RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/nikki-haleys-stellar-performance-as-ambassador-and

No wonder her appointment caused then-Israeli ambassador to the UN Danny Danon to cheer, and Permanent Observer of Palestine to the United Nations Riyad Mansour to flinch.

Nikki Haley is a star. There’s no other way to describe the former governor of South Carolina, whose subsequent two-year term as America’s ambassador to the UN was one of the most memorable in recent history.Her appointment to the latter post by then-President-elect Donald Trump came as somewhat of a surprise. She had supported Marco Rubio in the Republican Party primaries, and when he dropped out of the race, she backed Ted Cruz.When Trump became her party’s nominee, she announced that she would vote for him, in spite of her reservations about his character and abilities. She then called on him to release his tax returns, a move that elicited one of his notorious Twitter offensives.

Nevertheless, he selected her for the sensitive position based on what he considered to be her professional merit. This did not prevent critics from highlighting her lack of experience in foreign affairs.

To be fair, Haley seemed to many at the time who hadn’t heard of her to be an odd choice for a job that requires not only familiarity with global politics, but a rejection of conventional diplomacy – certainly by representatives from countries like the US and Israel.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/08/26/discipline-determination-and-data-will-get-us-through-the-pandemic/

While discussing many pandemic-related issues with friends and colleagues, we were reminded of the quip of journalist and satirist H.L. Mencken: “For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”

As we battle the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and the illness it causes, COVID-19, the “fog of war” continues on both the medical and epidemiological fronts. On the public health side, different studies, especially those that involve modeling, seem to reach conflicting, or at least ambiguous, conclusions. And politicians and pundits have jumped in to make the fog denser, with many policy prescriptions contaminated by misinformation, ideological spin, and partisan politics.

                                                       Obtaining clarity about many aspects of COVID-19 has been elusive. Dr. Anthony Fauci has emphasized the virus’s unique “protean manifestations”: “I have never seen a virus in which you have 20 percent to 40 percent of individuals who could have no symptoms at all, to individuals who get mild illness and do not need to go to a hospital, to people confined to their beds at home for weeks with multiple post-viral syndromes,” he said. 

SARS-CoV-2 is also unusual in being able to infect a broad spectrum of body tissues beyond the respiratory tract, including the digestive tract, neurons that mediate smell and taste, kidneys, and most critically, the heart and lining of blood vessels. 

Infection often leads to widespread inflammation and tiny clots, which cause secondary deleterious effects. Moreover, an Italian research study found that upwards of 85 percent of patients who had been hospitalized have persistent, sometimes serious aftereffects that can drag on for an indeterminate amount of time, and possibly permanently. (The virus is too recent to know conclusively.)

The clear lesson is that efforts to prevent infection are critical. But, absent a vaccine, which is still likely far off, that’s complicated and involves difficult cost-benefit calculations.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16421/alan-dershowitz-pursue-justice

Now, at 82, I am demanding justice for myself. I have been falsely accused by a woman I never met of having sex with her…. Indeed, the best evidence of my innocence is in her own words: a series of emails and manuscript that she tried to suppress in which she essentially admits that she never met me. Her lawyers own words — she is “wrong… simply wrong” in accusing you — constitutes an admission attributable to her.

Another of her lawyers has acknowledged that she lied about other prominent men. She told her best friend and her best friend’s husband that she was pressured by her lawyer to falsely accuse me.

The words in Hebrew are “Lo takir panim,” which means do not base your decision on the faces or identities of the litigants. Base it instead on the facts and the evidence. I wish people today would abide by that 3,000-year-old wisdom.

I also wish judges and prosecutors paid more heed to another command of my Bible portion: “The judges shall inquire diligently; and behold if the witness be a false witness and has testified falsely against his brother, then shall ye do unto him as he had proposed to do unto his brother…” I have invited prosecutors and judges to “inquire diligently” into my accuser and me. If they do, they will conclude that she has “testified falsely” and should be punished under the law of perjury.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/08/26/jacob-blakes-mother-thanks-trump-for-phone-call-expresses-disgust-with-kenosha-rioters/

Jacob Blake’s mother on Tuesday denounced the violent rioting that has rocked Kenosha since her son was shot, and said that she and her husband were praying for police officers.

Blake’s mother Julia Jackson also apologized to President Trump for missing a presidential phone call that was made following her heartfelt remarks at a news conference earlier Tuesday.

In an interview with CNN’s Don Lemon, Jackson expressed disgust with the rioting, calling it “not acceptable.”

“My family and I are very hurt. And quite frankly disgusted,” she told Lemon. “And as his mother, please don’t burn up property and cause havoc and tear your own homes down in my son’s name. You shouldn’t do it, people shouldn’t do it anyway, but to use my child or any other mother or father’s child—our tragedy—to react in that manner, it’s just not acceptable,” she said.

Jackson, who was accompanied by the family’s attorney Benjamin Crump on the Skype call, pointed out that the ongoing violence was not helping her son or anyone else who has suffered from alleged police brutality.

When asked by Lemon whether she had a message for any politicians, including Trump, Jackson took the opportunity to apologize to “our President Trump” on behalf of a family member who had said something that was “not kind.”

“She is hurting, and I do apologize for that,” she said. “That does not reflect our behavior.”