RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2020/08/13/the-city-manager-in-laredo-texas-received-a-880486-golden-parachute-last-year/#14395c4bb979

In 2019, the city manager in Laredo, Texas, made $880,486. It doubled the earnings of the President of the United States ($400,000) and tripled the earnings of four-star generals in the U.S. military ($268,000).

In fact, in two of the past three years, Laredo employed two of the most highly compensated city managers in the nation.

Between 2017 and 2019, those two city managers collectively made a total of $1.85 million in cash compensation, not including the cost of benefits such as health insurance, the public pension and other perquisites.

Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com discovered this by filing 41,500 Freedom of Information Act requests each of the last three years. We captured and mapped by ZIP Code 23 million public employee salary and pension records annually.

We uncovered an eye-popping amount of money flowing to Laredo’s managers, despite the fact that the border city is home to 261,000 residents with an average income of only $15,127 per year.

In May 2017, the Laredo city council promoted Horacio De Leon, Jr., to interim city manager and the permanent position by August. Earnings for De Leon in 2018 were $314,556. The manager had worked his way up through city government and enjoyed a good reputation locally.

But in a surprising move, the city council parted ways with De Leon in 2019 – only 20 months after hiring him. Our records request showed that De Leon received a $880,486 golden parachute, an all-inclusive payout including severance.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/science/articles/hydroxychloroquine-morality-tal

Early in the coronavirus pandemic, a survey of the world’s frontline physicians showed hydroxychloroquine to be the drug they considered the most effective at treating COVID-19 patients. That was in early April, shortly after a French study showed it was safe and effective in lowering the virus count, at times in combination with azithromycin. Next we were told hydroxychloroquine was likely ineffective, and also dangerous, and that that French study was flawed and the scientist behind it worthy of mockery. More studies followed, with contradictory results, and then out came what was hailed by some as a definitive study of 96,000 patients showing the drug was most certainly dangerous and ineffective, and indeed that it killed 30% more people than those who didn’t take it. Within days, that study was retracted, with the editor of one of the two most respected medical journals in the Western world conceding it was “a monumental fraud.” And on it went.     READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE AT SITE

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-long-sad-saga-of-hydroxychloroquine/

The same medical community which is telling us that HCQ is dangerous, may soon be telling us that a vaccine developed in record time is completely safe.

I want to make sure NR readers don’t miss this essay from Norman Doidge. It’s the best thing I’ve read on hydroxychloroquine. But beware: The piece is long and fascinating. Once you start reading, you won’t be able to stop, and it takes a good half hour to finish.

Doidge tells the tale of hydroxychloroquine, or HCQ as he calls it, as if the drug were a character in a story. His main point is that HCQ hasn’t received fair treatment in many quarters, including, unfortunately, some of the health experts advising the government of the United States. The main reasons are the intrusion of politics into medicine, the pitfalls and limitations of big data in medical science, and the over-reliance of many experts on random controlled testing to the exclusion of other kinds of evidence.

Doidge manages to make even a discussion of research methodology interesting. Here is a sample:

We now have studies that show one of the weaknesses of RCTs (random controlled testing) is that in the quest to eliminate confounding factors, they end up, in a majority of cases, excluding patients who are typical of those in the population. The RCT evangelist focuses only on the RCT strengths, and forgets their weaknesses. A typical RCT describes several data points about hundreds of patients. It can be helpful in determining what treatment might work for most people in a large population. A typical case history describes perhaps hundreds of data points about a single patient. Its focus might be on what treatment might work best for this patient. Sometimes we need all that information about a patient, to choose a proper treatment, because individual patients differ, often in decisive ways.

https://acdemocracy.org/blms-association-with-terrorist-linked-bds-groups-part-ii/

Organizations and activists participating in the delegitimization campaign against Israel, support the boycotts, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement, and expressly support US-designated Palestinian terror organizations, have strategically entrenched themselves in partnerships with Black Lives Matter (BLM) since the establishment of the movement in 2013.1 

By successfully creating coalitions with BLM, the delegitimization network has infiltrated and influenced the BLM agenda to openly support BDS and other anti-Israel causes. These include an explicit call for the divestment from Israel, which was featured prominently in the 2016 BLM platform, sending BLM delegations to the West Bank to protest the Israeli military and meeting with BDS leaders and convicted Palestinian terrorists. Several BLM founders and prominent leaders are connected to delegitimization organizations. These same leaders have gone beyond the call to divest from Israel or to oppose the United States (US) military-aid to Israel and have advocated for Palestinian terrorists and terror groups.

BLM Anti-Israel Policy Platforms

In 2016, BLM released a series of policy platforms, listing their political objectives. One of the platforms, “A Cut in US Military Expenditures and A Reallocation of those Funds to Invest in Domestic Infrastructure and Community Wellbeing,” cites the delegitimization (DLG) organizations Adalah, The US Campaign to End the Occupation, and Dream Defenders as organizations “currently working on policy.”2 According to the platform:

“The US justifies and advances the global war on terror via its alliance with Israel and is complicit in the genocide taking place against the Palestinian people … Israel is an apartheid state with over 50 laws on the books that sanction discrimination against the Palestinian people … Everyday, Palestinians are forced to walk through military checkpoints along the US funded apartheid wall.”3

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/24485/the-anti-american-2020-democrat-vision-of-america

   http://goudsmit.pundicity.com http://lindagoudsmit.com

In 2008, candidate Barack Hussein Obama promised to fundamentally transform America. Most Americans assumed he meant uniting the country and bringing Americans closer to our forefathers’ dreams of peace, harmony, prosperity, and equality. In 2008, most Americans had no idea what candidate Obama actually meant. Now it is 2020, and now we know.

The United States of America was born in revolution to the revolutionary ideology of a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

Our forefathers rejected monarchy, oligarchy, aristocracy, theocracy, and statist centralized government in all its forms. They fought to establish a representative constitutional republic that valued individual freedom and equality among men. The moral and ethical structure of American society was rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition and its Ten Commandments.

In 1776, the world was a very different place. Women were subservient to men. Slavery was practiced worldwide. Islam was not part of the American experience. It took seven weeks to sail from England to America, now it takes seven hours. This is important because all things are best understood in their historical context, especially politics.

https://americanmind.org/essays/scholarly-debate-is-dead/

A little opinion article I published in Newsweek last week raising questions about Senator Kamala Harris’s eligibility for the office of Vice President has created quite a firestorm of controversy. For nearly 20 years—based on extensive scholarly research and long before Senator Harris was tapped to be former Vice President Joe Biden’s running mate—I have been questioning whether the current generally-accepted view of the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause is correct. I have published numerous articles about the subject, both scholarly and popular, asking whether it is right to interpret the amendment as meaning that anyone born on U.S. soil is automatically a citizen no matter the circumstances. I have testified about the matter several times before Congress and state legislative bodies, in a wide range of contexts.

I first raised the issue publicly in a brief that former Attorney General Edwin Meese III and I submitted to the Supreme Court back in 2003 in the case of Yaser Esam Hamdi. Hamdi was an unlawful combatant in the Taliban who was treated as a citizen because he had been born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana while his father was in the United States on a temporary work visa.

I addressed similar or in some cases identical questions about citizenship in general, and natural-born citizenship in particular (and hence, about eligibility for the offices of president and vice-president) when Senator John McCain was a nominee for President, when Governor Mitt Romney was a nominee for President, when Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio were candidates for President, and when Governor Nikki Haley’s name was floated as a possible nominee for Vice President.