You see, if you’re working for Reuters or the New York Times it’s okay to have worked the Chinese Communist Party or Communist Party USA but God forbid you are an El Nuevo Herald Freelancer or a talk radio host and moonlight for Radio Martí, a US government broadcaster that is like The Voice of America and which tries to get uncensored news and information into Cuba, If you’re one of those you get a sloppy “exposé” written about you and get fired. Read all about the Martí Moonlighters scandal and how it ruined careers, including that of the Miami Herald’s asshat editor at the time, Tom Fiedler, at Herald Watch.
It’s obvious that the journalistic profession has deteriorated rapidly over the last years. Coverage of Cuba was a canary in a coal mine, though. For decades we’ve had international news organizations with bureaus in Cuba despite closing bureaus in far more important and consequential Latin American countries. And the thing is that these Cuba bureaus report no real news. They report weekly “human interest stories”. These are light reading puff pieces that whitewash the Castro regime. Case in point, the AP’s latest story about how the internet helps Cuban cooks improvise when they (frequently) don’t have ingredients to make desired foods. These Cubans are so ingenious!
Can’t find the ingredients you want? No problem: Yuliet Colón will help you whip up a dessert using the eggs you ran across, swap pork for the ground chicken in that recipe, even peanuts for beans in your Cuban-style rice.
She’s among a number of Cubans who, with more ingenuity than resources, help their compatriots cope with shortages exacerbated by the new coronavirus pandemic with Facebook posts of culinary creations designed around what they’re actually likely to find at the market or with government rations.
Yeah, don’t worry about trying to change the situation that led to the shortages and rationing in the first place, just improvise and be happy!
“I love Master Chef Spain, but where do I get liquid nitrogen in this country?” joked Colón, a 39-year-old mother of two and one of the creators of the Facebook page, ”Recipes from the Heart.”
Oh these Cubans, with their sense of humor, always joking around. Look, they watch TV from Spain and have access to Facebook!
These days, Cuban household staples come and go without warning. When toothpaste appears, deodorant disappears, and when it returns, soap and the toilet paper have vanished. The same is true for rice, beans, milk, cheese, onions, tomato and or garlic. Fruit has not been seen for weeks.
What’s this? Some accidental reporting? But wait, “these days”? Does 61+ plus years qualify as “these days”?
The Facebook page is an internet-era democratization of earlier efforts to help Cubans make due [sic] in hard times, notably following the collapse of the Soviet Union, which devastated the economy of its Caribbean ally in the early 1990s.
Did this “journalist” mean “make do”? Good to know that Facebook is more than just. a censor of free thought in free countries. It’s “democratizing” enslaved ones, or so the Associated Press would have you believe.
They’ve also helped make authorities more accountable in some cases — as when a state factory distributed croquettes that cooks complained seemed to explode when put in oil and authorities responded with explanations in the local press.
Exploding government-made croquetas! The worker’s paradise! Good thing Facebook was there to save the day.
Rob Manfred, MLB Commissioner y tremenda cara de palo
Great column today in the Washington Post by Marc Thiessen. It’s about the hypocrisy of Major League Baseball, demonstrated by the moving of baseball’s All-Star Game from Georgia to Colorado because Georgia’s duly elected legislature passed an election reform law that leftists aren’t happy about because it curtails their ability to stuff the ballot boxes as they’ve done in the past.
Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred announced last Friday that “the best way to demonstrate our values as a sport is by relocating this year’s All-Star Game and MLB Draft” away from Atlanta. Apparently, Georgia’s new election law…
But apparently it wasn’t a violation of baseball’s values to hold an exhibition game in 2016 in Havana between the Tampa Bay Rays and the Cuban national team. In an interview with ESPN during that game, Manfred exulted how Cuba is “a place where we would want to play regularly” and that “at a minimum” he’d like to start playing regular-season games in Havana, and eventually have an MLB team based on the Communist island…
It didn’t seem to bother Manfred that Cuba has long been home to one of the world’s most brutal and repressive dictatorships…
Well, according to the State Department’s human rights report released last month, “Cuba remains a one-party system in which the Communist Party is the only legal political party,” voting is “neither free nor fair nor competitive” and “specialized units of the [Ministry of Interior’s] state security branch are responsible for monitoring, infiltrating, and suppressing independent political activity.” The regime engages in “extrajudicial killings, by the government; forced disappearance by the government; torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of political dissidents, detainees, and prisoners by security forces; … [and] arbitrary arrests and detentions.”
My namesake Henry Louis (Hank) Aaron, died yesterday. Notably, he was vaccinated for COVID-19 just 18 days ago. I became aware of it when I saw this on MeWe.
Of course, this is not to say that Hank Aaron died because of the vaccine, but he was alive and coherent just eighteen days ago, as this video demonstrates, and he’s dead now.
Aaron’s death comes on the heels of a seemingly large number of deaths (30) among the frail and elderly in Norway, after receiving the Pfizer COVID vaccination. Notably, Norway’s vaccination program, “has mostly focused on residents in nursing homes.”
Of course, quickly afterwards, both Pfizer and the mainstream media came out saying that the vaccine is safe. What incentive do they have to say otherwise? The real problem here is that we can’t trust the news media to give us the real scoop on adverse effects of the vaccine because they’ve proven that they have a vested interest in certain narratives, particularly that we need to trust experts. But that’s hardly scientific. True scientific inquiry means questioning everything.
After the news from Norway hit, people began reporting adverse reactions to VAERS, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System’s database. Journalist Sharyl Attkisson has reported that 50+ deaths after COVID vaccinations have been reported to VAERS in the short time since we began to vaccinate for COVID in the US. Now, the media and critics are right to point out that this database is not a source of authoritative data and that it’s all self-reported. These deaths might have occurred anyway. But the same can be said of many deaths attributed to COVID itself. Also, if it turns out that these vaccines are in fact causing adverse reactions, VAERS would, by necessity, be the first place we’d begin to notice. But suddenly VAERS has to be discredited.
Now, I’m not an anti-vaxxer by any stretch. Nor am I against experimental drugs and treatments, for sick people. My life was saved when I participated in a drug study to treat Wilson’s Disease. But these vaccines have, by all accounts, been rushed to development at “warp speed”. Little to no animal testing has been done on these vaccines. And it’s not like we’ve never seen cases of pharmaceutical products being lifted from the market for safety reasons, even after years of testing and usage.
One big problem I see is that although the vaccine was tested on adults of all age ranges, it wasn’t done so at the same proportions in which we are vaccinating. In other words, the elderly made up a relatively small part of the testing but at present make up the vast majority of those being vaccinated.
If we have other high-profile deaths among those who were recently vaccinated, the media will have to at least investigate if there was a link, instead of dismissing it out of hand.
Before you inject yourself with any of these experimental biological agents, consider your risks with regards to the actual COVID illness. If you are under the age of say 70, and reasonably healthy, it may not be wise to take it. Likewise, if you are older than say 80 and have some serious health issues, perhaps you should be cautious about the vaccine. You wouldn’t want to be one of those people about who they’ll say, “he was going to die soon anyway.”
I urge everyone who may read this not to fall into the temptation of blaming 2020 for the bad things that have happened recently. It’s false and self defeating.
Everything we’ve been through was the result of decisions made by human beings. If we don’t hold those human beings accountable, we’ll be headed for more of the same.
Let’s start with the coronavirus. It may have been deliberately released or perhaps inadvertently escaped from a lab in Wuhan (there is some circumstantial evidence of latter). In any case, it happened in 2019, so there goes the 2020 excuse. But bottom line is that the Chinese Communist Party did not level with the world about what was happening. And why would they? It’s a totalitarian regime of the worst kind. We should rightly blame the politicians who insist (even today) on cozying up to ideological enemies, not 2020.
Then there was the reaction to the coronavirus. It had nothing to do with 2020. It was a combination of stupidity, malfeasance and arrogance in our elected and appointed officials. From the lockdowns to the lies about cloth and surgical masks, this was a failure of individuals not the calendar year.
So do us all a favor and save the “that’s 2020 being 2020” crap. We need to take control of our destinies and start putting the blame for bad events where it belongs. Again, if we don’t hold those individuals accountable, then 2021 will look a hell of a lot like 2020.
“I am sure that at this time, there are strong forces inside the United States pushing hard to turn to socialism,” said Luis Zuniga, who was imprisoned for his opposition to communism in Cuba.
He warned that, like what has been experienced in Cuba, those who are pushing the ideology may claim not to be socialists, but it’s only because “they don’t tell you.”
He goes on to say:
“The socialist economic system is a failure,” Zuniga said. “A centralized economy is a failure because it’s contrary to human beings efforts, wills, and purpose to have a better standard of living.”
Well, it seems like the Washington Post likes trying to outdo itself when it comes to publishing hateful and offensive cartoons.
Of course, those of us with long memories know that Cuban-Americans were targeted by a hateful cartoon in 2007 because we have the temerity to think for ourselves when we vote.
And back in 2009, it was Israel that drew the ire of WaPo cartoonists.
