive implication is that work, investment, and entrepreneurship — the ingredients of economic success — do not produce happiness, but human beings nevertheless keep doing more and more of it year in and year out.
Interpersonal utility comparisons have also been resurrected, supposedly proving that “social happiness” can be created by the state’s theft of one person’s income and the redistribution of it to another (while keeping a tidy sum for “administrative expenses”).
