What Good Are Honors From Such People?

By Rich Kozlovich, Tags:

 

On Monday July 18th, 2o22 the "Pulitzer Prize Board Stands by Awards Given to NYT, WaPo for Russia Hoax Reports".   The correspondent who sent this to me commented:

 

They have zero shame and clearly don't give a rip about actual journalism, journalistic ethics, standards, or morals. They just like telling leftist fairy tales that push the agenda.

The author states:

 

In the last three years, the Pulitzer Board has received inquiries, including from former President Donald Trump, about submissions from The New York Times and The Washington Post on Russian interference in the U.S. election and its connections to the Trump campaign–submissions that jointly won the 2018 National Reporting prize......

 

Apparently, in spite of the evidence of history and the results of actual investigations that the Trump/Russia election interference charges were nothing short of a conspiracy by the Democrat party and their media allies was fraudulent and blatantly false, they're standing by their decisions for awarding both the New York Times and the Washington Post for their lying reports and reporters stating: 

“These inquiries prompted the Pulitzer Board to commission two independent reviews of the work submitted by those organizations to our National Reporting competition,” the board continued before announcing the establishment media outlets will keep their prizes.

According the them:

“The separate reviews converged in their conclusions: that no passages or headlines, contentions or assertions in any of the winning submissions were discredited by facts that emerged subsequent to the conferral of the prizes,”....In total, 20 articles were challenged with formal complaints. All 20 were ruled factual by the Pulitzer Prize Board......

This kind of corruption isn't anything new.  The fact of the matter is the news media became infested with communist agents going back to the beginning of the 20th century.  The faces have changed, but the underlying philosophy hasn't.  The mainstream media is corrupt to the core.  The New York Times support of Stalin during the 1930's when he starved millions of his people do death, is history.  History that's incontestable.  Their support of Castro, along with Don Hewitt and CBS,  was no less disgusting. 

Their Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, Walter Duranty, did everything in his power to deny  Stalin's crimes against his people, even calling reporter liars who tried to tell the truth......and the New York Times leaders knew it, and so did all the other reporters who covered Russia.  Most of whom didn't have the guts to fight the good fight.  

 

Duranty was a Satanist, a deviate and a liar of massive proportions who worked to hide the fact Stalin starved five million people do death.  Dennis Behreandt demonstrates all this in his article, Duranty’s Lethal Lies.

 

I published this piece twice, Blast From the Past: What is the News Worth Knowing and Why Don't We Know It?, and has a lot about the corruption of the press and their embrace of murdering commie dictators, and prize winning lying "journalists" like Walter Duranty.   The prize that needs to be awarded here is the Walter Duranty Award.  A prize for journalistic mendacity.   The New York Times is often called the Old Grey Lady, when in reality the New York Times is a Old Gray Hag, offering poisoned apples to the world. 

The thinking at the NYT, the Washington Post and the rest of these propaganda organs of the left, including the broadcast media, is irrational, misanthropic, morally defective and mentally deranged.  Just like the groups they support.  Mark this down. I predict the day will come when the New York Times, the Washington Post and the rest will cease publication, but it can't be soon enough.  If it weren't for the "alternative media" we would still be being misled by these liars, hypocrites and traitors to humanity.

 

In the movie  K-19: The Widowmaker, the captain meets with what was left of his crew to honor those who died for their comrades saying: 

 

For their courage I nominated these men for the title of hero of the soviet union. But the committee ruled that because it was not wartime, and because it was merely an accident, they were not worthy of the title hero. 

 

What good are honors from such people?

 

The same question should be asked regarding the Pulitzer Prize Committee.  What honorable journalist would want honors from ones such as this? 

 

 

Another “Useful Idiot” Seeks to Prop Up Cuba’s Thuggish Regime by Regurgitating Propaganda

January 20, 2019 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty
 

There’s a long and sordid history of people in Western nations acting as dupes and apologists for communism. This is especially the case with the wretchedly impoverished totalitarian outpost 90 miles south of Florida.

• President Obama lauded aspects of Cuba’s totalitarian regime when he visited in 2016.
• Jeffrey Sachs ranked Cuba higher on development goals than the United States.
• Jimmy Carter (and Jeremy Corbyn, Justin Trudeau, etc) gushed about Fidel Castro when the long-time dictator died.
• Numerous vapid celebrities have helped turn the thuggish and racist Che Guevera into a pop icon.

Based on what he wrote for the opinion pages of the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof belongs on that list of “useful idiots.”

Cuba…in health care…does an impressive job that the United States could learn from. …an American infant is, by official statistics, almost 50 percent more likely to die than a Cuban infant. By my calculations, that means that 7,500 American kids die each year because we don’t have as good an infant mortality rate as Cuba reports. …a major strength of the Cuban system is that it assures universal access. Cuba has the Medicare for All that many Americans dream about. …It’s also notable that Cuba achieves excellent health outcomes even though the American trade and financial embargo… Cuba overflows with doctors — it has three times as many per capita as the United States… Outsiders mostly say they admire the Cuban health system. The World Health Organization has praised it, and Ban Ki-moon, the former United Nations secretary general, described it as “a model for many countries.”

Kristof admits in his piece that there are critics who don’t believe the regime’s data, but it’s clear he doesn’t take their concerns seriously. And he definitely doesn’t share their data. So lets take a close look at the facts that didn’t appear in Kristof’s column. My first recommendation is to watch Johan Norberg’s video on the real truth about Cuba’s infant mortality.

But there’s so much more.

Jay Nordlinger authored the most comprehensive takedown of Cuba’s decrepit system back in 2007. Here are some of the highlights.

The Left has always had a deep psychological need to believe in the myth of Cuban health care. On that island, as everywhere else, Communism has turned out to be a disaster: economic, physical, and moral. Not only have persecution, torture, and murder been routine, there is nothing material to show for it. The Leninist rationalization was, “You have to break some eggs to make an omelet.”  

Orwell memorably replied, “Where’s the omelet?” There is never an omelet. …there is excellent health care on Cuba — just not for ordinary Cubans. …there is not just one system, or even two: There are three. The first is for foreigners who come to Cuba specifically for medical care. This is known as “medical tourism.” The tourists pay in hard currency… The second health-care system is for Cuban elites — the Party, the military, official artists and writers, and so on. In the Soviet Union, these people were called the “nomenklatura.”  

And their system, like the one for medical tourists, is top-notch. Then there is the real Cuban system, the one that ordinary people must use — and it is wretched. Testimony and documentation on the subject are vast. Hospitals and clinics are crumbling. Conditions are so unsanitary, patients may be better off at home, whatever home is. If they do have to go to the hospital, they must bring their own bedsheets, soap, towels, food, light bulbs — even toilet paper. And basic medications are scarce. …The equipment that doctors have to work with is either antiquated or nonexistent.  

Doctors have been known to reuse latex gloves — there is no choice. …So deplorable is the state of health care in Cuba that old-fashioned diseases are back with a vengeance. These include tuberculosis, leprosy, and typhoid fever. And dengue, another fever, is a particular menace.

Wow, I guess shortages extend well beyond toilet paper.  Next we have some very sobering data from a 2004 article in Canada’s National Post.

…a small bottle of tetracycline costs US$5 and a tube of cortisone cream will set you back as much as US$25. But neither are available at the local pharmacy, which is neat and spotless, but stocks almost nothing. Even the most common pharmaceutical items, such as Aspirin and rubbing alcohol, are conspicuously absent. …Antibiotics, one of the most valuable commodities on the cash-strapped Communist island, are in extremely short supply and available only on the black market. Aspirin can be purchased only at government-run dollar stores, which carry common medications at a huge markup in U.S. dollars. This puts them out of reach of most Cubans, who are paid little and in pesos.  

Their average wage is 300 pesos per month, about $12. …tourist hospitals in Cuba are well-stocked with the latest equipment and imported medicines, said a Cuban pediatrician, who did not want to be identified. …”Tourists have everything they need,… But for Cubans, it’s different. Unless you work with tourists or have a relative in Miami sending you money, you will not be able to get what you need if you are sick in Cuba. As a doctor, I find it disgusting.”

And here’s some scholarly research from Katherine Hirschfeld at the University of Oklahoma (h/t: Scott Johnson).

…the Cuban government continues to respond to international criticism of its human rights record by citing…praise for its achievements in health and medicine…the unequivocally positive descriptions of the Cuban health care system in the social science literature are somewhat misleading. In the late 1990s, I conducted over nine months of qualitative ethnographic and archival research in Cuba.  

During that time I shadowed physicians in family health clinics, conducted formal and informal interviews with a number of health professionals, lived in local communities, and sought to participate in everyday life as much as possible. Throughout the course of this research, I found a number of discrepancies between the way the Cuban health care system has been described in the scholarly literature, and the way it appears to be described and experienced by Cubans themselves. …After just a few months of research, …it became increasingly obvious that many Cubans did not appear to have a very positive view of the health care system themselves.  

A number of people complained to me informally that their doctors were unhelpful, that the best clinics and hospitals only served political elites and that scarce medical supplies were often stolen from hospitals and sold on the black market. Further criticisms were leveled at the politicization of medical care… Public criticism of the government is a crime in Cuba, and penalties are severe.  

Formally eliciting critical narratives about health care would be viewed as a criminal act both for me as a researcher, and for people who spoke openly with me. …One of the most readily apparent problems with the health care system in Cuba is the severe shortage of medicines, equipment, and other supplies. …Many Cubans (including a number of health professionals) also had serious complaints about the intrusion of politics into medical treatment and health care decision-making.

Three academics at Texas Tech University also found very troubling data when they investigated the nation’s health system (h/t: David Henderson).

With 11.1% of GDP dedicated to health care and 0.8% of the population working as physicians, a substantial amount of resources is directed towards reducing infant mortality and increasing longevity.  

An economy with centralized economic planning by government like that of Cuba can force more resources into an industry than its population might desire in order to achieve improved outcomes in that industry at the expense of other goods and services the population might more highly desire. … 

Physicians are given health outcome targets to meet or face penalties. This provides incentives to manipulate data. Take Cuba’s much praised infant mortality rate for example. In most countries, the ratio of the numbers of neonatal deaths and late fetal deaths stay within a certain range of each other as they have many common causes and determinants. … 

Cuba, with a ratio of 6, was a clear outlier. This skewed ratio is evidence that physicians likely reclassified early neonatal deaths as late fetal deaths, thus deflating the infant mortality statistics and propping up life expectancy. Cuban doctors were re-categorizing neonatal deaths as late fetal deaths in order for doctors to meet government targets for infant mortality. …Physicians often perform abortions without clear consent of the mother, raising serious issues of medical ethics, when ultrasound reveals fetal abnormalities because ‘otherwise it might raise the infant mortality rate’. … 

The role of Cuban economic and political oppression in coercing ‘good’ health outcomes merits further study.

The bottom line is that Cuba is a hellhole and statistics from a repressive regime can’t be trusted.
Though the real message of today’s column is that we should be revolted by people who are willing to be dupes for totalitarianism.

And I can understand why people willing to debase themselves in that way are so sensitive to criticism.

P.S. The New York Times has a pathetic history of covering up for the crimes of communism, most notably Walter Duranty, who was given a Pulitzer Prize in 1932 even though he despicably lied in his reports to promote Stalin’s horrid regime. He even covered up Stalin’s holocaust of the Ukrainian people. Even though Duranty’s evil actions are now public knowledge, the Pulitzer Prize Board has not revoked the award. The New York Times, to its credit, at least has acknowledged that Duranty lied to promote Stalin’s brutal dictatorship. One wonders if the newspaper eventually will apologize for Kristof.

P.P.S. I’m also not impressed that a former Secretary General of the U.N. endorsed Cuba’s health care system. After all, it was an official from the U.N. who praised the lack of obesity among the starving people of North Korea.

Observations From the Back Row

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De Omnibus Dubitandum!

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Blood Libels from Israel-Hating Students in Florida

Posted by Arnold Ahlert

Students who vocally call for the destruction of Israel have created a stir in Florida with their promotion of modern-day blood libels and lies demonizing the Jewish State. On March 30th, 200 mock eviction notices were placed on dorm-room doors by the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at Florida Atlantic University (FAU) in Boca Raton. “We regret to inform you that your home is scheduled for demolition shortly,” begins the notice, which can be seen here. “You have three (3) days to vacate the premise persuant (sic) to code no. 208.2A or you will be subject to arrest. If you do not leave, we reserve the right to destroy your home. Anyone left inside is not our responsibility.”

Robert Spencer Asks: Did Muhammad Exist?

Posted by Bruce Thornton

Editor’s note: Robert Spencer’s acclaimed new book, Did Muhammad Exist?: An Inquiry into Islam’s Obscure Origins, is now available. To order, click here. 

One of the jihadists’ most potent psychological weapons is the double standard Muslims have imposed on the West. Temples and churches are destroyed and vandalized, Christians murdered and driven from the lands of Christianity’s birth, anti-Semitic lunacy propagated by high-ranking Muslim clerics, and Christian territory like northern Cyprus ethnically cleansed and occupied by Muslims. Yet the West ignores these depredations all the while it agonizes over trivial “insults” to Islam and Mohammed, and decries the thought-crime of “Islamophobia” whenever even factual statements are made about Islamic history and theology. This groveling behavior confirms the traditional Islamic chauvinism that sees Muslims as the “best of nations” destined by Allah to rule the world through violent jihad.

Social Security Faces Unfunded Liability of $8.6T, or $73,167.83 Per Household
By Christopher Goins
Social Security faces an unfunded liability of $8.6 trillion, according to the 2012 Annual Report of the Board of Trustees of the Federal Old-Age and Survivors Insurance and Federal Disability Insurance Trust Funds.
The unfunded liability is the amount that has been promised in benefits to people now alive that will not be funded by the tax revenue the system is expected to take in to pay for those benefits. (The Social Security trustees calculate the unfunded liability for a period of 75 years into the future, from 2012 to 2086)

U.N. Chief Calls for Universal Access to Abortion and Contraception for Teen Girls
By Pete Winn
Secretary-general Ban Ki-moon waves before flying out of N'djamena, Chad. United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Monday that millions of girls -- teenagers and younger -- need access to abortion and contraceptives in order to “avoid unintended pregnancies, unsafe abortions and sexually transmitted infections.” “Sixteen million adolescent girls become mothers every year, and every day, more than 2,000 young people contract HIV,” Ban said. “We have a collective responsibility to drive these numbers down.”

EEOC Says Transgenders Are Protected from Workplace Discrimination
By SAM HANANEL
The agency that enforces the federal job discrimination laws has for the first time ruled that transgender people are protected from bias in the workplace. In a groundbreaking decision late last week, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission said a refusal to hire or otherwise discriminate on the basis of gender identity is by definition sex discrimination under federal law. While some federal courts have reached the same conclusion in recent years, employment law experts say the EEOC decision sets a national standard of enforcement that offers employers clear guidance on the issue. "This decision is important because the EEOC is the agency with lead authority to interpret and enforce the nation's employment rights laws," said Jennifer Pizer, legal director of the UCLA School of Law's Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Law and Public Policy.

Those Cheapened Pulitzer ‘Prizes’
By L. Brent Bozell III
The 2012 Pulitzer Prizes looked less like an excellence-in-media competition and more like an exercise in leftist self-affirmation. No prize established this more strongly than the coveted National Reporting prize going to -- The Huffington Post! The Pulitzer judges who would rather swallow rat poison than give an award to a conservative outlet, such as The Washington Times, are bestowing kudos on a site that thrives on such celebrity dreck as "Miley Shows Off Legs in Lacy Shorts" and "Kim Kardashian Kanye West Earrings: Reality Star Sports 'KW' Initial Jewelry."….. It's amazing that liberals have cartooned conservative thinkers as locked in a bubble or an echo chamber. These cheapened "prizes" expose the airless insularity of today's leftist journalism.

Bill that bars public money from going to Planned Parenthood OK'd by Senate
Arizona is on the verge of joining eight other states that have banned the use of public dollars for Planned Parenthood. The Senate on Tuesday approved a bill that would bar the state or any local government from using public money to support an organization that includes abortions among its services. Although House Bill 2800 does not mention Planned Parenthood by name, it's clear the organization is the target. In a news release issued after the 18-8 party-line vote in the Senate, the Susan B. Anthony List, an anti-abortion group, cheered the decision. "Planned Parenthood's abortion-centered business model does not need or deserve taxpayer dollars," Marilyn Musgrave, the group's government-affairs vice president, said in a statement.

HBO’s ‘Girls’ depicts wasteland of sexual promiscuity
Call it bad sex and the city. With its unflinching (and often explicit) depiction of some of the most unerotic couplings you’ll ever see onscreen, HBO’s critically-acclaimed new comedy “Girls” captures the sexual wasteland of the millenials’ hook up culture — the grim reality of “no strings attached” sex between post-college guys, who have learned what they know about sex from online porn, and post-college girls, who have learned what they know about sex from Cosmopolitan magazine. Created by and starring Lena Dunham and executive produced by Judd Apatow, “Girls” tells the story of four educated and adrift young women in their mid-twenties trying to manage their romantic lives amid the joyless sex and jobless recovery of an unforgiving New York City

N. Korean military has 'powerful modern weapons'
North Korea is armed with "powerful modern weapons" capable of defeating the United States, a top military chief in Pyongyang said Wednesday amid increased speculation abroad about the nation's missile arsenal and nuclear ambitions. Vice Marshal Ri Yong Ho emphasized the importance of strengthening the military to defend North Korea against threats it sees from the United States and South Korea. He called his nation a nuclear and military power and praised new leader Kim Jong Un, believed to be in his late 20s, as a "military strategist" who has been giving the army guidance for years. "The Korean People's Army is armed with powerful modern weapons … that can defeat the (U.S.) imperialists at a single blow," he told party and military officials, using familiar descriptions of the country's rivals.


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