Say NO to Governor Cuomo’s plan to reimagine our school system!

“Emperor Cuomo sits on his throne ever more drunk on his own power”

By Phil Orenstein

Eric Schmidt, Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg – big gov’t and big tech overloards to reimagine life in NYS
Photo Credit: © Reuters/Arnd Wiegmann/Lucy Nicholson/Pool/KJN

There’s great news amidst the pandemic showing that support for President Trump and Republicans is growing throughout America. The President’s job approval rose to 51% according to a new Hill-HarrisX poll. Republicans are sweeping special elections races across the country including two more House seats in California and Wisconsin last week, revealing a great sign on the road ahead for victory in November!

However, here in New York, Emperor Cuomo sits on his throne ever more drunk on his own power. Using the pandemic as an opportunity to issue sweeping executive decrees, Cuomo is partnering with billionaire globalists, first with former Mayor Bloomberg to launch a contact tracing army, which will further erode our liberties, already decimated under two months of lockdown. Cuomo’s latest decree, in partnership with Bill Gates and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, will “reimagine” New York’s public school system, to overhaul the education system as we know it, replacing the teacher and physical classroom setting with digital technology peddled by these tech giants. “We don’t want to go through all of this and replace what was there before,” the emperor proclaimed.

Nicholas Giordano, Professor of Political Science, who spoke at past club meetings said, “Merging big government and big tech will completely destroy our education system.” In his latest enlightening PAS Report Podcast, Professor Giordano, blasted the emperor saying:

“If we allow Emperor Cuomo to fulfill his vision of reimagining education, the education system will be lost forever. Education will no longer be about knowledge, discussion, ideas, the ability to think critically, and building social relationships. Instead, education will be about obedience and compliance with the powers that be, with a little slice of social justice mixed in. Education will become nothing more than another app on our phones. It will become completely meaningless. If Governor Cuomo’s vision comes to fruition, we will be creating an entire generation of mindless bots.”

Jerry Matacotta, historian and 30-year veteran of NYC’s public schools, challenged this reckless high-tech plan as a total breakdown of the traditional student-teacher relationship, where children are lifted out of their everyday environments to enrich their lives with higher aspirations and dreams. They would lose irreplaceable socialization skills and disciplines which can never be learned on a digital platform. Shop classes, orchestra, debates, clubs, sports teams, gymnastics, vocational training, and any extra-curricular activities would be no more.  Education basically has not changed since the days of Socrates, Athens’ street-corner philosopher, where a live teacher uses the famous Socratic method to stimulate critical thinking and to bring out ideas in his students.

Something much more sinister is going on. Bloomberg, Gates, Schmidt and other globalist billionaires who have no background in teaching, nor do they care about educating our kids, bow before the gods of big money and global power. It’s a money grab from the vast property tax income stream that finances today’s public education system. With the state facing a $13 billion deficit, and potential deep cuts to New York’s schools, Cuomo is making a Faustian bargain with these tech giants trading control of New York’s school system to bail us out of the looming financial crisis.

For this devilish tradeoff, he wants to let these tech industry elitists do a complete takeover of New York’s schools and determine our education policy. Whoever controls the knowledge industry has more power, control over people lives, and control of the future, and will be well funded by our tax dollars. It’s feeding the beast until it is big enough to devour us.

Big tech is not capitalism. It’s akin to corporatism or statism, which is China’s system without competition, where corporations and the Communist Party are one and the same. Google and former CEO Eric Schmidt have been working with the Chinese Communist Party to develop a secret censored search engine, code named Google Dragonfly, that would remove such terms as “human rights,” “freedom,” “democracy” and other content blacklisted by the CCP. Google and the US tech giants helped China build the “Great Firewall” to block their citizens’ access to the outside world.

Even more chilling is the social credit system China is instituting to control the behavior of its 1.4 billion people. More than 200 million surveillance cameras are watching its citizens every move, rewarding the trustworthy and penalizing people who are ranked poorly in their “social credit score,” by denying them mortgages, high-speed train and plane tickets, access to good schools, etc. Dissent and criticism of the government are criminalized, and offenders “pay a heavy price.” This Orwellian mass surveillance system to foster obedience and submission is made in America by Google, Facebook and our big tech companies. Do you trust Google, Eric Schmidt and big tech to be in charge of our education system?

We must say NO to Governor Cuomo and his plan to reimagine our school system! We must say NO to the partnership of big government and big tech in education. Google and our tech giants are way too big – stifling competition, censoring conservative opinions, and emulating their Chinese Communist masters. The good news for freedom and democracy is that Google is presently under investigation for anti-trust violations, for undermining free market competition. President Trump recently said: “The Radical Left is in total command & control of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Google. The Administration is working to remedy this illegal situation.”

America is the land of the brave and free and will always be. There are no emperors in America. The government and politicians are elected to serve the people! We the People must rise up and demand freedom, protect our schools, save our city and state, by voting out Cuomo and tyrannical politicians. We will build a great new Republican Party to elect leaders of integrity who will humbly serve the people.  Join us as we come out of lockdown to build a great new future of freedom and American values here in Queens!

The following merchants in our local communities are open for business, some in open defiance of the shutdown. These businesses are struggling to survive amid the draconian lockdown mandates, and are going to find it very difficult to get back on their feet without our help. Their food, service and products are all made in the USA and are the best in the world, and they care about their customers! Let’s do our civic duty for our country and help them survive!

Reboot the U.S. Economy!
Support Local Businesses!

Oasis Cafe, 196-30 Northern Blvd. Bayside NY 11358, for delectable desserts, pastries, cheescakes, ba ba rum, dark chocolate mousse, you name it! The owner Mike Amvros, was our Lincoln Dinner  Businessman of the Year, and staunch Trump supporter who used to serve the Trump family when they lived nearby in Queens! Because of the honors we gave him, he is determined to ride out the shutdown and succeed. He will open his outdoor cafe in defiance in June if NYC is not open then! 

Turnpike Comfort Footware, one of our loyal Lincoln Dinner ad sponsors, will be opening on May 26th. Hours are Tues – Sat. 10am to 4pm and Sunday 12pm to 4pm. Address is 184-20 Union Turnpike, Flushing, NY 11366. 718-454-5870  Their specialty is comfortable footwear that is fashionable, too! Say hello to Steve Rueda, the owner who cares and shares our values!Mythos is a family-owned authentic Greek Restaurant, who are loyal Republicans and supporters of our club. They are open for take-out and deliveries.  Address is 19629 Northern Blvd., Flushing, NY 11358. After dining at Mythos, hop across Northern Blvd. and enjoy a scrumptious dessert and coffee at Oasis!

New Hyde Park Diner is open for take-out! 160 Hillside Avenue, New Hyde Park, NY 11040. Great place for lunch across from Stop & Shop. Thank Ken for his loyalty and annual support for our Lincoln Dinner! 

Robert Mancz Service Station, 22233 Braddock Ave, Queens Village, NY 11428, is open full time. Say hello to Paul and Chris. They are honest and caring auto mechanics. Yes, honest and caring! Tell them QVGOP club sent you!!

Supreme Pizza is back and their gates are up! They are at 236-09 Braddock Ave, Bellerose, NY.  They are open full time for take-out orders with a full Italian menu, either for pick up or delivery. 718-343-7100. Jim Trent and  many of our QVGOP Board members agree that their Penne alla Vodka is the best in town! Say hello to Louie, the owner. He’s a great guy!
 

We are thrilled that Cara Mia, one of our favorite Italian Restaurants is open for take-out business! Their address is: 220-20 Hillside Avenue, Queens Village, NY 11427. Ph: 718.740.9118. For menu and hours, visit their website.  Say hello to April and Carlo, who support us every year with Lincoln Dinner Journal ads! 
 

Rollin Greens is at 247-77 Jericho Turnpike, Queens, NY 11426. (718) 343-3313. Their menu and daily specials are on their Facebook page.  Rollin is a great place for takeout dinners and great comfort foods!  Rolland and Christine are ever grateful for our support! See you there and spread the word that Rollin Greens is open for takeout business! 

Southern Spice is now open for take out business! Sri is a good friend and past Lincoln Dinner honoree. He is master chef who has achived the American Dream! His restaurant was rated one of the topp Asian restaurants on Long Island. If you like Indian cuisine, you’ll fall in love with Southern Spice!!  The address is 1635 Hillside Ave, New Hyde Park, NY 11040 and phone is (516) 216-5448. Click on Website for menu.

And we highly recommend Nancy’s, open for take-out! 255-41 Jericho Tpk, Floral Park,NY. See Nancy’s to-go menu. We thank them for their annual Lincoln Dinner journal ads we will see them in Dec. for our annual Christmas-Chanukah Party!
 
Let’s help our local businesses survive! We will continue to provide notices of businesses open in our community.  Let us know your favorites that are open for business and defying the lockdown!

LET’S PRAY ON MEMORIAL DAY

Dear Brothers, friends and relatives and clergy;

As published in the Queens Chronicle.

This Memorial Day because of the COVID-19 pandemic, there will be no Memorial Day parades which I find sad. I do however  truly understand the reason and that is to keep us safe. I have served in the United States Navy during the Vietnam era and am a member of the American Legion Post # 103, Grand Knight of St. Anastasia Knights of Columbus in Douglaston and a member of the Queens Village Republican Club and believe there is something we can still do. This Memorial Day since there will not be parades or patriotic activities but we still can say a prayer for all those serving our country today and that is our brave men and women in the military. We also should offer prayers for all those serving and protecting us in our communities like our Doctors, Nurses, EMS, firefighters, and those in our police departments. We can also offer a moment of silence for all those who gave the ultimate sacrifice and gave their lives to keep us free. Remember this also: Let’s not forget the true meaning of Memorial Day and fly the American Flag if you can on that day.

Sincerely Yours,
Frederick R. Bedell Jr.
Grand Knight of St. Anastasia Knights of Columbus Council #5911

Remember Them All on Memorial Day

By Emily Toma

Remember those who served before.
Remember those who are no more.
Remember those who serve today.
Remember them all on Memorial Day.

Memorial Day is a Time to Remember

By Stacey Vila

Memorial Day is a time to remember that the American way of life is not cheap. 
It is of the brave. 
It’s been purchased by the lives of so many who have sacrificed for all to live free and happy.
The sacrifices made by men and women who have fought and died for freedom and liberty that we hold dear.
It is more important today than ever because if we don’t practice freedom and liberty it shall indeed be taken from us.
For freedom is not free.
And we remind ourselves on this day of the cost of standing up and living in freedom and liberty.
We remember those who came before and those of today.
We remember the lessons of standing up for freedom.
We respect and honor those who when everyone is running away- they run toward and answer the call for liberty. 

What? Me Tweet? Why not!

By Sgt. Eric Spinner

We have all heard the constant vitriol against President Donald Trump for his presence on Twitter. Opinions run the gamut from positive to negative, but we can easily understand why he uses it- and to great advantage. We need to adopt it as a tool for our purposes, as well, or be overwhelmed by the opposition.

Donald Trump fully understands the social media and how it provides a platform that will allow one to speak  their  mind  without having  censoring  of   their   words   or   any chance  of  fake  news  altering  the  words. Because everything is in black and white, the evidence is always available to prove exactly what was said.

Another great advantage to using Twitter is that it forces one to think in simple, concrete terms. With a limit of just 200 characters in a Tweet, messages are quite brief and quickly read. Twitter users are not willing to spend the time to sit and read lengthy messages and will not dwell on something that looks lengthy or complex.  One does, however, have the ability to add links to online information, messages, or even other web-based locations. All one needs it the link to the material.

There are ways to direct messages to specific people, and a search function to find them. There are hashtag (#) items that can be inserted in messages to relate the tweet to a specific topic. You can follow other Tweeters at will so that their postings will be announced when you login to your account.

Another great feature of Twitter is that your ID, or handle, does not have to be your real name. When you sign up for an account, you give your name and email, but you can choose a handle that is more aligned with your mission and your message.

Those who have used or at least visited Twitter before should recognize what a tweet looks like. One of my recent tweets is pictured below. My logo and my handle appear in the upper-left corner, and my twitter address, @spinmaven, appears below it. Following that is my comment regarding Mayor DiBlasio’s release of Rikers Island inmates during the Covid crisis into the community. We all knew, of course, what the result of this foolhardy act would be, but of course also expected the results of this action. Having already had to deal with Governor Cuomo’s bail reform and DiBlasio’s sanctuary city policies, we knew that this could only result in more problems, and the linked item in the tweet certainly explains that at another location on the web.

Now we come to the specific purpose of this message. We are in the fight of our lives to preserve the Constitution of The United States of America, the supreme law of the land, against the constant assaults by the progressive left. If we are to get our words out there to be heard, we need to employ the social media. We cannot sit back and be silent- my mind wanders back to the Vietnam era with talk of the silent majority. We can be silent no more!

Cap that with the fact that there are so many issues we must deal with if we are to succeed. The left has used social media to their advantage. It’s time for us to wake up and use it to our advantage. Sure, we all love facebook, but all we are doing is sharing with our limited group of friends, and unless we go out on a limb, we don’t get very much pushback. Linked-In is for business use, and is not effective for influencing people. But Twitter is the way to go, and asking a simple, thoughtful question, under the right conditions, can start a thought or idea on a journey across the nation. Join us on Twitter! We must do this!

HISTORICAL TIMELINE OF CHINA

In order to understand the historical background of China and how they have become America’s number one threat, we present this brief historical timeline. It is very important to review and study this timeline in preparation for the Queens Village Republican Club’s May 7th Zoom meeting on the threat of China with Gordon Chang.  Historian, Jerry Matacotta was the main source and advisor for this timeline of Chinese history in the modern era. Relevant quotes were also selected from Bully of Asia by Steven Mosher.

For more than 2000 years, the Chinese considered themselves the geographical and geopolitical center of the world… They believed their emperor to be the only legitimate political authority and regarded themselves as the highest expression of civilized humanity.    -Steven Mosher, Bully of Asia, p. 10

In all the world there is only one threat to the United States that must be classified as a disease of the heart. This is a country that long ago invented totalitarianism – the total subjugation of the individual to the state – and that still practices a modified form of this all-embracing political tyranny today.   -Steven Mosher, Bully of Asia, p. 6 

1839-1860 – Opium Wars. Two armed conflicts in China between the forces of Western countries and the Qing dynasty, which ruled China. Western powers were victorious and British won control of the opium trade in China and acquired Hong Kong. China became the weakest country in the world and resented any foreign influence. The major reason for China’s resentment of foreigners can be traced back to the Opium Wars, which became their rallying cry for nationalism.

The Opium Wars “… shook the empire to its core. The so-called “unequal treaties” that followed reduced China to a semi-colony of the Western powers. Western troops garrisoned China’s “treaty ports” – essentially, European colonies – and Western gunboats roamed its rivers.”   -Steven Mosher, Bully of Asia, p. 16

1900 – Boxer Rebellion – Uprising of Chinese nationals against foreign influence in China. After several months of growing violence and murder against foreign and Christian presence in June 1900, Boxer fighters (Chinese martial artists), convinced they were invulnerable to foreign weapons, converged on Beijing with the slogan “Support the Qing government and exterminate the foreigners.” They were defeated by Japan, Germany, United States and other Western powers which sent troops to crush the rebellion.

“Non-Chinese have difficulty appreciating the depth of China’s grievances against the West and Japan resulting from these experiences. It was not merely that Western gunboats had twice defeated China in the Opium Wars; China had been defeated before, although never perhaps by organized drug runners. Nor was the bitterness caused simply by the dethronement of Confucian high culture by the West…. The underlying problem was this: China had dominated (in every sense – culturally, economically, militarily) its known world almost since the beginning of its recorded history. More than what is today called a superpower, it had been the hegemon for century after century, dynasty after dynasty, for over 2000 years. Then within the span of a few decades, it was cast down from this pinnacle of greatness by the Western powers and Japan and brought low, divided into spheres of influence, and partially carved up into colonies.”     -Steven Mosher, Bully of Asia, p. 18

1912-1928 – After over two thousand years of imperial rule, the Republic of China was established in 1912 to replace the monarchy, in an attempt to bring some form of democracy to China. Sun Yat-sen served as the first president of the Republic of China and the first leader of the Nationalist Party of China. But China was chaotic, the Nationalist government was weak, and warlords controlled China.

1921-1927 – The Communist Party of China (CPC or CCP) was founded in 1921. The CCP grew quickly, and by 1949 it had driven the Nationalist government from mainland China, leading to the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. In 1920 until 1927 the CCP worked together with the Nationalist government to get rid of the warlords and build a powerful central government.

1926-1928 – Chiang Kai-shek, follower of Sun Yat-sen, became leader of the Republic of China in 1928. He led the Northern Expedition campaign of the Chinese Nationalist army allied with the Communists, defeating a coalition of warlords, ending their control of China, and reunifying China under a new Nationalist government of the Republic of China.

1927 – Midway through the Northern Expedition, the alliance broke down and Chiang Kai-shek purged the Communists inside the party. Although the Communists welcomed Chiang, he turned on them, killing 1,000’s. In response, the CCP founded the “Red Army”, to battle Chiang’s Nationalist Party army beginning the Chinese Civil War. Mao Zedong was appointed commander-in-chief of the Red Army.

1931 – The Empire of Japan invaded Manchuria, took over and established a puppet state, while China was involved in civil war.  Chiang Kai-shek avoided a war with Japan in order to focus on defeating the Communists first.

“The political leader with the most experience fighting the CCP – first successfully and later much less so – was Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek. After the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, Chiang was under enormous pressure to declare war on the Empire of the Rising Sun. He refused, arguing that before the Japanese could be driven out of China, the Communist rebellion must first be put down. ‘First internal pacification, then external resistance,” he insisted…. Chiang stated: “The Japanese are like a disease of the skin, but the Communists are like a disease of the heart.”    -Steven Mosher, Bully of Asia, p. 1 

1934-1935 – Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Party army defeated the Communists who begin a big retreat. Mao took the Red Army on the “Long March” into the mountains of Northern and Western China and consolidated his leadership as the head of the CCP. The Long March, the central event in Chinese revolutionary mythology, became the precursor of everything the CCP is today, and established Marxist–Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought (Maoism) as the Party’s guiding ideologies.

“The Long March is a manifesto. It has proclaimed to the world that the Red Army is an army of heroes, while the imperialists and their running dogs, Chiang Kai-shek and his like, are impotent. It has proclaimed their utter failure to encircle, pursue, obstruct and intercept us. The Long March is also a propaganda force. It has announced to some 200 million people in eleven provinces that the road of the Red Army is their only road to liberation.”   – Mao Zedong, On Tactics against Japanese Imperialism (December 27, 1935)  

1937 – Full-scale Japanese invasion of China. The Japanese scored major victories, capturing Beijing, Shanghai and the Chinese capital of Nanking in 1937, which resulted in the Rape of Nanking, which was an episode of mass murder and mass rape committed by Imperial Japanese troops against the residents of Nanking. That is why China despises the Japanese and any allies of Japan.

1939-1945 – Chiang Kai-shek and Mao made a temporary peace to form a united front of the Nationalists and Communists to fight against Japan.  

1945 – Yalta Conference was the meeting of the heads of government of the three World War II allies, United States, United Kingdom, and Soviet Union. The Soviet Union pledged to fight Japan and attacked the Japanese in Manchuria. Soviet Union, Nationalists and Communists were all fighting the Japanese in Manchuria.

1945-1949 – After surrender of Japan, ending WW II, Mao turned on Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese Civil War resumed. The power of the Communist Party grew considerably with skillful organization and propaganda envisioning the Red Army conducting guerrilla warfare in defense of the people. The Soviet Union supported the Red Army from Manchuria with their own weapons and tanks, and military supplies captured from the Japanese. The Nationalist forces were weak, and the war concluded with Communist victory in mainland China. Chiang Kai-shek and two million Nationalist soldiers retreated to the island of Taiwan, and Chiang set up the Republic of China. America protected Chiang Kai-shek, and the containment policy against potential Communist advance began.

1949 – Mao Zedong proclaimed the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and did not recognize Taiwan, treated them as a rebellious group. Mao took over every aspect of Chinese life. All economic and cultural activity, schools, military, re-education of all the people to the communist system were all controlled by the PRC. Land reform campaigns forcibly seized land from landlords and redistributed it among peasants, who were encouraged to overthrow and kill landlords. The campaign to consolidate the power of the CCP continued, suppressing counterrevolutionaries, with mass trials and murder of millions of Nationalist supporters, businessmen and intellectuals.

1950-1953 – The Korean War was a war between North Korea and South Korea. PRC supporting the North, fought the USA supporting the South. The war ended in a stand-off creating the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) to separate North and South Korea.

1958-1962 – Great Leap Forward was the PRC’s economic and social campaign. Chairman Mao Zedong launched the campaign to reconstruct the country from an agrarian economy into an industrial society through the formation of people’s communes. But the cost was nearly 100 million deaths from man-made famine and mass executions, since private farming was prohibited, and people were moved from farming to industrial production; thus people starved.

1966-1976 – The Cultural Revolution, was a decade-long period of political and social chaos, launched by Mao Zedong, turning against his own Party, to purge the Communist Party of “bad thought,” i.e. capitalism and traditional Chinese culture, and re-impose Maoism as the dominant ideology in the CCP and China. Kids tuned on parents, students turned on teachers and friends on friends for not following the Little Red Book of Mao’s sacred thoughts. Mao’s way was the only thought. The Red Guards, a mass student-led paramilitary social movement, heeded Mao’s call to burn and destroy cultural artifacts, Chinese literature, paintings, religious symbols and temples.

1972 – President Richard Nixon visited the People’s Republic of China, where he met with Chairman Mao Zedong and Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai. This historical visit opened China to the rest of the world for trade. We opened American markets and welcomed Chinese products into the United States. We witnessed the rise of China, as they industrialized, learned Western technologies, copied the West, and quickly became an industrial superpower, without changing their foundation in communist political ideology. Statism is the economic system of China, corporations run by the CCP, state-run industries.

1990-today – Business leaders and the Communist Party have joined together to became one entity in order to unite economic and political power for the benefit of the elite class, not for the people. Globalist elites of America are tied in with the elites of China. The Clintons, Biden, Bloomberg, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and there are many other examples of globalists including McKinsey & Company, whose former senior partner Peter Walker was recently exposed on Tucker Carlson fawning over China. The globalist media as well, NYT, Washington Post, MSNBC, CNN, ABC News, Newsweek, and all the others; these Western globalist elites hate the West. They hate America. They foresee a one-world order run by technocrats, without freedom or democracy. They see China’s rise to dominate the West as a positive thing, so they can build up their own bottom lines. They see China as a friend and America as the enemy. They are all anti-Trump because Trump is anti-globalist and he is standing up against the threat of China’s economic and political domination. 

President Clinton gave China most-favored-nation status, starting free trade with China. He brought them in as global players in the world economy, pushed Congress for their entry into the WTO, made favorable trade deals, and moved US manufacturing to China, including American aerospace, nuclear, missile, and military technology, and pushed to open up the U.S. industrial base to Chinese offshoring. Presidents Bush and Obama continued these favorable China policies, to foster our nearly total dependence on Chinese manufacturing. President Trump was the first president to stand up to the threat of China and to stop their outrageous “theft of intellectual property,” “illegal dumping,” and “devastating currency manipulation.”

“China is already at war with us in the economic sphere. It consistently flouts the rules and breaks its promises. Its goal is to outstrip the United States, and it is not averse to undermining the existing international economic and political order to do so.”  -Steven Mosher, Bully of Asia, p. 240

“Few Americans have yet grasped either the depth of China’s historic grievance against the West or its vengeful envy of the United States in particular, or the breadth of its resurgent imperial ambitions. China is not just an emerging superpower with a grudge, though that would be worrisome enough. It is the hegemon, waiting to reclaim its rightful position as the center of the world.”  -Steven Mosher, Bully of Asia, p. 32

“Only the Chinese people, by overthrowing the current Communist dynasty in favor of democratic rule, can … diminish its relentless drive for domination.”  -Steven Mosher, Bully of Asia, p. 291

CALL YOUR LOCAL ELECTED OFFICIALS!!
FIGHT BACK!! 
WE THE PEOPLE WANT ANSWERS!!

**** Read Open Letter to NYC Elected Officials below ****

CALL, WRITE, AND EMAIL YOUR REPS. 
ASK: WHAT IS THE PLAN TO TEST AND TRACE THE MORE THAN ONE MILLION PEOPLE LIVING IN THE SHADOWS IN NYC?
ASK THESE QUESTIONS:

ASK YOUR STATE ELECTEDS: How is mass testing and contact tracing going to be done by May 15 according to the Governor’s blueprint, so NYC can come safely out of lockdown, when large swaths of the city’s population are unaccountable, undocumented, homeless, and living in the shadows?

ASK YOUR CITY ELECTEDS: What is the city’s plan to identify, test, trace and quarantine those who test positive, from NYC’s most virus-prone populations of over one million illegal immigrants, homeless, and inmates recently released from city jails?

Find your New York State Assembly member here. 
Find your New York State Senator here.
Find you New York City Council Member here. 

We the people have to rise up and hold our elected officials accountable for a solution to the question of testing, tracing and quarantining the shadow populations of NYC!!!

It was their progressive policies that welcomed them here to our city and created this colossal  mess!!

Open Letter to NYC Elected Officials on Question of Testing and Tracing Shadow Populations From the Queens Village Republican Club. 

www.QVGOP.org
April 27, 2020
CONTACT: Joe Concannon
PHONE: 347-946-1931
EMAIL: INFO@qvgop.org

The Bearer of Good Coronavirus News

Stanford scientist John Ioannidis finds himself under attack for questioning the prevailing wisdom about lockdowns.

This is reposted from the April 24, 2020 opinion column in the Wall Street Journal  by Allysia Finley

Defenders of coronavirus lockdown mandates keep talking about science. “We are going to do the right thing, not judge by politics, not judge by protests, but by science,” California’s Gov. Gavin Newsom said this week. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer defended an order that, among other things, banned the sale of paint and vegetable seeds but not liquor or lottery tickets. “Each action has been informed by the best science and epidemiology counsel there is,” she wrote in an op-ed.

But scientists are almost never unanimous, and many appeals to “science” are transparently political or ideological. Consider the story of John Ioannidis, a professor at Stanford’s School of Medicine. His expertise is wide-ranging—he juggles appointments in statistics, biomedical data, prevention research and health research and policy. Google Scholar ranks him among the world’s 100 most-cited scientists. He has published more than 1,000 papers, many of them meta-analyses—reviews of other studies. Yet he’s now found himself pilloried because he dissents from the theories behind the lockdowns—because he’s looked at the data and found good news.

In a March article for Stat News, Dr. Ioannidis argued that Covid-19 is far less deadly than modelers were assuming. He considered the experience of the Diamond Princess cruise ship, which was quarantined Feb. 4 in Japan. Nine of 700 infected passengers and crew died. Based on the demographics of the ship’s population, Dr. Ioannidis estimated that the U.S. fatality rate could be as low as 0.025% to 0.625% and put the upper bound at 0.05% to 1%—comparable to that of seasonal flu.

“If that is the true rate,” he wrote, “locking down the world with potentially tremendous social and financial consequences may be totally irrational. It’s like an elephant being attacked by a house cat. Frustrated and trying to avoid the cat, the elephant accidentally jumps off a cliff and dies.”

Dr. Ioannidis, 54, likes metaphors. A New York native who grew up in Athens, he also teaches comparative literature and has published seven literary works—poetry and fiction, the latest being an epistolary novel—in Greek. In his spare time, he likes to fence, swim, hike and play basketball.

Early in his career, he realized that “the common denominator for everything that I was doing was that I was very interested in the methods—not necessarily the results but how exactly you do that, how exactly you try to avoid bias, how you avoid error.” When he began examining studies, he discovered that few headline-grabbing findings could be replicated, and many were later contradicted by new evidence.

Scientific studies are often infected by biases. “Several years ago, along with one of my colleagues, we had mapped 235 biases across science. And maybe the biggest cluster is biases that are trying to generate significant, spectacular, fascinating, extraordinary results,” he says. “Early results tend to be inflated. Claims for significance tend to be exaggerated.”

An example is a 2012 meta-analysis on nutritional research, in which he randomly selected 50 common cooking ingredients, such as sugar, flour and milk. Eighty percent of them had been studied for links to cancer, and 72% of the studies linked an ingredient to a higher or lower risk. Yet three-quarters of the findings were weak or statistically insignificant.

Dr. Ioannidis calls the coronavirus pandemic “the perfect storm of that quest for very urgent, spectacular, exciting, apocalyptic results. And as you see, apparently our early estimates seem to have been tremendously exaggerated in many fronts.”

Chief among them was a study by modelers at Imperial College London, which predicted more than 2.2 million coronavirus deaths in the U.S. absent “any control measures or spontaneous changes in individual behaviour.” The study was published March 16—the same day the Trump administration released its “15 Days to Slow the Spread” initiative, which included strict social-distancing guidelines.

Dr. Ioannidis says the Imperial projection now appears to be a gross overestimate. “They used inputs that were completely off in some of their calculation,” he says. “If data are limited or flawed, their errors are being propagated through the model. . . . So if you have a small error, and you exponentiate that error, the magnitude of the final error in the prediction or whatever can be astronomical.”

“I love models,” he adds. “I do a lot of mathematical modeling myself. But I think we need to recognize that they’re very, very low in terms of how much weight we can place on them and how much we can trust them. . . . They can give you a very first kind of mathematical justification to a gut feeling, but beyond that point, depending on models for evidence, I think it’s a very bad recipe.”

Modelers sometimes refuse to disclose their assumptions or data, so their errors go undetected. Los Angeles County predicted last week that 95.6% of its population would be infected by August if social distancing orders were relaxed. (Confirmed cases were 0.17% of the population as of Thursday.) But the basis for this projection is unclear. “At a minimum, we need openness and transparency in order to be able to say anything,” Dr. Ioannidis says.

Most important, “what we need is data. We need real data. We need data on how many people are infected so far, how many people are actively infected, what is really the death rate, how many beds do we have to spare, how has this changed.”

That will require more testing. Dr. Ioannidis and colleagues at Stanford last week published a study on the prevalence of coronavirus antibodies in Santa Clara County. Based on blood tests of 3,300 volunteers in the county—which includes San Jose, California’s third-largest city—during the first week of April, they estimated that between 2.49% and 4.16% of the county population had been infected. That’s 50 to 85 times the number of confirmed cases and implies a fatality rate between 0.12% and 0.2%, consistent with that of the Diamond Princess.

The study immediately came under attack. Some statisticians questioned its methods. Critics noted the study sample was not randomly selected, and white women under 64 were disproportionately represented. The Stanford team adjusted for the sampling bias by weighting the results by sex, race and ZIP Code, but the study acknowledges that “other biases, such as bias favoring individuals in good health capable of attending our testing sites, or bias favoring those with prior Covid-like illnesses seeking antibody confirmation are also possible. The overall effect of such biases is hard to ascertain.”

Dr. Ioannidis admits his study isn’t “bulletproof” and says he welcomes scrutiny. But he’s confident the findings will hold up, and he says antibody studies from around the world will yield more data. A study published this week by the University of Southern California and the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health estimated that the virus is 28 to 55 times as prevalent in that county as confirmed cases are. A New York study released Thursday estimated that 13.9% of the state and 21.2% of the city had been infected, more than 10 times the confirmed cases.

Yet most criticism of the Stanford study has been aimed at defending the lockdown mandates against the implication that they’re an overreaction. “There’s some sort of mob mentality here operating that they just insist that this has to be the end of the world, and it has to be that the sky is falling. It’s attacking studies with data based on speculation and science fiction,” he says. “But dismissing real data in favor of mathematical speculation is mind-boggling.”

In part he blames the media: “We have some evidence that bad news, negative news [stories], are more attractive than positive news—they lead to more clicks, they lead to people being more engaged. And of course we know that fake news travels faster than true news. So in the current environment, unfortunately, we have generated a very heavily panic-driven, horror-driven, death-reality-show type of situation.”

The news is filled with stories of healthy young people who die of coronavirus. But Dr. Ioannidis recently published a paper with his wife, Despina Contopoulos-Ioannidis, an infectious-disease specialist at Stanford, that showed this to be a classic man-bites-dog story. The couple found that people under 65 without underlying conditions accounted for only 0.7% of coronavirus deaths in Italy and 1.8% in New York City.

“Compared to almost any other cause of disease that I can think of, it’s really sparing young people. I’m not saying that the lives of 80-year-olds do not have value—they do,” he says. “But there’s far, far, far more . . . young people who commit suicide.” If the panic and attendant disruption continue, he says, “we will see many young people committing suicide . . . just because we are spreading horror stories with Covid-19. There’s far, far more young people who get cancer and will not be treated, because again, they will not go to the hospital to get treated because of Covid-19. There’s far, far more people whose mental health will collapse.”

He argues that public officials need to weigh these factors when making public-health decisions, and more hard data from antibody and other studies will help. “I think that we should just take everything that we know, put it on the table, and try to see, OK, what’s the next step, and see what happens when we take the next step. I think this sort of data-driven feedback will be the best. So you start opening, you start opening your schools. You can see what happens,” he says. “We need to be open minded, we need to just be calm, allow for some error, it’s unavoidable. We started knowing nothing. We know a lot now, but we still don’t know everything.”

He cautions against drawing broad conclusions about the efficacy of lockdowns based on national infection and fatality rates. “It’s not that we have randomized 10 countries to go into lockdown and another 10 countries to remain relatively open and see what happens, and do that randomly. Different prime ministers, different presidents, different task forces make decisions, they implement them in different sequences, at different times, in different phases of the epidemic. And then people start looking at this data and they say, ‘Oh look at that, this place did very well. Why? Oh, because of this measure.’ This is completely, completely opinion-based.”

People are making “big statements about ‘lockdowns save the world.’ I think that they’re immature. They’re tremendously immature. They may have worked in some cases, they may have had no effect in others, and they may have been damaging still in others.”

Most disagreements among scientists, he notes, reflect differences in perspective, not facts. Some find the Stanford study worrisome because it suggests the virus is more easily transmitted, while others are hopeful because it suggests the virus is far less lethal. “It’s basically an issue of whether you’re an optimist or a pessimist. Even scientists can be optimists and pessimists. Probably usually I’m a pessimist, but in this case, I’m probably an optimist.”

Open Letter to New York City and State Representatives and Lawmakers

***See media coverage below***

We want answers: How is mass testing and contact tracing going to be done by May 15th according to the Governor’s blueprint, when large swaths of the city’s population are unaccountable, undocumented, homeless, and living in the shadows?

Queens Village, NY – Governor Cuomo announced that New York State will be on lockdown until May 15 in order to diminish the spread of the deadly virus and to insure there will be no renewed outbreak, and then will re-evaluate when to “Un-Pause NY.”  In other words, after May 15th the Governor would assess whether or not New York could even move to Phase One, which is a gradual lifting of restrictions. 
 
When asked when the lockdown will be over, he said: “It’s over when you have a vaccine. And that’s 12 to 18 months away.” Also, de Blasio recently announced that the city is canceling all non-essential events including concerts, festivals, and parades, through June to slow the spread of the virus.
 
At this point no one, not the governor or any other elected official knows when New York will be safe to open for business and people can return to their jobs and normal lives, whether it will take weeks, months or over a year as he has intimated. It’s common sense that New York City cannot survive a lockdown of 12 to 18 months. It may not even survive more than a month of the current economic shutdown, with the concurrent outbreak of business bankruptcies, crime, mental illness, domestic violence, drug overdoses, and general breakdown of law and order and civil society. A lockdown going into June will be disaster for the city.
 
Many important measures in the governor’s blueprint to get back to a “new normal” are practicing social distancing, staying home, keeping non-essential business establishments closed, stockpiling PPE, and other measures. But the key element is mass testing and contact tracing. Cuomo said “Why is testing so important? Testing is how you monitor the rate of infection. Testing is how we find people with the virus and trace their contacts. The challenge is to bring testing up to scale.”
 
The big question is how is this mass testing and tracking going to occur by May 15th when large swaths of the city’s population are unaccountable, undocumented, and living in the shadows? This includes the city’s most virus-prone populations: over one million illegal immigrants, more than 78,000 homeless, and 1500 inmates recently released from city jails.
 
This is not a partisan issue. This is about protecting all New Yorkers and getting NYC back to work safely and securely. It is well known that many immigrants here illegally are scared to visit a doctor or hospital to seek treatment for fear of being arrested and deported. How much more unlikely will it be that they would divulge their name, address and personal information for testing or submit to interviews for their contacts?
 
Now that everyone must be identified, tested, and traced, how are we supposed to identify and do the same to the illegal immigrant population of the city? The hardest hit pandemic hotspots in NYC are Elmhurst, the epicenter of the virus, Corona, Jackson Heights and Flushing, and other towns, home to vast proportions of the city’s illegal immigrants. Shouldn’t these hotspots of the disease be the first zip codes tested rather than Bayside, Oakland Gardens, Douglaston, for example and other zip codes with a significantly lower number of cases?
 
Will the DMV release the information on the data-protected Driver’s Licenses issued to illegal aliens? Will the IRS release their Tax ID data? How will public health personnel locate and verify that they are tested and document the results? Can churches and community associations be relied upon to gather and turn over data to health officials?
 
Since the virus hit, the undocumented and homeless populations have taken over our subway system, which is a big contributing factor to New York’s excessive number of infections and fatalities. In contrast, cities without massive underground public subway systems, such as California’s municipalities, have much lower rates of infection.  How will the MTA clean and disinfect our subways and prevent another massive outbreak from homeless and undocumented riders when the city comes out of lockdown?
 
These questions are just the beginnings of an issue that no one is talking about. This is the tip of the iceberg of a momentous task to implement the guidelines in order to safely move the city to lifting the restrictions and getting back to work. No one is addressing it. We want answers, otherwise it is not out of the question to fear the worst consequences for our city. Can we see a repeat of the history we never learned from, the real chaos and disaster, on the level of the Great Depression, the Black Plague, or the Spanish Flu?  We want answers to our questions from our city and state representatives and lawmakers!

Members of the Queens Village Republican Club
April 21, 2020

Additional Media Coverage

One America News Network

WABC Radio: Rich Valdes – This is America – Coronavirus Special (start 11:00 minutes)

Queens GOP Club Demand Answers From Cuomo, de Blasio over COVID-19
Queens County Politics

Open Letter to NYC Elected Officials from the Queens Village Republican Club
Yahoo Finance

The Global Threat to U.S. Hegemony

By Professor Nicholas Giordano

Professor Nicholas Giordano

If the last month has proved anything, it should be the threat that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) poses to the global community. For decades, American administrations, except for the Trump administration, have placated China. They acquiesced out of fear that we will lose access to cheap goods and the potential 1.3-billion-person marketplace. It is due to this benign approach that many of us are on lockdowns, and the U.S. economy, as well as the global economy, are in shambles.

Over the course of the last 30 years, the Communist government of China has been working on their grand strategy to become the dominant superpower by 2049. They grew their economy and increased stability to maintain their authoritarian rule. They continued, unencumbered, to build their national military strength. Now they are ready for the last two major goals. The first being to weaken Taiwan’s international standing that will allow China to recapture Taiwan. The second is far more detrimental, and that’s to replace the U.S. world order.

While China has been working on multiple fronts to achieve these objectives, they faced little pushback from the U.S. and the global community. We willingly underestimated China’s capabilities. America was afraid to use the full weight of our power and strength to ensure countries are playing by our rules. After all, we are the benign superpower. In fact, our policymakers and the corporate elite were fearful of calling out the CCP because they worried China would cut off access to their markets. Just look at the pathetic attempt by the NBA, and athletes like Lebron James, who bowed down to China after the GM of the Houston Rockets, Daryl Morey, dared to criticize the CCP’s hardline approach in Hong Kong. Failures like these embolden the CCP and continue the perception that the U.S. is weak and feckless.

China continually thumbs its nose at the international order, and their strategies to acquire power are extraordinarily sophisticated. China weaponized their currency and the economy by continuing to devalue the Yuan and increase trade deficits throughout the world. They want the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) to replace the World Bank, where the United States has the largest voting share. All in an effort to replace the dollar as the world’s currency.

They have a coordinated corporate espionage and intellectual property theft on a massive scale. They force companies to sign partnership agreements if they want access to China’s marketplaces. This has cost the United States trillions of dollars over the last 20 years. They routinely conduct cyber intrusions, penetrating our critical infrastructure and key resources in an effort to exploit vulnerabilities. They infiltrated college campuses throughout the country to cultivate the next generation of American engineers and scientists to be assets for future intelligence endeavors. They set up Confucius Institutes to immerse Americans in “Chinese culture and history” when it is really nothing more than a propaganda machine designed to influence students to the CCP.

Perhaps, the most dangerous of all is China’s Belt and Road Initiative. A number of countries are desperate for money, and the CCP has laid out debt traps throughout the world. China entices these countries with a money supply, particularly for large critical infrastructure projects. The stipulations of the loan are that a Chinese company must be hired to run the project. The people of the country are employed for the menial labor, but Chinese labor is brought in to actually operate the facilities. If a country is unable to pay back the loan, the CCP then owns the infrastructure facility. If a foreign country controls your airports, electricity plants, port system, water supply plants, etc. do you have sovereignty or are you held hostage by the CCP? Quite genius if you think about it.

The U.S. needs to wake-up. The lies and deception have cost tens of thousands of lives, and have plunged our economy, and the global economy, into a recession, perhaps even a depression. It is time countries join together and hold the CCP accountable. It is time we bring critical manufacturing sectors back to the U.S. It is time to reduce our dependency on China. It is time we lead the world again and take our power back.

Nicholas Giordano is Professor of Political Science at Suffolk Community College and host of The P.A.S. Report Podcast

Open America Now!

By Phil Orenstein

Editor’s Note: Jerry Matacotta, historian, and founder of History Seminar Series at QCC provided historical background and assistance for this column.

We Republicans cherish our Freedom. We believe in our country’s birthright in Liberty. We want America open for business. We are Americans, a brave, proud and free people. We’re not good little obedient subjects of big government bureaucrats.  We want America open now!

We stand with President Trump who is plotting our course to economic recovery, to open the economy quickly: “We’re winning our battle, we’re winning our war… We want to get our country back to where it was. We want to open our country and we want to do it quickly.”

To blame the virus on Trump or anyone else, as the media and politicians are doing, is either ignorant or evil. The fault is not Trump’s, it’s not Italy’s, not the bats nor the Wuhan wet markets. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is the cause of the global death count and the collapse of the world’s economies. But politicians and journalists bankrolled by the CCP and their global affiliates, who want to keep the country closed, are blaming Trump in order to defeat him in November. The New York Times concocted a narrative that Trump was incompetent and late to act and now people are dying. The Boston Globe headliner was “Trump’s coronavirus advice just might kill us.”  House Speaker Pelosi accused Trump of deception and lies leading to “unnecessary deaths and economic disaster.” The Democrats and the media are saying the blood is on Trump’s hands, not China’s.  They are on the side of the enemy, Communist China, and they have no qualms about playing politics with the virus, destroying our country, shutting down our economy, and if possible keeping the pandemic going until November to get rid of Trump.

While the rest of New York State and the country are desperately yearning to open the economy and breathe the fresh scent of freedom once again, Mayor de Blasio, wants to keep society closed. In a decision that rattled even Governor Cuomo, he announced that all city schools would remain closed for the rest of the school year sending the message that the CCP virus won. Keeping our schools, businesses, beaches and restaurants closed for so long as de Blasio intends to do, are decisions that can destroy the lives and fortunes of millions of New Yorkers. He needs to be shut down and locked up.

Wartime presidents Lincoln, Wilson and FDR invoked the War Powers Act, and although President Trump is loath to use it, he should do so, and arrest de Blasio for sedition. History’s traitors and defectors were rightfully punished and imprisoned for aiding and abetting the enemy and inciting opposition to America, as our nation went to war and rose up to battle the enemies of freedom.

Exploiting the pandemic just like his leftist colleagues, AOC and Ilhan Omar who recently called for a socialist overhaul of the federal government, de Blasio and other Democrat lawmakers are going after the landlords, calling on the Rent Guidelines Board to freeze rents for all regulated apartments, and to allow New Yorkers to pay rent with their security deposits.

In their violent overthrow of the capitalist system, the bloody communist revolutions of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, the first step was to go after the landlords and confiscate their land and estates, which was distributed to the impoverished peasants, who then became slaves of the tyrant government. Communist revolution is part of de Blasio’s DNA.

De Blasio capitulated to the CCP in the war against this invisible viral enemy versus humanity. De Blasio’s declaration of defeat is like sentencing New Yorkers to prison in their houses for months.  It’s holding NYC hostage to the virus. It’s FDR surrendering to Japan after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Instead of rallying all New Yorkers saying “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” de Blasio surrendered, giving everyone in the city fear and paranoia.

There needs to be a city-wide outcry against de Blasio shouting him down from every open window. But where are our city’s politicians, where are our religious leaders, where are the activists, the community organizers? Where are their booming voices now that we need them to get our city back on track, to re-open our city, protect our school kids, save our fellow New Yorkers from economic collapse, fear and desperation? Alas, they are all in hiding, scared to death of the CCP virus, hunkered down in isolation, living in bondage, hording their toilet paper.

The Spanish Flu killed 675,000 in the U.S. but political leaders still led, the city council still met, and people still voted. When the Blitz hit England and bombed the House of Lords, Parliament still met and gave the people hope and courage. Our heroic firefighters and police officers ran into the burning towers on 9/11 giving up their lives to save our fellow New Yorkers. In the worst of times, leaders rose up fearlessly leading their constituents to have faith, hope, and conquer the enemy.

We don’t have any real leaders today except for President Trump, our Commander in Chief, who is courageously leading the battle to defeat the CCP virus! He’s guiding us to be strong, to know that faith defeats the pandemic, courage wins the battle, hope is triumphant.

How many more months are people going to stay imprisoned in their homes and look out their windows? We say no longer! Open our city and let us breath free, do business, dine at our favorite restaurants, have meetings, go to the beach, to weddings, to the game, to church, to synagogue, socialize, drink beer with friends, be free! Most importantly, to vote! To vote every Democrat out! Boot out the enemies of freedom! Elections have consequences. Voting matters now more than ever! Open America Now!