Archive for 2022

Now that Ukraine is taking back territory from Russia, now is the time for the New York Times to return Walter Duranty’s tainted Pulitzer

Posted: September 11, 2022 by John Ruberry in media, News/opinion, war
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Pro-Ukraine protest in downtown Chicago this spring

By John Ruberry

There is good news out of Ukraine, its forces have made gains in the Kharkiv region and they are near Russian border. There is much ground still to liberate, not only land that Russia has seized in the war that began early this year, but also the area that have been controlled by Russian separatists in the Donetsk region since 2014, as well as Crimea, which Vladimir Putin annexed the same year.

Ukraine has endured an unhappy history. World War II and the Holocaust devastated Ukraine. And in order to impose communism on wealthier peasants in Ukraine, Josef Stalin engineered a famine in the early 1930s, known there as the Holodomor, translating roughly into “man-made starvation.” Roughly four million people perished as a result of Stalin’s atrocities against the kulaks in Ukraine.

Even in a closed society, it’s difficult to coverup a famine. And news trickled out of Ukraine about the Holodomor. But a New York Times reporter, based in Moscow, Walter Duranty, dismissed such stories, instead of “famine” he wrote of “malnutrition” in Ukraine, for instance. 

For a series of 1931 articles about the Soviet Union, Duranty, for his “dispassionate interpretive reporting,” he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. 

While in Moscow, Duranty, was granted a rarity, interviews with Stalin; he also enjoyed another rarity, a luxury apartment in the Soviet capital. During the entire history of the USSR, housing of any kind was scarce. In Moscow Duranty had a mistress, whom he impregnated, and a chauffeur. Automobiles were also rare in Russia in the 1930s. 

In 1933, another journalist, or I should say, a real one, Gareth Jones, visited Ukraine and he was horrified by what he found. “If it is grave now and if millions are dying in the villages, as they are, for I did not visit a single village where many had not died, what will it be like in a month’s time?” Jones wrote for the London Evening Standard. “The potatoes left are being counted one by one, but in so many homes the potatoes have long run out.” 

Duranty’s response to Jones was a New York Times article, “Russians Hungry, But Not Starving.” That same year, Duranty wrote to a friend, “The famine is mostly bunk.”

Another shameful sentence from Duranty, about Stalin’s brutal policies as the Holodomor continued, “To put it brutally,” Duranty wrote for the Times, “you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”

Since the war began attention has been brought to Duranty’s undeserved Pulitzer. Even NPR took notice. “He is the personification of evil in journalism,” Oksana Piaseckyj told NPR earlier this year of Duranty. She is a Ukrainian-American activist who emigrated here as a child over 70 years ago. “We think he was like the originator of fake news,” Piaseckyj added.

The New York Times admitted on its corporate website about Duranty’s work, “Since the 1980’s, the [Times] has been publicly acknowledging his failures.” But it has not returned the tainted Pulitzer. It also notes that twice, most recently in 2003, the Pulitzer board has decided not to revoke its award to Duranty. 

It’s time for them to reconsider.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

9/11 vs 12/7

Posted: September 11, 2022 by datechguy in Uncategorized

If you want to understand the decline of America consider this simple comparison.

21 years after the attack on Pearl Harbor

  1. West Germany was a fully democratic western state with full human rights allied with the US and housing tens of thousands of US troops
  2. Italy was fully democratic western state with full human rights allied with the US and housing tens of thousands of US troops
  3. Japan was a fully democratic state with a western style government with full human rights allied with the US and housing tens of thousands of US troops
  4. The United States Military was the single most powerful military in the world feared by all others with excellent morale and strong leadership.
  5. Pearl Harbor is a fully functioning US Naval base with full capacity to project power anywhere within it’s range.

21 Years after the attack on 9/11

  1. Afghanistan is a rogue state under the rule of the Taliban with Americans held hostage and hundreds of millions of dollars of American equipment in hand.
  2. Iran is closing than ever to developing nuclear weapons while getting concessions and cash from our government and exercising heavy influence in Iraq.
  3. The United States Military has horrible morale, is unable to recruit to the levels needed power, is dismissing people over vaccine mandates and more concerned with advancing a woke agenda then projecting power
  4. The Twin Towers have not been rebuilt and there are no plans to do so nor the will to do so

There is absolutely no chance that the Americans who turned “a day that will live in infamy” into the greatest power the world would have allowed this to happen and it is to our eternal disgrace that we have let ourselves fall this far.

It’s on us as a nation and it’s a horrible thing to behold.

Why LGBT voters should be prolife

Posted: September 10, 2022 by navygrade36bureaucrat in Uncategorized
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This is part of a short series on why many LGBT voters would be better served under conservative values then far leftist values.

LGBT voters are traditionally associated with voting on left-leaning policies and almost always for Democrat candidates, yet during the last election almost a third of LGBT-identified voters said on exit polling that they voted for Trump.

Despite President Trump’s anti-LGBTQ past, including opposing LGBTQ workplace protections, he was able to attain 28% of the LGBTQ vote improving on his 2016 showing, when he ran against Hillary Clinton, and only won 13% of the LGBTQ vote.

thepridela.com

The article, not surprisingly, is shocked that any LGBT individual would even contemplate voting for a Republican candidate, much less President Trump. Yet I think this site, like so many others, misses the fact that in most cases conservative positions on issues are far more advantageous for LGBT individuals then leftist ones. I actually think that Republican candidates can probably capture more like 40% of the LGBT vote, which would finally start to highlight that LGBT individuals are not in fact one large, homogenous group of people, but rather individual voters that each have very different needs.

(A quick note: For this series I’m leaving of the …QIA+-= alphabet soup of people, which includes the pansexuals, cats and other really odd identities. Honestly, I think these people are overrepresented because they are so strange as to capture immediate attention and have an outsized impact via social media.)

First, lets look at who is considered an LGBT voter. In the case of the exit poll, its whomever happens to tell the pollster they identify as somewhere on the LGBT spectrum. This is somewhere around 1-5% of voters nationwide, by conservative and liberal estimates. However, I actually think its a bit higher, for two reasons. First, lots of people don’t like talking to pollsters, so exit poll sampling is notoriously very skewed liberal. Second, the LGBT people that would openly agree to the label are likely people comfortably out to their families, employer and the world…which is not the majority. There are likely a lot of closeted LGBT voters that simply stay quiet about their homosexual or transsexual inclinations.

That said, the ones most likely to be closeted are also most likely to lean conservative, since conservative voters are less likely to discuss this and other issues with…well, anyone really. This sets up a Harry Truman-esque scenario where traditional polling and thinking concerning LGBT voters and what they care about can be very easily misunderstood.

That doesn’t answer the bigger question of why LGBT voters would benefit from conservative policies. Let’s start with abortion, and over the next few weekends we’ll look at the economy, foreign policy and the military, plus marriage and the nuclear family. I’m leaving out religious discussions on these issues because 1., I’m not a religious scholar and thus not qualified to discuss it, and 2., Religions, especially Christian ones, vary widely on LGBT issues.

LGBT voters should be pro-life for many reasons, the most important being that as technology, and especially genetic testing, becomes easier and cheaper, there will be more people inclined to abort babies that aren’t “perfect.” This has been predicted for years, even appearing in science fiction films like Gattaca, where babies are tested and sorted into “Valids” and “In-valids.” The “Valids” are genetically perfect and given access to the best jobs, while the “in-valids,” if they aren’t euthanized, compose the underclass of citizens.

But that’s science fiction, you might think. One only needs to look across the Atlantic to see Europeans wipe out Down Syndrome kids through testing (which is not perfect, so plenty of otherwise healthy kids are lost to abortion in the process). It’s not a far stretch to assume that as we develop more and more genetic markers for what we consider disorders, it’ll be easier to “justify” aborting more and more babies that don’t line up to our idea of perfect.

Which brings up the LGBT issue, because scientists have been quite happily searching for a genetic link to explain homosexual and transgender individuals. If they find that there is a gene, or set of genes, that would incline an individual to this behavior, could there be an increase in people saying “I don’t want to bring life to this world that would suffer as a transgender individual.”? If abortion is available on demand, I can see a large number of religious mothers making this justification.

Which begs the question: don’t LGBT individuals have a right to life? Don’t babies with these genetic markers deserve a chance in this world? Who is to say that their genetics will ultimately determine how they think on any particular issue? I would argue that they do. Just because someone is genetically inclined towards something doesn’t mean they will take those actions. More importantly, this walks us down the slippery slope of euthanizing people who’s only crime is existing, which never bodes well for any minority group.

LGBT voters are best served with prolife policies, which may one day keep them from being literally aborted out of existence.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

Five King Chuck (Charles III) Thoughts Under the Fedora

Posted: September 9, 2022 by datechguy in Uncategorized

For the first time in the lifetime of myself and most of humanity, I begin a day without a Queen Elizabeth on the throne of England replaced instead with a King Charles. A few thoughts:

This is not very respectful but the first thought that came into my head and stayed into my head for all of Thursday was a remix of the classic Steve Martin song “King Tut” remade as “King Chuck” with verses like this:

,

King Chuck

First wife was kind of curvy

King Chuck

HIs brothers kind of pervy.

Born inside a palace, never been to Dallas,  King Chuck

King Chuck

King Chuck

Never wore a beardo

Funky Chuck

His son married a weirdo

Ears just like a Donkey, Now he's the head honkey, 70 years he's waitin'  now they say "God Save Him" King Chuck

It’s has to be something to go from punchline to the most prominent King in the world in 24 hours

Elizabeth is a tough act to follow but Charles has several large advantages that she did not

  1. Decades of experience in his royal duties as the longest serving Prince of Wales in History
  2. Decades watching his mother perform her Royal duties at the highest possible level
  3. Rather low expectations
  4. One of the most inept collection of heads of state in the world to be compared to

I mean how tough is it to be a better example than Joe Biden or Vlad Putin?

Of course in the Expectations game he’s almost certainly can’t end up worse than the first King Charles who was beheaded by Cromwell or the 2nd King Charles who had to flee the country after his father execution and ended up with plenty of illegitimate children but no heir.

Ironically his first wife Princess Diana was descended from one of those illegitimate children which means that if either of his sons come to the throne England will once again have a king who is a descendent of all three King Charles.

There is another interesting parallel to history in Charles ascension to the throne. That of course is King Edward VII whose mother Queen Victoria was like Elizabeth II after her, the longest reigning British monarch at the time of her death.

The Edwardian age of course is celebrated in culture as one of the great era in British history, a time of peace and prosperity that came before the first and second world wars led to the dismantling of the British Empire and it’s place in the world.

Given the collapse of western Civilization over the last few decades such an outcome is unlikely but I suspect nobody predicted such a result from King Edward either.

Yesterday Charles completed his first full day as King including a speech to the nation.

Not a bad speech and hit all the right notes. The speech looks even better when you consider that he’s in mourning for his mother.

Of course getting the first thing right is as much of a guarantee as a successful reign as the Bills opening day victory over the defending champion LA Rams means they’re a lock for the Superbowl, but it certainly doesn’t hurt.

Charles is not only Head of State as of yesterday, but is now also the head of the Anglican Church. While both positions are largely ceremonial I expect to see him challenged in all of those positions by those with various agendas.

It will be how he handles those challenges that his reign will be judged and given his age it is very likely that I might live to see his entire reign and be in a position to evaluate it.

It suspect it won’t be boring.

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