The greatest Pulitzer since Duranty: the 1619 Project

The New Neo Posted on by

Hey, if Arafat could get a Nobel Peace Prize, and Obama could get one for merely existing, and Walter Duranty can get a Pulitzer for dastardly lies, why not give it to the NY Times for its bogus anti-American “history” lesson known as the 1619 Project (I’ve written about the project many times before)?

Why ever not?

Here you are:

The 2020 Pulitzer Prize for commentary was awarded Monday to Nikole Hannah-Jones for an essay in the New York Times that falsely claimed the American Revolution was fought primarily to protect slavery…

Historians were outraged by Hannah-Jones’s false claim.

Andrew Sullivan tweets:

I don’t know the answer. I do know that the Times has never given back Duranty’s Pulitzer; they say they don’t have it, and the Pulitzer board “has twice declined to withdraw the award.”

No surprise there.

Nobel peace prizes and Pulitzer prizes increasingly have become awards not for objective accomplishments in their respective fields, but for politically correct (that is, leftist) achievements. The achievement of the 1619 Project is as leftist propaganda, which is now the most basic function of the news. The project has already become accepted as a study guide – one of its goals from the start – in
many public schools, and as such will serve to shape the views of a new generation:

From the moment Fatima Morrell read The New York Times’ 1619 Project last year, the educator embraced the 100-page magazine special issue on slavery and racism as a professional godsend. Morrell, an associate superintendent in the Buffalo, N.Y., school district, where 80% of the 31,200 students are non-white, was inspired by the project’s reframing of American history that put the struggles and contributions of black Americans “at the very center” of the nation’s self-understanding.

“I just think it really becomes a curriculum of emancipation, a pedagogy of liberation, for freeing the minds of young people,” said Morrell, who was involved in the decision to adopt the 1619 Project as part of the district’s curriculum. “Particularly for our black children, it lets them know there actually isn’t something wrong with you. We don’t need to be self-destructive, to hate ourselves. There actually was an institution of enslavement that really put us 400 years behind in terms of where we are with prosperity.”

Nikole Hannah-Jones: The lead writer on the 1619 Project says the United States’ founding ideals of equality and liberty, expressed in the Declaration of Independence, were a “lie” to the founders who birthed them, but ultimately realized by African Americans who embraced and fought for them, largely alone.

Since its publication in August, the 1619 Project has been adopted in more than 3,500 classrooms in all 50 states, according to the 2019 annual report of the Pulitzer Center, which has partnered with the Times on the project.

That’s the agenda, and its educational purpose was always apparent.

Note also that last sentence I quoted: “the Pulitzer Center, which has partnered with the Times on the project.” The Pulitzer Center’s website has a comprehensive study guide to the project that it actively promotes. What is the Pulitzer Center? Here’s the Wiki description, and despite the name, it’s not affiliated with the Pulitzer prizes:

The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting is an American news media organization established in 2006 that sponsors independent reporting on global issues that other media outlets are less willing or able to undertake on their own. The Center’s goal is to raise the standard of coverage of international systemic crises, and to do so in a way that engages both the broad public and government policy-makers. The organization is based in Washington, D.C.

The Center funds international travel costs associated with reporting projects on topics and regions of global importance.

It’s not immediately apparent – in fact, it’s not apparent at all – how the 1619 Project would fit into that description. Nevertheless, the Center is promoting this curriculum, which says a lot about its methods and its goals. The MSM and entities connected with the press are not content to write propaganda for adult readers only. They want to get the ears of children, and to do that, education is key.

COVID: What the Chinese knew, and when they knew it

The New Neo Posted on by

There has been an explosion of stories about the Chinese coverup of COVID-19. Rather than offer my own, I’m just going to link to a few.

I will add, however, that this is mostly old news to those who have been following reporting on the right since the beginning. For example, I remember reading almost from the start that there was a lab near the wet market in Wuhan, and that many people suspected the lab was the actual origin of the virus. I also remember that one of the first news items we got about the awful events occurring in Wuhan was that health workers – for example, some doctors – were frantically trying to get the word out to the world about the dangers the disease represented, and they were silenced and/or “disappeared.”

Here are the links:

What Pompeo said

The dossier.

China in violation of international health regulations.

China hoarded medical supplies.

China’s lie about the virus’ origins.

One of the things that caused me to undergo my political change was my discovery, nearly twenty years ago – and to my great surprise at the time – that news sources on the right were more reliable than news sources on the left. Not completely reliable, for sure. But so much more likely to be correct that the comparison was really almost laughable, except that it was deadly serious.

During the Trump administration, this tendency has gotten even more pronounced. But if people continue to get their news from sources on the left, they will not notice it.

As suspected, COVID had already spread outside China at least as early as December

The New Neo Posted on by

The French have made a discovery:

A French hospital which has retested old samples from pneumonia patients discovered that it treated a man who had COVID-19 as early as Dec. 27, nearly a month before the French government confirmed its first cases.

Yves Cohen, head of resuscitation at the Avicenne and Jean Verdier hospitals in the northern suburbs of Paris, told BFM TV that scientists had retested samples from 24 patients treated in December and January who tested negative for the flu.

The patient was apparently originally assumed to have had pneumonia. But he actually had COVID, way back in December, and he hadn’t recently been to China, either. Nor had anyone in his family, although his wife (who never showed symptoms and who I don’t think has yet been tested for antibodies) “worked alongside a Sushi stand, close to colleagues of Chinese origin, Cohen said. It was not clear whether those colleagues had travelled to China, and the local health authority should investigate, he said.”

The old samples from the other 23 people tested were not found to have COVID.

It is suspected that COVID may have also been present in the US in late December.

When a novel virus first appears, what causes it to come to attention? A change in patterns or a change in symptoms and patterns. COVID-19 didn’t initially represent much of a change, certainly not in this country, and perhaps not even in China, at the very outset (which is speculated to have been in November of 2019). The reason for that is that, until the numbers of cases started to accumulate, indicating a change in pattern, the symptoms of COVID are not very different from the symptoms of people who die of pneumonia and/or flu complications that are often diagnosed as pneumonia or ARDS. They are also not that different from the way people who died of H1N1 expired, and H1N1 is a variant of flu. Also, the population COVID affects most severely in terms of age and/or pre-existing conditions is very very similar to the group killed by seasonal flu and/or pneumonia and/or ARDS. Although flu and pneumonia kill more people under 5 than COVID appears to, that would not necessarily be noticed at the outset of the epidemic either, because that younger group would still be succumbing to the regular flu.

Because of Chinese obfuscation, however, it’s hard to reconstruct a good timeline and understand at what point the Chinese realized what was actually happening. Here’s a timeline that I doubt is completely correct, but it does mention that on December 31, the Chinese told WHO about “a cluster of 41 patients with a mysterious pneumonia.”

I’m going to assume that represents something like what happened. It stands to reason that it took a change of pattern, a sudden explosion of deaths in Wuhan to get the attention of Chinese health authorities and then later of the world. About a week after that, on January 7 (according to the timeline), COVID-19’s novel virus was identified, probably from samples from this cluster of 41.

Because the Chinese were actively covering up, however, instead of being open and honest, even after that there was a delay in knowledge about the virus and a delay in blocking international travel to and from China. So two things were operating. The first is that the virus probably began to spread before even the Chinese authorities were truly aware of the scope of what they were dealing with internally. The second is that once they became aware, and understood the dangers COVID presented to the world, they did all they could to keep that knowledge secret.

Meanwhile, COVID-19 got a silent toehold in many countries around the globe.

Reducing our dependence on China

The New Neo Posted on by

It can’t happen fast enough for me:

The Trump administration is “turbocharging” an initiative to remove the US from dependency on a China-based supply chain and weighing imposing new tariffs to punish the Communist Party in Beijing for its response to the coronavirus pandemic, according to a report on Monday…

A number of agencies, including the Commerce and State departments, are looking at how to move the supply chain and manufacturing from China using tax incentives and other measures, the report said.

They are examining which manufacturing work should be considered “essential” and how to make those goods outside of China.

“There is a whole-of-government push on this,” an official told Reuters. “The White House’s policy on China has always been caught between pro-trade advisers and China hawks, but the current situation has given the hard-liners new ammunition.”

Good.

It seems obvious that Trump is the right president to do this. And it should have bipartisan support.

I know; dream on about that last bit.

John Brennan again

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: Ace.]

I’m a bit tired of starting posts with statements like, “It will come as no surprise…”

But indeed, it will come as no surprise that the report written by intelligence authorities at the request of the Obama administration was cooked to favor the Trump/Russia collusion narrative, and cooked by none other than our good friend John Brennan:

The January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA), prepared at the behest of President Barack Obama, claimed that Russia interfered in the presidential election in order to help candidate Donald Trump…

A separate, classified report holed up at the office of the CIA Inspector General (IG) sheds damning light on the role then-CIA Director John Brennan played in the preparation of the report, former National Security Council Chief of Staff Fred Fleitz learned from House Intelligence Committee staff. A source familiar with the report’s fate would not deny that the report went to the office of the CIA IG.

The report states that Brennan overruled agency analysts who wanted to include strong intelligence in the assessment to show that Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted Hillary Clinton to win the election, Fleitz says, citing conversations with House Intelligence Committee staffers. Brennan had also rejected analysts who wanted to strike weak intelligence from the report which suggested that Russia favored Trump, Fleitz said.

“So Brennan actually slanted this analysis, choosing anti-Trump intelligence and excluding anti-Clinton intelligence,” Fleitz told The Epoch Times.

It has been reported almost from the start – on the right – that the evidence was that the Russians wanted most of all to sow discord, and if anything they preferred Clinton to Trump. It has always seemed odd to me that so many people bought the “Trump is Putin’s puppet” ridiculousness, but they certainly did. People like Brennan knew exactly what they were doing when they suppressed evidence to the contrary and pushed to the forefront the evidence they wanted the public to believe.

[NOTE: Some of my previous posts on Brennan can be found here and here.]

Dr. Birx: “We underestimated very early on the number of asymptomatic cases”

The New Neo Posted on by

Dr. Birx made this claim in an interview on Saturday:

I think we underestimated very early on the number of asymptomatic cases. And I think we’re really beginning to understand there are people that get infected that those symptoms are so low-grade that they don’t even know that they’re infected.

And we’re beginning to see that with the New York studies of their sero-antibody studies. So we’re really beginning (AUDIO GAP) and in every other country before they had the antibody test, all they could really see are the cases that showed up with serious symptoms. And so things are changing on a day-to-day basis.

Excuse me, but no. We did not just learn this.

I wrote a post on February 29, over two months ago, in which I wrote the following [emphasis added]:

There are two main issues with COVID-19, and we don’t know all that much about either yet: contagiousness and lethality. But the situation of the Diamond Princess cruise passengers offers an opportunity to learn about both under a sort of worst case scenario, which is confinement of healthy with ill passengers in a closed system, and an especially susceptible population because of a high percentage of people of advanced age. So let’s take a look…

The first thing you’ll notice is that the headline blares that the ship started with 10 passengers testing positive for the virus and ended with 700 testing positive within the two weeks of the quarantine. That’s quite a leap. The total number of people on the ship was 3,711. So the final number testing positive represented about 19% of the whole, or a little less than a fifth…

This part is especially interesting:

“More than half of the infected people (322) showed no symptoms at all, which suggests that some coronavirus carriers in China could be going undetected.”

That’s a fact that indicates less mortality – and even less serious morbidity – than has commonly been reported.

The Diamond Princess data was available early in the process of the virus’ spread to the US and the world. The ship represented a very special opportunity to study a population in which the entire group was tested. It was a population with a large number of older people, as well, and people with pre-existing conditions. I have never seen a discussion of how many of those positive-yet-asymptomatic people from the ship remained asymptomatic over the course of the next two weeks, but if it was a relatively large number, that would have been an enormous clue that the people we were seeing who were substantially sickened from COVID were the tip of a more substantial iceberg.

Did Birx and company ignore that? I can understand if they felt they needed more data and more proof. But to not have strongly suspected quite early on that there was a huge percentage of asymptomatic COVID cases would be to have ignored the obvious that was staring them in the face.

And the NY Times editors prove that they do have a keen sense of humor, after all

The New Neo Posted on by

For all those naysayers, the NY Times editors display every bit as keen a sense of humor as the Babylon Bee:

As is so often the case in such situations, it is all but impossible to be certain of the truth [concerning Tara Reade’s allegations]. But the stakes are too high to let the matter fester — or leave it to be investigated by and adjudicated in the media. Mr. Biden is seeking the nation’s highest office.

In 2018, this board advocated strongly for a vigorous inquiry into accusations of sexual misconduct raised against Brett Kavanaugh when he was nominated to a seat on the Supreme Court. Mr. Biden’s pursuit of the presidency requires no less. His campaign, and his party, have a duty to assure the public that the accusations are being taken seriously. The Democratic National Committee should move to investigate the matter swiftly and thoroughly, with the full cooperation of the Biden campaign.

Har-dee ha ha ha, that’s a real kneeslapper.

Ted Cruz gets into the act at Twitter:

And the DNC, not to be outdone, declares the Times’ suggestion “absurd” – but not for the obvious reason that the DNC cannot possibly be unbiased, or because the Times didn’t call for the RNC to investigate Kavanaugh. No, it’s for exactly the reason one might think:

I cannot imagine that either the Times editors or the DNC heads think that anyone not already fully onboard the Biden choo-choo will be convinced by these arguments. Perhaps they just think that other events will end up burying Reade’s allegations against Biden for enough voters. And perhaps they’re correct.

Don’t try this at home

The New Neo Posted on by

But they did:

Whoever planned and edited that did a fabulous job.

I have to say, though, that this is not a form of dance that has ever especially appealed to me. I deeply admire the skill of those who can do it, of course. They’re phenomenal. But the dance genre doesn’t speak to me at all. The combination of the near-rigidity of the upper body and the frenetic legwork doesn’t reach me emotionally or seem beautiful or interesting to me in terms of line. I appreciate the extraordinary achievement and the effort, but not the aesthetic.

I know I’m not necessarily typical in that respect.

COVID shutdown protests: Will it be a bang or a whimper?

The New Neo Posted on by

From T. S. Eliot’s poem The Hollow Men:

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river…

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

At first the shutdown seemed somewhat reasonable although extreme, given the predictions from epidemiologists and the news we had seen coming from China and then Italy. “Flatten the curve” and keep the health care system from being overwhelmed seemed important goals.

They were met. And yet still we see some governors continue their little dictatorships, making seemingly arbitrary pronouncements that continue to infringe on people’s rights as the situation seems to become less and less full of peril in terms of public health.

Yes, the danger exists, and more people are going to die. That’s always true, and it may indeed be more true than usual right now. But people need to live while they’re living, and unless there is an utterly compelling reason for a restriction it needs to go.

Citizens have been fairly cooperative so far. That’s either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on how you look at it. It’s “good” if you think it’s necessary to comply with orders that restrict people’s rights for a while, because the danger remains overwhelmingly great. It’s “bad” if you think this is sheepish slavish nonsense, a testing of the waters for greater tyranny, and quite unnecessary as well.

But the natives are getting restless – even in California, albeit in the redder parts of that blue blue state. There has been protesting and defiance in Sacramento and Huntington Beach:

…[T]he California governor has been less than candid in sharing a timeline of reopening with Californians. And, in an obvious instance of political pique, he shut down Orange County beaches because visitors supposedly failed to follow social distancing guidelines.

Huntington Beach is one of those Orange County locations. On Friday thousands flocked to those shores to protest the needless closures.

“Large crowds opposing the state’s coronavirus stay-at-home mandate took to the streets of downtown Huntington Beach on Friday, a day after the governor closed Orange County beaches and drew frustration and criticism from some residents and city leaders.

“Protesters gathered near the Huntington Beach pier shortly before noon, with the crowd eventually swelling to some 2,500-3,000 people, according to Huntington Beach police Chief Robert Handy. The tightly packed crowd, with most people not wearing protective masks, repeatedly chanted “U.S.A.” as they waited for the demonstration to begin.”

California isn’t the only place this is happening. People want their lives back, and they are willing to assume the risk. Others, who consider themselves to be among the more at risk, can continue to stay home and isolate if they like. But normal-ish life needs to resume for those less at risk.

But how many people feel this way compared to those who want the restrictions to go on and on and on, till COVID is completely vanquished? No doubt it varies from state to state. One thing that’s clear is that a lot of people in South Dakota are happy their state was never really closed down at all:

Republican South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem had an impromptu parade thrown in her honor on Tuesday in the capitol city of Pierre. A local construction company organized the parade to show appreciation for her handling of the coronavirus epidemic.

Noem, the state’s first female governor, was one of a handful of governors not to issue an order shuttering non-essential businesses during the ongoing epidemic.

The parade, organized by John Morris of Morris Inc. construction company, featured “literally hundreds of cars,” fire trucks and other vehicles honking their horns and sirens while Noem watched, apparently surprised, from a local park.

Of course, it helps that South Dakota has barely had any COVID at all: a total of 21 deaths. That’s in a state that with a population that’s somewhere in the 800 thousands, and a low population density as well. But still, it took courage for Governor Noem to hold back in the face of tremendous criticism. Her gamble paid off.

The COVID crisis has many elements, but one of them is that it’s a test of how important liberty is to the American people. How most Americans will answer that test is still being sorted out.

[ADDENDUM: At first I thought this article was satire. Apparently it’s not. At least, I don’t think it is.]

Tara Reade WalksAway

The New Neo Posted on by

As predicted. On April 28, I wrote:

Tara Reade might be getting close to her own WalkAway moment. It almost seems that until this point she believed that her allegations might be treated fairly. But disillusionment has set in.

And that disillusionment seems to have gotten worse:

“I just— I’m stunned,” Reade said. “They [Democratic politicians] didn’t just say, ‘Oh, we’re standing with Joe Biden until we hear more.’ They just discounted me. They marginalized me. They said they didn’t believe me. I can’t tell you,” Reade said, trailing off. “I cried for a while because they’re important in my life. They’ve been figures that I looked up to.”…

“I used to think that a Republican talking point was to call the mainstream media biased,” Reade said. ‘So I used to think, ‘Oh, that’s just a talking point for them. I don’t believe it.’ But now I’m living it, real time, and I see it — like, I see it for what it is. Because I am a Democrat, or I was. But now I’m not anything, really. I’m politically homeless.”

That’s the first step, Tara. You’re not ready to cast off the ideology of a lifetime yet. Maybe you never will be; maybe you’ll remain in this odd place, betwixt-and-between, wondering what happened, for the rest of your life. Maybe someday you’ll even re-enter the Democratic fold, when the sting has passed. Maybe the Democrats will even figure out a way to jettison Biden’s candidacy and will suddenly find you very credible, after all. If so, will you forgive and forget?

Or has this been the sort of indelible experience from which there’s no turning back for you? Will you go on to explore what the Democratic and Republican parties really stand for? Will neither of them appeal? Or even if neither appeal, will one appeal more than the other? Will you become a libertarian? Will you turn your back on politics forever and immerse yourself in gardening?

At the moment, here’s where Reade stands:

Reade said she doesn’t intend to vote in the national election in November but will vote in local elections.

And yet I bet that, in those locals, she will vote for only Democrats.

And she will not cooperate with Fox News, which for a while was the only major news outlook inviting her to speak. Here’s the reason she gives:

So far, Reade has declined the Fox News invitations, which she said had been from shows such as Hannity and Tucker Carlson. “I’m not on Fox. I’m not cooperating with Republicans, because I’m not interested in my story being politically hijacked,” Reade said earlier this month. “I want a safe platform to tell my full history with Joe Biden.”

Later on, she says she wants a neutral platform. I say if she thinks she’ll ever get one, she’s incredibly naive for someone who’s been active in politics for a long time. She also says this in explanation of why Democrats aren’t taking her seriously:

“I do think it’s because Joe Biden is, you know — it might be because he’s a Democrat. I think it’s certainly because he’s running against Donald Trump. And most people I know are horrified at the idea of four more years of the Trump presidency. He’s an incredibly dangerous man. He is a sexual predator himself. So I think people have complex feelings about it. But to me, like nothing should be so dangerous that we can’t talk about it.”

I wonder what she would cite as the evidence that Trump is a sexual predator. He’s definitely a person who has cheated on a wife or wives. There was definitely some locker room talk. But evidence for anything like what happened to Reade, or what we would call “predation” rather than mere philandering, is quite shaky.

I think Reade is coming at it this way for several reasons. The first reason is that, despite her disillusionment with the Democrats, and her discovery that Republicans were correct about the press, she is still very anti-right. The second is that she can’t stand Trump as a politician or a person. And the third is that she still Believes All Women. She thinks she should be believed automatically, like Christine Blasey Ford, and like Trump’s accusers. At least – unlike most people in politics and unlike many MeToo-ers, Reade is consistent in the rules she applies to such allegations.

Reade has been reeling from her abandonment by people she thought might be defending her. If she ever thought they would defend her, given the political circumstances, that’s still another example of her naivete.

In sum, from her remarks so far, I give her only about a 15% chance of ever going much further than this in her political change journey.

In NY, it’s all COVID, all the time

The New Neo Posted on by

Some NY area funeral directors are saying that all the deaths are being ascribed to COVID:

“Basically, every death certificate that comes across our desk now has COVID on it,” said a funeral director in Williston Park, N.Y. [in greater NYC], on a recorded phone call with Project Veritas in a newly-released video. James O’Keefe has been asking for people inside the medical system to blow the whistle if they see corruption or inconsistencies in reports about the Chinese WuFlu known as COVID-19. In conversations with several funeral directors across New York City, O’Keefe uncovered a shocking narrative where, without fail, every director he spoke to expressed his or her concern that coronavirus deaths are being inflated and every death in NYC is being recorded as a COVID death with or without testing to confirm.

The CDC directives are only to assume it’s COVID if there’s good reason to assume it. But in practical terms, the decision is up to those who fill out the certificates. If they have reason to over-diagnose COVID – whether it be for reimbursement purposes, political strategies, or other reasons – they will do so. That means, of course, that the COVID death statistics at this point are highly suspect.

Looking at excess death statistics over the usual for the past few months would be more valid. But there are problems with those numbers, too. For example, if people are otherwise neglecting their health (and for the most part it makes sense to believe that they are), then other types of deaths would be up and would be part of the excess death numbers but would not be due to COVID. If EMTs are told not to spend much time or effort reviving victims of cardiac arrest, that’s another type of non-COVID death that would be higher. Stress can cause death, too, in a susceptible individual. And 2019-2020 was already a supposedly worse-than-average flu season before COVID hit. What happened to those flu deaths? Did they suddenly disappear, or are they part of the excess death figure that is being routinely misdiagnosed as COVID?

Joe Biden responds

The New Neo Posted on by

The MSM has been pressed to finally cover the Tara Reade accusations, either because – as happened with the John Edwards scandal way back when – the clamor reached a volume that could no longer be ignored, or because the Democratic Party is getting ready to replace him.

Either way, in the next six months or so we will be seeing a full court press to defeat Donald Trump in November. I don’t think the details of the final approach have been fully formulated yet, but it will be well-coordinated and it will be grimly determined, and truth will have no part in it if truth is seens as getting in the way of the goal.

Biden himself is of little interest to me. I’m not so sure he’s of much interest to anyone at this point except as a tool, a means to reach a certain end. As a tool he’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but perhaps that’s what’s wanted, as well, because he knows the score and will do what’s needed and what he’s told to do by his advisors.

At any rate, his interview this morning received wide coverage online. I’m going to link to some of the discussion rather than get into the details myself:

Ace.

At Legal Insurrection.

About Mika.

Are the records at the National Archives?

The silence of the women’s groups (completely unsurprising, for anyone who was around for Bill Clinton’s Lewinsky scandal).