Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
JD Vance wrote a book with the theme of him and his people being othered by the rest of the country. Then, he goes into politics with a strong strategy of othering other people in immoral ways.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qa_PCNgW79E
Child vaccination rates have declined again, likely causing an increase in formerly rare diseases.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0s8dAMhLgI
“El Salvador’s congress has approved constitutional reforms to abolish presidential term limits, allowing President Nayib Bukele to run an unlimited number of times.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/el-salvador-scraps-term-limits-040456105.html
“The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), a landmark law to increase government accountability, is falling short in its aim to improve transparency with American citizens, according to a recent report from Open the Books. FOIA gives the public the freedom to request government records from federal agencies, with the exception of certain information involving the White House, congressional records, confidential financial information, national security matters, and law enforcement records. In recent years, government-caused inefficiency has increased wait times for FOIA requests, which “have become so long they undercut the accountability FOIA is meant to provide,” per Open the Books.
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While understaffing at federal agencies may be partially to blame, Open the Books found cases of government officials deliberately delaying FOIA requests.
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Open the Books offers potential fixes to FOIA’s problems, including updating FOIA’s outdated legacy software, removing bureaucrats who slow-walk requests, and instituting staffing quotas.”
https://reason.com/2025/07/29/the-freedom-of-information-act-is-failing-due-to-government-bloat/
“Immigration officers were caught on video celebrating proudly after using chokeholds and a stun gun to arrest two undocumented immigrants in Florida. The owner of the video, an 18-year-old American citizen, was threatened and charged after he refused to delete the footage revealing the harsh tactics used by immigration authorities to meet the Trump administration’s mass deportation goals.
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The recording continues after the three men are in custody and captures the officers’ candid remarks. A couple of officers can be heard cracking jokes about how one man smells and bragging about the stun gun use. One officer remarks on how “they’re starting to resist more now.” Another responds, “We’re going to end up shooting some of them… because they’re going to start fighting.”
“Just remember, you can smell that [inaudible] with a $30,000 bonus,” one officer says amidst post-arrest celebrations.
After his arrest and six-hour detention at a CBP station, Laynez-Ambrosio told The Guardian he was threatened with charges if he didn’t delete the exposing video. When he refused, he was charged with obstruction without violence for having allegedly interfered with CBP officers’ arrest—a first-degree misdemeanor punishable by up to a $1,000 fine and one year of incarceration. He was ultimately sentenced to 10 hours of community service and a four-hour anger management course.
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“The federal government has imposed quotas for the arrest of immigrants,” Laynez-Ambrosio’s attorney, Jack Scarola, told The Guardian. “Any time law enforcement is compelled to work towards a quota, it poses a significant risk to other rights.”
Scarola’s warning appears to be right. The Department of Homeland Security posted on Monday that it will “stop at nothing to hunt [undocumented immigrants] down.” The brutal tactics used by federal officers under the Trump administration, against mostly nonviolent immigrants—including people on their way to work and who pose no threat to public safety—will only serve to degrade constitutional protections and subject more people to the government’s abuse of power.”
https://reason.com/2025/07/29/this-u-s-citizen-recorded-an-immigration-arrest-officers-told-him-to-delete-it-or-face-charges/
“A new report by the Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ) found that homicides are significantly down in major cities across the country compared to last year, and the Trump administration is claiming its mass deportation program is part of the reason.
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First, one must begin by congratulating the Trump administration on its sudden, enthusiastic embrace of crime statistics. Trump and his reelection campaign repeatedly claimed in 2024 that crime was spiking even though it had been generally dropping since 2022.
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“there were issues with the FBI crime data, which were eventually revised, but the data generally jibed with what other public safety researchers were reporting: that crime in 2024 was continuing to go down.
Now that those numbers are politically useful, the Trump administration and its allies would like to take a very early victory lap.
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there is no evidence yet of any deterrent effect, or that crime is falling now because of the administration’s mass deportation program, rather than for whatever reason it was falling in the past. Quantifying the effects of laws and law enforcement—and attempting to attribute causation to dips and spikes in crime—is a notoriously tricky problem in criminal justice research, and it usually takes years to collect and analyze the data.
On its face, the claim that Trump’s immigration enforcement is driving down crime runs into the problem that most of the immigrants being arrested aren’t criminals. About 60 percent of people arrested by ICE between January and June had no criminal record. In fact, the Trump administration’s quotas for arrests and deportations have forced ICE and DHS to stop prioritizing investigations of criminal networks and serious offenders.
There may well be an incapacitative effect on crime from the scale of the Trump administration’s mass deportations, but even then, it would likely be statistically minor. Most studies that have attempted to quantify how much the “mass incarceration” era contributed to the national drop in crime that began in the mid-’90s have pegged it somewhere between single digits and 25 percent. And that represented the largest buildup of prisons and prison populations in U.S. history.
Crime also fell during the Obama administration and the second half of the Biden administration, but no one suggested that Joe Biden’s executive order banning police chokeholds or Barack Obama’s lax marijuana enforcement were responsible for safer cities.”
https://reason.com/2025/07/29/trump-administration-takes-credit-for-crime-drop-it-previously-denied-existed/
When people say MSNBC is on the left and Fox News is on the right, they are misunderstanding what Fox News is. Fox News isn’t an honest conservative news network, it acts as the propaganda arm of the Republican Party. Its creator cynically created Fox News to spread bullshit in favor of his ideology.
MSNBC had a liberal bent, but its hosts don’t go help a current or running president campaign. Each host has his own thing, but there isn’t an overarching propaganda goal to the organization.
Fox News may be unique in the Western World when it comes to a supposed news network designed as a partisan and ideological propaganda arm.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IXXOZhkaPE
Is the Navy’s new F/A-XX stealth fighter dead in the water?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sH019U1QhDw
India has been fighting a regional Maoist insurgency for decades.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvSLjsoRLHE
The Japanese trade deal is actually bad for U.S. car companies. Cars manufactured in Japan will have a 15% tariff on them, but cars made in Mexico by U.S. companies will have a 25% tariff, giving U.S. companies a disadvantage. They could move that back to the U.S., but the move itself is costly, and the cost to make the cars in the U.S. is even costlier.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfxC6hCMlmI