Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
A First Amendment Lawsuit Highlights the Chilling Impact of Speech-Based Deportation on Student Journalists
https://reason.com/2025/08/06/a-first-amendment-lawsuit-highlights-the-chilling-impact-of-speech-based-deportation-on-student-journalists/
https://reason.com/2025/08/07/how-overregulation-burned-out-competition-in-the-fire-retardant-industry/
“Currently, parole has been revoked for a portion of the 8,100 Afghans who entered the U.S. through the southern border using the Customs and Border Protection’s now defunct One app, and Temporary Protected Status (TPS) was revoked from around 11,700 Afghans in July. Additionally, Afghans who arrived in the U.S. during Operation Allies Refuge in August 2021 were granted two years of humanitarian parole. Their parole was extended in 2023 but is soon set to expire, which will leave an unknown number of parolees in precarious legal standing.
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In late 2024, Nasrin, who spoke with me on the condition of anonymity, fled to the U.S. to escape her abusive ex-husband, who sought to marry her daughter to a member of the Taliban after the terrorist group’s takeover of Afghanistan in August 2021. Upon arrival in the U.S., Nasrin, along with her daughter and two of her sons, was placed in ICE detention. Nasrin and her daughter were released, but both of her sons remain in ICE facilities. Nasrin “worries a lot” about the unknown future of her sons.
Former interpreter Mahmud, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity, entered the U.S. in 2014 through the SIV program. His brother, Fawad, applied for an SIV through work for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and fled to Mexico after his half-brother was murdered. After waiting eight months in Mexico for a CBP One app appointment, Fawad crossed the border in March 2025 and was immediately detained. ICE rejected his claim for asylum and now insists Fawad must be deported to Afghanistan.
Mahmud reports that Fawad has not been granted a credible fear interview and is being moved to different ICE facilities around the country, which makes it difficult for his family to acquire expensive legal representation. Mahmud says Fawad’s depression and other health issues are “getting worse in detention centers.””
https://reason.com/2025/08/07/flickers-of-hope-for-afghans-caught-in-legal-limbo/
“The Trump administration claims its tariffs are drawing countries to the table for tough negotiations. Yet in 2016, TPP partners were already there, ready to sign an agreement that closely reflected U.S. trade standards and practices, having overcome significant domestic hurdles. The TPP’s multilateral negotiating framework actually provided an efficient mechanism for participating countries to modernize their existing bilateral free trade agreements, and it augmented less comprehensive pacts like NAFTA and the Korea-U.S. agreement (KORUS).
The White House claims its new trade deal with Japan pushed “breakthrough openings” in agriculture and food, but the real groundwork was laid a decade earlier, when Shinzo Abe took on Japan’s powerful farm lobby in 2015, clearing the path for the TPP and softening resistance to liberalized agricultural trade. The TPP would have covered virtually all goods, including politically sensitive products like Japanese rice.
The 2025 deal also hardly qualifies as a “free trade deal,” with imports from Japan into the U.S. still subject to a 15 percent reciprocal tariff rate. Those tariffs are a tax on American businesses and consumers.
The TPP, by contrast, was slated to roll back 18,000 individual tariffs, making it “the largest tax cut on American exports in a generation.”
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Building trade policy on headline‑driven, ad hoc bargains is an unstable strategy—made more precarious when the very tariffs they hinge on rest on contested executive authority. These arrangements may create the illusion of momentum, but without enforceable commitments or structural durability, they offer little of the stability that comprehensive trade agreements provide. The TPP demonstrated how a well‑designed pact could lock in reforms, deepen alliances, and shape the rules of global commerce for decades. Washington’s drift toward improvisation risks ceding that ground to others who are willing to play the long game—and win it.”
https://reason.com/2025/08/07/the-art-of-the-empty-trade-deal/
“in June, vaccine manufacturer Moderna reported the results of a clinical trial pitting its mRNA influenza vaccine against both high-dose and standard-dose licensed seasonal influenza vaccines. The conventional vaccines used inactivated flu viruses to induce an immune response. Moderna’s mRNA-1010 achieved a relative vaccine efficacy against influenza illness of 26.6 percent in the trial. That means that the mRNA-1010 group had 26.6 percent fewer influenza cases than the group that got the standard-dose flu shot. For example, if the standard flu vaccine group had 100 cases per 1,000 people, the mRNA-1010 group would have had about 73–74 cases per 1,000.
The clinical trial roundly contradicts RFK Jr.’s claim that mRNA vaccines fail to protect effectively against upper respiratory infections, especially in comparison to old-fashioned flu vaccines.
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A simple Google Scholar search for mRNA vaccine trials for infectious diseases turns up over 10,000 results for just 2025 alone. But let’s just take a look at a comprehensive new review of promising vaccine formulations for emerging infectious diseases. In that study, a team of Korean researchers compares the pros and cons of different vaccine production platforms, including whole-organism-based, live-attenuated, subunit, virus vector-based immunity, and nucleic acid-based (DNA and RNA) vaccines.
The researchers’ analysis concludes that “mRNA vaccine formulations offer significant advantages, such as rapid development and production, over other vaccine platforms.” They also note that it is “necessary to develop an analysis system that can verify the effectiveness and safety of the mRNA vaccine, as well as the development process of the vaccine itself.” Just what the now-cancelled BARDA mRNA vaccine contracts could have helped to figure out.
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These vaccines might indeed have a significant impact on mitigating the spread of infectious diseases, if RFK Jr. would just stop standing athwart biomedical progress yelling, “Stop.””
https://reason.com/2025/08/07/rfk-jr-shifts-500-million-from-mrna-research-to-safer-vaccines-does-the-data-back-that-up/
Trump continues to bully and sue to suppress the press and free speech. He knows that just to defend a lawsuit is incredibly expensive, and hopes that people just give in.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fs9v0sdZixs
Producer price inflation up, driven by services.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXdMXPkWuSU
‘Multi level marketing schemes are mostly scams. Most people fail and lose money. Some lose a lot of money. People want to be their own boss, but really they’re a sucker.’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcLQh3yDQuo
“Trump takes a further step. To him, not only is the private public, but the public is also very personal. He sees himself as the CEO of the department store that is the United States of America—a metaphor that, notably, does not make any distinction between the government and the rest of the country. He’ll decide what deals are in everyone’s best interest, no matter what consenting individuals engaged in peaceful, private commerce might want to do. If he’s unhappy about something in Brazil, it will be your problem. And if he’s pleased with gifts and tributes, then all is well.
Do you run a foreign company trying to make a huge investment in American steel manufacturing? You’d better be prepared to cut Trump a piece of the action. Are you unhappy about Medicaid cuts that reduce the reimbursements your company receives from the government? That’s nothing a $5 million donation and dinner at Mar-a-Lago can’t fix. There’s a good reason why lobbying firms with direct access to the White House are reportedly keeping very, very busy these days.”
I thought the Tea Party was motivated by deficits and sweet deals by special interests. Where’s the Tea Party!?
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“Those who can afford to make a direct appeal to the president might get a tariff exemption. Everyone else is screwed. In effect, Trump has turned the administrative state into his private machine.
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there seem to be three basic explanations for why Republicans have ignored Trump’s open grift and self-dealing: “Either they just don’t see the problem, or it’s the price for participating in a two-party system where this particular politician is enduringly potent, or they never really meant that stuff about virtue anyway,” he wrote.
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Special treatment is available to anyone willing and able to pay the price, and the White House is open for business.”
https://reason.com/2025/08/08/apple-ceo-tim-cook-has-learned-the-rules-for-getting-ahead-in-trumps-america/
“M.A.R. is just one of “hundreds of thousands of noncitizens…paroled into the United States in recent years after inspection at a port of entry and who now face the threat of removal under highly truncated procedures that have rarely, if ever, been applied at any scale to parolees””
https://reason.com/2025/08/08/they-fled-socialism-and-came-to-the-u-s-legally-now-the-trump-administration-is-trying-to-deport-them/