Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
“At the beginning of the war, the Taliban were almost completely routed, and the U.S. military could have left from a position of strength. The new Afghan republic announced that it had an offer from the Taliban to surrender in exchange for amnesty and a chance to participate in politics. But the Bush administration turned down that offer, settling for nothing less than total, unconditional victory.”
“a new annual fee of $100,000 will be levied on each H-1B visa applicant going forward, which will serve as a big deterrent. Some number of the roughly 500,000 people currently in the U.S. with H-1Bs—high-skill visas used by tech workers, medical workers, and other professionals working in the fields they received degrees in—would have been dissuaded from coming here had the new system been in place. For companies hiring new talent, this fee will be a huge barrier to sponsoring foreign workers—which appears to be the point.
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Companies in many industries will probably respond to this shift by offshoring more of their workforces or relying on contract workers. (For the medical industry, this won’t really work. Bigger shortages might just become a fact of life.)”
https://reason.com/2025/09/22/the-100000-visa/
The Space Race Never Ended
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy_H2BeE_Nk
ICE outsiders yell at local police and accidentally hit them with tear gas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jVhlXARVTA
This “peace deal” is a demand for Hamas’s surrender. Hamas surrendering may bring peace, but I generally wouldn’t call a demand for surrender a ‘peace deal’.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/29/trump-touts-peace-plan-for-israel-hamas-has-not-agreed-00584857?cid=Connatix&nid=00000150-1596-d4ac-a1d4-179e288b0000&nname=illinois-playbook&nrid=00000164-8481-d4a7-a5fc-9ecfc4730000
Sometimes, for wars to end, leaders on the losing side have to decide that they love their kids more than they hate their enemy. Hamas hates Israel more than they care about the lives of Palestinians, so Hamas refuses to surrender.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=br3FD3Rt5-Q
“Unlike other forms of media, radio and network TV stations broadcast over public airwaves, which the FCC polices by issuing broadcast licenses. Federal law authorizes the FCC to ensure licensees serve “the public interest, convenience, and necessity.”
“Generally, this means [a broadcaster] must air programming that is responsive to the needs and problems of its local community of license,” the FCC claims.
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The “public interest standard” is in fact “not really a standard because it doesn’t tell you what they can’t do,” Thomas W. Hazlett, an economics professor at Clemson University, tells Reason. “There is some formal structure to the process, but in terms of an actual regulatory standard, it basically means that we’re going to make rules according to what we think is right. And of course, if you want to do things that are different and exercise power in a certain direction, you’ll talk a lot about public interest because it’s a very wide berth for justifying what you’re trying to do. It does dress it up a little bit, that it’s not just politics, it’s bigger than that, but not really: It’s what the five members of the commission vote to do, and that’s the beginning and the end.””
https://reason.com/2025/09/23/brendan-carr-says-networks-must-serve-the-public-interest-what-does-that-mean/
The Six Rules Every Dictator Lives By | Stephen Kotkin (Dartmouth Lecture)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcXEtJ0XoPk
“At the Arizona memorial service for Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated two weeks ago, President Donald Trump acknowledged Kirk’s character, saying, “he did not hate his opponents; he wanted the best for them.” And then he added, “That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponents. And I don’t want the best for them.”
It was an honest moment if an awkward comment to make at a memorial service for a man murdered (to all appearances) by a political opponent. Like too much of the political class across the ideological spectrum, Trump is prone to despising those he disagrees with. It raises questions about why people should ever submit to the governance of those who hate them—and whether politicians realize that they’re a big part of what brought us to this unfortunate moment.
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Trump also put the blame for Kirk’s murder on “the radical left” and promised to “find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence,” hinting at something nastier than a criminal investigation.”
https://reason.com/2025/09/24/politicians-go-out-of-their-way-to-make-political-tensions-worse/
“While Alphabet “continued to develop and enforce its policies independently, Biden Administration officials continued to press [Alphabet] to remove non-violative user-generated content,” a lawyer for Alphabet wrote in a September 23 letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan. Administration officials including Biden “created a political atmosphere that sought to influence the actions” of private tech platforms regarding the moderation of misinformation.
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the Biden administration’s attempts to pressure private companies into doing their bidding with regard to free speech seems quite quaint in comparison to what the Trump administration has been doing.”
https://reason.com/2025/09/24/google-says-biden-admin-pressured-company-to-remove-content/