Search Results for: Cuomo

Rabbi Avigdor Miller on the Murderous Father of Murderer Cuomo

From here:

A very sick man, Cuomo, one of the worst cholei hanefesh, said, “It’s barbaric to kill murderers.” He’s the real barbarian because anybody who says it’s barbaric to kill murderers is a barbarian himself.

And again:

Among Jews we say נָקֹם יִנָּקֵם – Crime surely must be avenged (Shemos 21:20). It means that you have to be angry at criminals. Not like that criminal governor Cuomo who vetoed the death penalty. He’s the criminal; he’s the one who will be to blame for the murders that will take place in the future. Because now they know they have a friend in Albany — all the criminals and all their liberal lawyers know they can rely on him. It’s only when the leaders of society make a display of justified anger against wrongdoing, that’s when society functions properly.

We know טבע האב בבן, so (Breitbart)

Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s aides rewrote a report from state health officials to hide 9,250 Chinese coronavirus deaths in nursing homes and long-term care facilities.

The New York Times details the coverup citing new documents and interviews with six people involved in the concealment of deaths.

Cuomo (D) faced early criticism in his state for ordering nursing homes to take patients who had tested positive for the coronavirus, as the elderly are among those most vulnerable to the virus.

After reports surfaced in February that Cuomo was intentionally hiding the numbers, the governor’s office explained he was withholding the truth to prevent then-President Donald Trump’s administration from using the data to launch a politically motivated attack.

Cuomo blamed the “toxic political environment” and “disinformation” for the revised numbers.

But the Times states Cuomo began hiding the truth about the numbers long before the Justice Department began their investigation in August.

The June numbers showed the actual death toll in nursing homes was “roughly 50 percent higher” than the numbers ultimately cited by the Cuomo administration, according to the Times.

The actual number of 9,250 nursing home deaths by June were much larger than the reported 6,432 nursing-home deaths — more than a 40 percent increase.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the governor’s advisers stripped the number of nursing home residents who died after they were transferred to a hospital from the report, making the death toll look better for Cuomo.

The doctored report, released in July, allowed Cuomo to continue trumpeting his success in fighting the virus in New York.

“Whatever happens, this is going to be a period to learn from,” Cuomo said in a radio interview on July 10, just after the doctored information was released. “I am now thinking about writing a book about what we went through, lessons learned, the entire experience, because if we don’t learn from this, then it will really compound the whole crisis that we’ve gone through.”

More than 15,000 New Yorkers in nursing homes and long-term care facilities have died from the Chinese coronavirus since March 2020.

Of course, oldsters are only a few years away from euthanasia, anyway, but females are an officially protected class, so Andrew Cuomo the son is in disgrace only for that.

For far more on Cuomo, see here.

(P.S., Not to address the death penalty, itself…)

Who Will Punish the Lockdown-Pushing Scientists?!

The Lockdown Paradigm Is Collapsing

It’s taken much longer than it should have but at last it seems to be happening: the lockdown paradigm is collapsing. The signs are all around us.

The one-time hero of the lockdown, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, has seen his support tank from 71% to 38%, along with ever more demands that he resign. Meanwhile, polls have started to favor Florida governor and lockdown opponent Ron DeSantis for influence over the GOP in the future. This remarkable flip in fortunes is due to the dawning realization that the lockdowns were a disastrous policy. DeSantis and fellow anti-lockdown governor Kristi Noem are the first to state the truth bluntly. Their honesty has won them both credibility.

Meanwhile, in Congressional hearings, Representative James Jordan (R-OH) demanded that Dr. Fauci account for why closed Michigan has worse disease prevalence than neighboring Wisconsin which has long been entirely open. Fauci pretended he couldn’t hear the question, couldn’t see the chart, and then didn’t understand. Finally he just sat there silent after having uttered a few banalities about enforcement differentials.

The lockdowners are now dealing with the huge problem of Texas. It has been fully open with no restrictions for 6 weeks. Cases and deaths fell dramatically in the same period. Fauci has no answer. Or compare closed California with open Florida: similar death rates. We have a full range of experiences in the US that allow comparisons between open and closed and disease outcomes. There is no relationship.

Or you could look to Taiwan, which had no stringencies governing its 23.5 million people. Deaths from Covid-19 thus far: 11. Sweden, which stayed open, performed better than most of Europe.

The problem is that the presence or absence of lockdowns in the face of the virus seem completely uncorrelated with any disease trajectory. AIER has assembled 33 case studies from all over the world showing this to be true.

Why should any of this matter? Because the “scientists” who recommended lockdowns had posited very precisely and pointedly that they had found the way to control the virus and minimized negative outcomes. We know for sure that the lockdowns imposed astonishing collateral damage. What we do not see is any relationship between lockdowns and disease outcomes.

This is devastating because the scientists who pushed lockdowns had made specific and falsifiable predictions. This was probably their biggest mistake. In doing so, they set up a test of their theory. Their theory failed. This is the sort of moment that causes a collapse of a scientific paradigm, as explained by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962).

A good example of a similar situation might be the Soviet economy under Nikita Khrushchev. He came to power with a promise that he would make the Russia economy under communism perform better than the United States. That was the essence of his famous promise “We will bury you.” He meant that Russia would outproduce America.

It did not happen. He failed and the theory he pushed failed alongside. And thus began the slow coming apart of communist theory and practice. Khrushchev had already repudiated the Stalinist terror state but never had any intention of presiding over the slow demise of the entire Soviet experiment in central planning. By setting up a test that could falsify his promise, he doomed an entire system to intellectual repudiation and eventual collapse.

The theory and practice of lockdownism could be going the same way.

In Kuhn’s reconstruction of the history of science, he argued that progress in science occurs not in a linear fashion but rather episodically as new orthodoxies emerge, get codified, and then collapse under the weight of too many anomalies.

The pattern goes like this. There is normal science driven by puzzle solving and experimentation. When a theory seems to capture most known information, a new orthodoxy emerges – a paradigm. Over time, too much new information seems to contradict what the theory would predict or explain. Thus emerges the crisis and collapse of the paradigm. We enter into a pre-paradigmatic era as the cycle starts all over again.

As best anyone can tell, the idea of locking down when faced with a new virus emerged in the US and the UK around 2005-2006. It started with a small group of fanatics who dissented from traditional public health. They posited that they could manage a virus by dictating people’s behavior: how closely they stood next to each other, where they travelled, what events they attended, where they sat and for how long. They pushed the idea of closures and restrictions, which they branded “nonpharmaceutical interventions” through “targeted layered containment.” What they proposed was medieval in practice but with a veneer of computer science and epidemiology.

When the idea was first floated, it was greeted with ferocious opposition. Over time, the lockdown paradigm made progress, with funding from the Gates Foundation and more recruits from within academia and public health bureaucracies. There were journals and conferences. Guidelines at the national level started to warm to the idea of school and business closures and a more broad invocation of the quarantine power. It took 10 years but eventually the heresy became a quasi-orthodoxy. They occupied enough positions of power that they were able to try out their theory on a new pathogen that emerged 15 years after the idea of lockdown had been first floated, while traditional epidemiology came to be marginalized, gradually at first and then all at once.

Kuhn explains how a new orthodoxy gradually replaces the old one:

When, in the development of a natural science, an individual or group first produces a synthesis able to attract most of the next generation’s practitioners, the older schools gradually disappear. In part their disappearance is caused by their members’ conversion to the new paradigm. But there are always some men who cling to one or another of the older views, and they are simply read out of the profession, which thereafter ignores their work. The new paradigm implies a new and more rigid definition of the field. Those unwilling or unable accommodate their work to it must proceed in isolation or attach themselves to some other group.

That’s a good description of how lockdown ideology triumphed. There are plenty of conspiracy theories out there concerning why the lockdowns happened. Many of them contain grains of truth. But we don’t need to take recourse to them to understand why it happened. It happened because the people who believed in them became dominant in the world of ideas, or at least prominent enough to override and banish traditional principles of public health. The lockdowns were driven primarily by lockdown ideology. The adherents to this strange new ideology grew to the point where they were able to push their agenda ahead of time-tested principles.

It is a blessing of this ideology that it came with a built-in promise. They would achieve better disease outcomes than traditional public health practices, so they said. This promise will eventually be their undoing, for one simple reason: they have not worked. Kuhn writes that in the history of science, this is prelude to crisis due to “the persistent failure of the puzzles of normal science to come out as they should. Failure of existing rules is the prelude to a search for new ones.” Further: “The significance of crises is the indication they provide that an occasion for retooling has arrived.”

The silence of Fauci in Congressional hearings is telling. His willingness only to be interviewed by fawning mainstream media TV anchors is as well. Many of the other lockdowners that were public and preening one year ago have fallen silent, sending ever fewer tweets and content that is ever more surreptitious rather than certain. The crisis for the fake science of lockdownism may not be upon us now but it is coming.

Kuhn speaks of the post-crisis period of science as a time for a new paradigm to emerge, first nascently and then becoming canonical over time. What will replace lockdown ideology? We can hope it will be the realization that the old principles of public health served us well, as did the legal and moral principles of human rights and restrictions on the powers of government.

From AIER, here.

Not Everything Is a Tyranny Trial Balloon…

Here is a potential suspect: Ankle bracelets to track incoming passengers who are obligated to quarantine (!).

“Times of Israel” (if to be believed) quotes a Channel 12 report on this, noting this “has been considered in places like China, Australia and several states in the US“. (Hat tip: Chananya Weissman)

Cynics suspect these items are mere tests of the public’s reaction. If the idea encounters opposition, they can always deny it was serious. (Netanyahu is forever doing this, by the way.)

What is a trial balloon?

Wikipedia introduces the concept:

A trial balloon, or kite-flying (used in the UK and elsewhere), is information sent out to the media in order to observe the reaction of an audience. It can be used by companies sending out press releases to judge reaction by customers, or it can be used by politicians who deliberately leak information on a policy change under consideration.

In politics, trial balloons often take the form of an intentional news “leak” to assess public opinion. An example was when the New York Times reported in mid-June 2012 that Governor Andrew Cuomo and his staff were deliberating on a plan to restrict hydrofracking to five counties in the Southern Tier of New York where the Marcellus shale is deepest and drilling is least likely to pollute well water supplies in those aquifers. Because the proposed change in New York energy law was highly controversial, the Albany Times Union the next day filed a front-page, above the fold story questioning the plan’s leak as a “trial balloon” in the headline, which had quickly garnered both criticism and support.

But there is another option. Perhaps the “leak” is not meant in earnest, but as a way to signal to the masses how severe matters stand in the estimation of the “experts”. In other words, the regime hints “See how bad things are, that we are forced to consider such drastic measures!”

Or it could just be Security Theater.

From Goyim Claiming ‘Jews Spreading Disease!’ to, well… ‘Jews Spreading Disease!’

Anti-Semitic Democrats Blame Orthodox Jews For The Coronavirus

October 13, 20202:45 pm

“I have to say to the Orthodox community tomorrow, ‘If you’re not willing to live with these rules, then I’m going to close the synagogues,’” Gov. Andrew Cuomo told religious Jews.

His basis for the decree was a photo of mourners who weren’t practicing social distancing at a funeral. But the photo of a crowd of Orthodox Jews on Cuomo’s slide was from 2006.

It was a very different message than Cuomo’s condemnation of bigotry when he had insisted, “There is zero evidence that people of Asian descent bear any additional responsibility for the transmission of the coronavirus.” The new message is, don’t blame the Asians, blame the Jews.

They did go to a funeral in 2006.

Cuomo was picking up where Mayor Bill de Blasio had left off in his infamous tweet targeting Orthodox Jews. “My message to the Jewish community, and all communities, is this simple: the time for warnings has passed,” the New York City leftist boss had raged.

Medieval bigots blamed the Black Plague on Jews poisoning wells. Modern Democrats blame the coronavirus on the Jews. Despite the plague of media narratives accompanied by photos of Chassidic Jews praying or mourning, there’s as little evidence for the latter as for the former.

Cuomo’s threat to synagogues was prompted by a supposed resurgence of the virus. De Blasio had already announced that the spike in the targeted areas would lead to school and business closures. Except that a number of those areas have African-American, Latino or Asian majorities. But instead Democrats and the media have focused in on the “Jewish” areas.

And even those “Orthodox Jews” areas are far from a homogenous monocultural community.

Chassidic Jews, a subset of Orthodox Jews, may stand out, but so do the Amish. So-called “Chassidic neighborhoods” in Brooklyn are actually made up of the usual New York mix of African-Americans, Latinos and assorted immigrant groups, including Muslim immigrants.

Coronavirus deaths among Asians in New York have been twice as high among whites and approaching five times as high among Latinos and African-Americans. New York City’s worst death rates were not in Borough Park or Williamsburg, but in a Bronx neighborhood, in East New York, in Flushing, Queens, in Far Rockaway and in Brighton Beach.

None of those are Chassidic neighborhoods. Only one has a significant Orthodox population.

Nor are the highest positive rates in Orthodox or Chassidic areas. You have to get through five Queens neighborhoods before making it to Borough Park. And Borough Park, and most Brooklyn neighborhoods, except East New York, are far below Queens and Bronx neighborhoods when it comes to cases per population. Borough Park is only the 49th highest ZIP code in actual mortality rates, Williamsburg is in 79th place.

And yet the insistence that the outbreak is an Orthodox Jewish problem is ubiquitous. It pops up in the media and in rhetoric by top Democrats that stigmatize religious Jews for the virus.

The Democrats who rose to denounce scapegoating of Asians have joined in the racism.

The media pumps out stories blaming the outbreak on Orthodox Jews with a cheerful disregard for facts or basic urban geography. The Associated Press rolled out an entire story blaming the outbreak of coronavirus infections on Orthodox Jews, but the only actual neighborhood that it offers statistics for is the “Gravesend section of Brooklyn,” a mostly immigrant area that is not home to a Chassidic community and whose Orthodox Jews are Syrian refugees, but is mostly associated with Italian-Americans, with large populations of Chinese and Russian immigrants.

The media won’t stop claiming that Orthodox Jews spread the virus because they make a convenient boogeyman for its hipster readers who despise traditional Judeo-Christian religions.

The New York Times, which has run the most articles blaming Orthodox Jews for the outbreak, has linked them to cultural lefty hobgoblins like opponents of vaccines and Trump supporters.

“N.Y.C. Threatens Orthodox Jewish Areas on Virus, but Trump’s Impact Is Seen,” one New York Times headline read.

The power of othering is that all your hatreds and fears can be projected onto those who are different. And despite all the politically correct lectures on race and hate, the Times needs its own others to hate. The most obvious “tell” is that when the Times writes about any other group, it quotes members of the community, but when it writes about Chassidic Jews, it turns to opponents and critics of the community who are happy to nod along to the negative coverage.

That’s why a rise in positive test results in a Chinese area isn’t a story, a rise in a black area is a story about racism and inequity, but a rise in an Orthodox Jewish area is a story about ignorant religious fanatics who support Trump, insist on praying and don’t trust the medical experts.

The Orthodox Jewish community has suffered from the virus, as have many other groups. It’s no more at fault for it than they are. It isn’t unique because more Orthodox Jews have come down with the virus, but because they make a convenient scapegoat for the failures of Democrat officials like Cuomo and de Blasio, for the blatant flouting of their rules by rioters and hipsters.

Chassidic Jews, in particular, are stereotypically “other” with strange garb, incomprehensible beliefs, accents, large families and long beards, but they’re white enough that hating them is socially acceptable for progressives who can act out their xenophobia without feeling guilty.

Even before the pandemic, the media was eager to provide a platform for every special interest out to bash Orthodox Jews, from the YAFFED campaign by leftists against religious Jewish schools to opponents of circumcision to animal rights cranks campaigning against Kosher meat.

The new coronavirus anti-Semitism relies on the same stereotypes and slurs: Orthodox Jews are ignorant, superstitious, flout authority and need to be saved from their backward ways. These are the progressive prejudices that permeate the media’s coverage of Orthodox Jews. And it’s part of the reason why Orthodox Jews are a Republican constituency in presidential elections.

Bigotry isn’t just about the pleasures of hate. It’s how those in power redirect blame for their crimes and failures, and a means for those who hate to gain a false sense of power and control.

Blaming the upsurge on an outside group creates a false sense of security for everyone else.

And when it’s no longer possible to pretend that the upsurge is limited to Orthodox Jews, then they can still be blamed for having caused it with their weddings, funerals and their prayers.

Best of all, none of the newfound bigots will blame Cuomo or de Blasio.

The two top Democrats who mishandled the pandemic in the worst ways possible, while spewing lies, excuses and smears at their serial press conferences, won’t be held accountable.

And that’s why every time things get worse, Cuomo and de Blasio will blame the Jews.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism.

{JNS}

From Matzav.com, here.

Hey Jews, New York Is FINISHED. OVER! What Now?

When Half Of NYC’s Tax Base Leaves And Never Comes Back

Without anyone left to pay for the city, the Big Apple is headed for a failed state.

AUGUST 18, 2020 | 4:38 PM

PETER VAN BUREN

The separateness in New York, and by extension much of the nation curled around it from America’s eastern edge, stands out. There are the hyper-wealthy and there are the multi-generational poor. They depend on each other, but with COVID who needs who more has changed.

It’s easy to stress how far apart the rich and the poor live, even though the mansions of the Upper West Side are less than a mile from the crack dealers uptown. The rich don’t ride public transportation, they don’t send their kids to public schools, they shop and dine in very different places with private security to ensure everything stays far enough apart to keep it all together.

But that misses the dependencies which until now have simply been a given in the ecosystem. The traditional view has been the rich need the poor to exploit as cheap labor—textbook economic inequality. But with COVID as the spark, the ticking bomb of economic inequality may soon go off in America’s greatest city. Things are changing and New York, and by extension America, needs to ask itself what it wants to be when it grows up.

It’s snapshot simple. The wealthy and the companies they work for pay most of the taxes. The poor consume most of the taxes through social programs. COVID is driving the wealthy and their offices out of the city. No one will be left to pay for the poor, who are stuck here, and the city will collapse in the transition. A classic failed state scenario.

New York City is home to 118 billionaires, more than any other American city. New York City is also home to nearly one million millionaires, more than any other city in the world. Among those millionaires some 8,865 are classified as “high net worth,” with more than $30 million each.

They pay the taxes. The top one percent of NYC taxpayers pay nearly 50 percent of all personal income taxes collected in New York. Personal income tax in the New York area accounts for 59 percent of all revenues. Property taxes add in more than a billion dollars a year in revenue, about half of that generated by office space.

Now for how the other half lives. Below those wealthy people in every sense of the word the city has the largest homeless population of any American metropolis, which includes 114,000 children. The number of New Yorkers living below the poverty line is larger than the population of Philadelphia, and would be the country’s 7th largest city. More than 400,000 New Yorkers reside in public housing. Another 235,000 receive rent assistance.

That all costs a lot of money. The New York City Housing Authority needs $24 billion over the next decade just for vital repairs. That’s on top of a yearly standard operating cost approaching four billion dollars. A lot of the money used to come from Washington before a multibillion-dollar decline in federal Section 9 funds. So today there is a shortfall and repairs, including lead removal, are being put off. NYC also has a $34 billion budget for public schools, many of which function as distribution points for child food aid, medical care, day care, and a range of social services.

The budget for a city as complex as New York is a mess of federal, state, and local funding sources. It can be sliced and diced many ways, but the one that matters is the starkest: the people and companies who pay for New York’s poor are leaving even as the city is already facing a $7.4 billion tax revenue hit from the initial effects of the coronavirus. The money is there; New York’s wealthiest individuals have increased their net worth by $44.9 billion during the pandemic. It’s just not here.

New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo has seen a bit of the iceberg in the distance. He recently took to MSNBC to beg the city’s wealthy, who fled the coronavirus outbreak, to return. Cuomo said he was extremely worried about New York City if too many of the well-heeled taxpayers who fled COVID decide there is no need to move back. “They are in their Hamptons homes, or Hudson Valley or Connecticut. I talk to them literally every day. I say. ‘When are you coming back? I’ll buy you a drink. I’ll cook. But they’re not coming back right now. And you know what else they’re thinking, if I stay there, they pay a lower income tax because they don’t pay the New York City surcharge. So, that would be a bad place if we had to go there.”

Included in the surcharge are not only NYC’s notoriously high taxes. The recent repeal of the federal allowance for state and local tax deductions (SALT) costs New York’s high earners some $15 billion in additional federal taxes annually.

“They don’t want to come back to the city,” Partnership for NYC President Kathryn Wylde warned. “It’s hard to move a company… but it’s much easier for individuals to move,” she said, noting that most offices plan to allow remote work indefinitely. “It’s a big concern that we’re going to lose more of our tax base then we’ve already lost.”

While overall only five percent of residents left as of May, in the city’s very wealthiest blocks residential population decreased by 40 percent or more. The higher-earning a neighborhood is, the more likely it is to have emptied out. Even the amount of trash collected in wealthy neighborhoods has dropped, a tell-tale sign no one is home. A real estate agent told me she estimates about a third of the apartments even in my mid-range 300 unit building are empty. The ones for sale or rent attract few customers. She says it’s worse than post-9/11 because at least then the mood was “How do we get NYC back on its feet?” instead of now, when we just stand over the body and tsk tsk through our masks.

Enough New Yorkers are running toward the exits that it has shaken up the greater area’s housing market. Another real estate agent describes the frantic bidding in the nearby New Jersey suburbs as a “blood sport.” “We are seeing 20 offers on houses. We are seeing things going 30 percent over the asking price. It’s kind of insane.”

Fewer than one-tenth of Manhattan office workers came back to the workplace a month after New York gave businesses the green light to return to the buildings they ran from in March. Having had several months to notice what not paying Manhattan office rents might do for their bottom line, large companies are leaving. Conde Nast, the publishing company and majority client in the signature new World Trade Center, is moving out. Even the iconic paper The Daily News (which published the famous headline “Ford to City: Drop Dead” when New York collapsed in 1975 without a federal bailout) closed its physical newsroom to go virtual. Despite the folksy image of New York as a paradise of Mom and Pop restaurants and quaint shops, about 50 percent of those who pay most of the taxes work for large firms.

Progressive pin-up Mayor De Blasio has lost touch with his city. After years of failing to address economic inequality by simply throwing free money to the poor and limiting the ability of the police to protect them, and us, from rising crime, his COVID focus has been on shutting down schools and converting139 luxury hotels to filthy homeless shelters. Alongside AOC, he has called for higher taxes on fewer people and demanded more federal funds. As for the wealthy who have paid for his failed social justice experiments to date, he says “We don’t make decisions based on a wealthy few. Some may be fair-weathered friends, but they will be replaced by others.”

What others? The concentration of major corporations once pulled talent to the city from across the globe; if you wanted to work for JP Morgan on Wall Street, you had to live here. That’s why NYC has skyscrapers; a lot of people once needed to live and especially work in the same place. Not any more. Technology and work-at-home changes have eliminated geography.

For the super wealthy, New York once topped the global list of desirable places to live based on four factors: wealth, investment, lifestyle and future. The first meant a desire to live among other wealthy people (we know where that’s headed), investment returns on real estate (not looking great, if you can even find a buyer), lifestyle (now destroyed with bars, restaurants, shopping, museums, and theaters closed indefinitely, coupled with rising crime) and…

The future. New York pre-COVID had the highest projected GDP growth of any city. Now we’re left with the question if COVID continues to hollow out the city, who will be left to pay for New York? As one commentator said, NYC risks leading America into becoming “Brazil with Nukes,” a future of constant political and social chaos, with a ruling class content to wall itself off from the greater society’s problems.

Peter Van Buren, a 24-year State Department veteran, is the author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, Hooper’s War: A Novel of WWII Japan, and Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the 99 Percent.

From The American Conservative, here.