Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
Israel’s invasion of Lebanon may not go well. Just pushing Hezbollah to the Litani River will be tough due to varied and difficult terrain and hardened Hezbollah fighters. Hezbollah can operate defensively despite losing several leaders.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2WDpMPalP0
“Special counsel Jack Smith has outlined new details of former President Donald Trump and his allies’ sweeping and “increasingly desperate” efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss, in a blockbuster court filing Wednesday aimed at defending Smith’s prosecution of Trump following the Supreme Court’s July immunity ruling.
Trump intentionally lied to the public, state election officials, and his own vice president in an effort to cling to power after losing the election, while privately describing some of the claims of election fraud as “crazy,” prosecutors alleged in the 165-page filing.
“When the defendant lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office,” the filing said. “With private co-conspirators, the defendant launched a series of increasingly desperate plans to overturn the legitimate election results in seven states that he had lost.”
When Trump’s effort to overturn the election through lawsuits and fraudulent electors failed to change the outcome of the election, prosecutors allege that the former president fomented violence, with prosecutors describing Trump as directly responsible for “the tinderbox that he purposely ignited on January 6.”
“The defendant also knew that he had only one last hope to prevent Biden’s certification as President: the large and angry crowd standing in front of him. So for more than an hour, the defendant delivered a speech designed to inflame his supporters and motivate them to march to the Capitol,” Smith wrote.
The lengthy filing — which includes an 80-page summary of the evidence gathered by investigators — outlines multiple instances in which Trump allegedly heard from advisers who disproved his allegations, yet continued to spread his claims of outcome-determinative voter fraud, prosecutors said.
“It doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election. You still have to fight like hell,” Trump allegedly told members of his family following the 2020 election, the filing said.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/bombshell-special-counsel-filing-includes-193959558.html
“Former President Donald Trump on Sunday called for “one real rough, nasty” and “violent day” of police retaliation in order to eradicate crime “immediately.”
The remarks — delivered by Trump at a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, just 36 days before the election — did not amount to a new policy proposal, according to a Trump campaign official.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/09/29/trump-violent-day-policing-crime-00181619
“The U.S. government has limited influence over those global prices, which are shaped by market and geopolitical factors. Gas prices dropped during the early months of the pandemic, for example, because millions of people stayed home and dramatically reduced their gas consumption. But as the Bureau of Labor Statistics documented, prices surged as society reopened and the economy started to rebound.
While energy prices have consistently been higher under Biden than they were during Trump’s first term, they have dropped from their heights in 2022, when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent global prices soaring. As the Agriculture Department noted in February, fuel and oil costs saw significant declines in 2023 and are expected to decline again in 2024, thanks to drops in global energy prices. U.S. oil prices in the past few days have dropped to their lowest level in two years as OPEC+ says it will increase its own oil production later this year and fuel demand in China looks weaker.
And it’s not clear green-lighting more domestic drilling would have much impact on energy costs. For one thing, the U.S. is already producing record amounts of oil and gas, not to mention renewable energy like solar, wind and hydropower. The Biden administration has also approved more permits to drill for oil on federal land than many of its predecessors, even as it moves to restrict how much federal land is available for drilling.
Several economists also told POLITICO that while energy costs are a factor in every part of the food supply chain, they’re just one of many inputs companies consider when setting prices.”
https://www.politico.com/interactives/2024/food-cost-price-harris-trump-biden/
Israel’s invasion of Lebanon may not go well. Just pushing Hezbollah to the Litani River will be tough due to varied and difficult terrain and hardened Hezbollah fighters. Hezbollah can operate defensively despite losing several leaders.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2WDpMPalP0
https://www.yahoo.com/news/fact-check-7-false-claims-made-by-walz-and-vance-during-their-vice-presidential-debate-last-night-042419198.html
“The Biden administration did pressure Meta, as well as its competitors, to crack down on Covid-19 misinformation throughout the pandemic. In 2021, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called it “an urgent threat,” and Biden himself said that misinformation was “killing people,” a statement he later walked back. This pressure was also at the center of a recent Supreme Court case, in which justices ruled in favor of the Biden administration.
We also knew that Meta, then known simply as Facebook, pushed back at efforts to stop the spread of misinformation on its platforms. Not long after Biden’s “killing people” remark, leaked company documents revealed that Facebook knew that vaccine misinformation on its platforms was undermining its own goal of protecting the vaccine rollout and was causing harm. It even studied the broader problem and produced several internal reports on the spread of misinformation, but despite pressure from Congress, Facebook failed to share that research with lawmakers at the time.
We actually learned about the specific kind of pressure the White House put on Facebook a year ago, thanks to documents the company turned over to, you guessed it, Jim Jordan and the House Judiciary Committee.
The Biden administration issued a statement after Zuckerberg’s latest letter became public. It said, in part, “Our position has been clear and consistent: We believe tech companies and other private actors should take into account the effects their actions have on the American people, while making independent choices about the information they present.”
But the Zuckerberg letter didn’t stop with details of the well-known crackdown on Covid misinformation. It also reminds the public of the time, ahead of the 2020 election, the FBI warned social media companies that a New York Post article about Hunter Biden’s laptop could be part of a Russian disinformation campaign. Without mentioning any direct pressure from the government, Zuckerberg says in the letter that his company demoted the laptop story while it conducted a fact-check. He told podcaster Joe Rogan something similar in a 2022 interview, when he mentioned that an FBI disinformation warning contributed to the decision to suppress the story. Twitter also suppressed the laptop story, and its executives denied that there was pressure from Democrats or law enforcement to do so.
Zuckerberg also addresses some donations he made to voting access efforts in the 2020 election through his family’s philanthropic foundation. “My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another — or to even appear to be playing a role,” the billionaire said. “So I don’t plan on making a similar contribution this cycle.” The House Judiciary Committee responded in a tweet, “Mark Zuckerberg also tells the Judiciary Committee that he won’t spend money this election cycle. That’s right, no more Zuck-bucks.” Neither party mentioned that Zuckerberg also declined to make a contribution in the 2022 cycle for the same reasons.
The right is taking a victory lap over this Zuckerberg letter. Others are simply wondering why on earth, on an otherwise quiet week in August, did Zuckerberg even bother to remind us of all of these familiar facts?
https://www.vox.com/technology/369136/zuckerberg-letter-facebook-censorship-biden
“On the merits, there is little question that liberals should prioritize making housing cheaper. There is nothing progressive about putting property owners’ return-on-investment above less privileged Americans’ access to shelter. Further, promoting homeownership as a wealth building strategy also fails many homeowners. Concentrating one’s savings in a single asset is a perilous investment strategy, especially for America’s least privileged groups.”
…
“although tanking home prices isn’t politically tenable, slowing their growth in the name of affordability probably is. And for people looking to buy or rent a home, it makes a big difference whether home values rise faster or slower than wages. If paychecks grow more rapidly than home values, then housing becomes more affordable for workers, even if the nominal price of a house goes up. In that scenario, fewer renters would struggle to keep roofs over their heads, while homeowner backlash to increasing affordability would be limited, since, on paper, houses would appear more valuable than when they were purchased.
Pursuing that outcome, however, means making housing a worse investment for new buyers, especially relative to putting their savings into diversified index funds. Democrats therefore should not go out of their way to encourage middle-class Americans to invest in housing. And they certainly should not adopt policies that privilege homeowners over renters.”
https://www.vox.com/policy/369525/kamala-harris-housing-plan-corporate-landlords-homeownership
“Three of America’s four major military services failed to recruit enough servicemembers in 2023. The Army has failed to meet its manpower goals for the last two years and missed its 2023 target by 10,000 soldiers, a 20 percent shortfall. Today, the active-duty Army stands at 445,000 soldiers, 41,000 fewer than in 2021 and the smallest it has been since 1940.
The Navy and Air Force missed their recruiting goals, too, the Navy failing across the board. The Marine Corps was the only service to achieve its targets (not counting the tiny Space Force). But the Marines’ success is partially attributable to significant force structure cuts as part of its Force Design 2030 overhaul. As a result, Marine recruiters have nearly 19,000 fewer active duty and selected reserve slots to fill today than they did as recently as 2020.
A decrease in the size of the active force might be less worrying if a large reserve pool could be mobilized in the event of a major war or national emergency. But recruiting challenges have impacted the reserve components even more severely than the active duty force. The National Guard and Reserves have been shrinking since 2020. Last year, the Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve each missed their recruiting targets by 30 percent. The Army Reserve had just 9,319 enlistees after aiming to recruit 14,650 new soldiers. Numbers for the Navy Reserve were just as bad — the service missed its enlisted and officer targets by 35 and 40 percent, respectively.
Should a true national security emergency arise, America lacks the ability to mobilize as Israel and Russia have done. The Individual Ready Reserve (IRR) — comprising former active duty or selected reserve personnel who could be reactivated by the Secretary of Defense during wartime or a national emergency — is designed to act as a bridge from the AVF to a revived draft. Almost forgotten even by servicemembers, the IRR earned brief notoriety when some servicemembers were “stop-lossed” during the Iraq War — pulled from the IRR and returned to active duty involuntarily, usually to deploy again.
Today, there are just over 264,000 servicemembers in the entire IRR. The Army’s IRR pool has shrunk from 700,000 in 1973 to 76,000 in 2023. Forget building new units in wartime: the IRR is now incapable of even providing sufficient casualty replacements for losses from the first battles of a high-intensity war.
And even if more Americans could be encouraged to sign up, they may not be able to serve. Before Covid, fewer than three in 10 Americans in the prime recruiting demographic — ages 17 to 24 — were eligible to serve in uniform. Those numbers have shrunk further since the pandemic began. Only 23 percent of young Americans are qualified to enlist without a waiver, based on the most recent data. Endemic youth obesity, record levels of physical unfitness, mental health issues exacerbated by the Covid pandemic, and drug use have rendered the vast majority of young Americans ineligible for military service. Scores on the ASVAB — the military’s standardized exam for recruits, which tests aptitude for service — plummeted during the pandemic.”
…
“The recruiting crisis is a greater national security threat to the United States than the wars that currently dominate the headlines. If there is one lesson America’s leaders should take from the conflicts in Europe and the Middle East, it is that troop mobilization and depth are still essential for fighting wars. As both Israel and Ukraine have learned, no amount of high-tech wizardry has changed this enduring reality of warfare. Should the United States fail to fix its military recruiting, it will risk losing a great power war — with enormous consequences for all Americans.”
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/368528/us-military-army-navy-recruit-numbers
The Bible is not anti-abortion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Agy88gCk1K0