Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
“Unreliable drug tests are sparking unnecessary child welfare investigations.”
https://reason.com/2024/09/13/the-government-is-taking-babies-away-because-their-moms-ate-poppy-seeds/
“But for a disastrous raid, narcotics officer Gerald Goines would have been free to continue framing people he thought were guilty.”
https://reason.com/2024/09/13/houston-officials-trusted-a-dishonest-drug-cop-for-decades-before-his-lies-killed-2-people/
“The Lebanese army has about 80,000 troops, with around 5,000 of them deployed in the south. Hezbollah has more than 100,000 fighters, according to the militant group’s late leader, Hassan Nasrallah. Its arsenal — built with support from Iran — is also more advanced.”
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“The U.S. had been a primary funder of the Lebanese army before the crisis. It has given some $3 billion in military aid since 2006, according to the State Department, which said in a statement that it aims “to enable the Lebanese military to be a stabilizing force against regional threats” and “strengthen Lebanon’s sovereignty, secure its borders, counter internal threats, and disrupt terrorist facilitation.”
President Joe Biden’s administration has also touted the Lebanese army as a key part of any diplomatic solution to the current war, with hopes that an increased deployment of its forces would supplant Hezbollah in the border area.
But that support has limits. Aid to the Lebanese army has sometimes been politically controversial within the U.S., with some legislators arguing that it could fall into the hands of Hezbollah, although there is no evidence that has happened.
In Lebanon, many believe that the U.S. has blocked the army from obtaining more advanced weaponry that might allow it to defend against Israel — America’s strongest ally in the region and the recipient of at least $17.9 billion in U.S. military aid in the year since the war in Gaza began.
“It is my personal opinion that the United States does not allow the (Lebanese) military to have advanced air defense equipment, and this matter is related to Israel,” said Walid Aoun, a retired Lebanese army general and military analyst.
Nerguizian said the perception is “not some conspiracy or half-truth,” noting that the U.S. has enacted a legal requirement to support Israel’s qualitative military edge relative to all other militaries in the region.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/hezbollah-israel-battle-border-lebanons-044734803.html
“Despite international sanctions meant to cripple Russia’s war machine, Russia has maintained an edge over Ukraine when it comes to artillery production and rate of fire.
Over a dozen analysts from the Royal United Services Institute wrote in a new report that Russia’s artillery advantage “is the single greatest determinant of the distribution of casualties and equipment loss, the balance of military initiative, the calculus of what is operationally possible, and thus the political perception of the trajectory of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.”
Russian artillery is estimated to be responsible for more than 70 percent of Ukraine’s combat casualties.
The analysts at RUSI said that the West needs to disrupt the industries that are keeping Russia’s deadly and destructive howitzers firing before it’s too late for Ukraine.
Russia’s defense industry is growing through new facilities, supply imports, and mass recruitment, the analysts said. They said that, without interruption, Moscow will be better poised to strengthen its position in Ukraine within the next few years.
The report explained that “Russia is self-sufficient in many of its needs, especially in raw materials like iron ore, and may have enough machine tools and stored howitzers from the Soviet era to support its war in Ukraine.”
However, the analysts said, “the longer the war continues, the more Russia’s dependencies on foreign suppliers will become a weakness.”
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“These vulnerabilities include placing sanctions on the supply of essential materials to Russia, preemptive purchasing of raw materials on the open market to prevent them from falling into the hands of hostile nations, or putting diplomatic pressure on countries to examine their domestic companies that are exporting goods to Russia.
One example the RUSI report gave was targeting chrome ore imports for barrel production. Another involved hindering the flow of machining equipment into Russia.
The analysts said that Ukraine’s Western partners should immediately prioritize disrupting Russia’s artillery supply chain because doing so for prolonged periods will make it more difficult for Moscow to maintain its howitzers and artillery ammunition.
This is critical for Ukraine. The analysts warned that “left on its current trajectory, Russian fire superiority will increase year-on-year and become less vulnerable to external disruption through pressure on the supply chain.”
The task potentially becomes even more urgent for the West as Russia continues to increase its security ties with China, Iran, and North Korea. The US has publicly expressed concern over Moscow’s deepening military relationships with its rivals and foes over the past few years.
Ukraine has managed to reduce Russia’s long-held artillery advantage and is increasingly taking steps to degrade its stockpiles of shells by using long-range drones to attack ammunition depots inside Russia, but more is needed to break Russia’s edge.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/war-analysts-argue-west-needs-165537999.html
“Prior to COVID-19, Fauci had long supported funding pandemic research that other scientists found risky, if not downright dangerous.
In 2005, as NIAID director, he praised researchers who’d used a grant from his agency to resurrect the virus that had caused the Spanish flu pandemic. Better understanding that virus would help prevent future diseases, he argued. “The certain benefits to be obtained by a robust and responsible research agenda aimed at developing the means to detect, prevent and treat [future pandemics] far outweigh any theoretical risks,” he said in an October 2005 statement co-authored with then–CDC Director Julie Gerberding.
This wasn’t a universal opinion at the NIAID. The agency’s chief scientist described this approach to pandemic prevention as “looking for a gas leak with a lighted match.”
Fauci would continue to praise and fund this kind of research. In 2011, researchers at the University of Wisconsin and at Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands managed to manipulate the virus H5N1 (which had been responsible for a 2004 bird flu epidemic in Asia) to transmit between mammals, a “gain of function” for a virus that had heretofore only been able to pass from infected birds to humans. One of the researchers involved in the work would say the enhanced pathogen they’d created was “very, very bad news” and “probably one of the most dangerous viruses you can make.” Fauci was more sanguine, telling The New York Times that “there is always a risk. But I believe the benefits are greater than the risks.””
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“In 2014, there was a series of embarrassing safety lapses at U.S. government labs, highlighting this risk.
Dozens of CDC employees were potentially exposed to live anthrax samples shipped by mistake to labs not equipped to handle them. At another CDC lab, a less dangerous version of bird flu was accidentally contaminated with deadly H5N1. Vials of smallpox capable of infecting people were stashed in a cabinet at an NIH lab, where they’d apparently been sitting for decades. None of these incidents were direct results of gain-of-function research. But they heightened the concern that researchers working to enhance deadly pathogens might do so in unsafe settings.”
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“In 2021, Fauci said the NIH “has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” That wasn’t true. What EcoHealth was doing in Wuhan clearly met the widely understood definition of gain-of-function research.
In his June 2024 testimony, Fauci dodged accusations that he lied by saying that while EcoHealth’s work might have met a generic definition of gain-of-function research, it didn’t meet the precise definition established in the P3CO framework.
Fauci said that every time he mentioned gain-of-function research, “the definition that I use is not my personal definition; it is a codified, regulatory and operative definition.” That definition, he said, “had nothing to do with me.”
On the contrary, regulatory definitions had quite a bit to do with Fauci. They were designed with the expectation that he and his fellow public health bureaucrats would use discretion and good judgment when making decisions. The relevant regulatory language included lots of “likelys and highlys and reasonably anticipated,” says Gerald Epstein, a former director at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy who wrote the P3CO policy. “These words are inherently subjective. You can’t not be. You’ve got to be making judgment calls on something that does not yet exist.” Those subjective definitions gave Fauci and his NIAID underlings considerable room to decide what research required additional review.”
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“We probably won’t ever definitively discover the origins of COVID-19.”
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“Chinese officials obstructed any investigation into the Wuhan Institute of Virology. In September 2019, the Associated Press reported, the institute took its database of viruses offline. It also hasn’t made public lab notebooks and other materials that might shed light on exactly what kinds of work it was doing in the lead-up to the pandemic. In late 2019, the Chinese government also exterminated animals and disinfected the Wuhan wet market. If COVID did leap from animal to human in the Wuhan market, as many natural origin proponents argue, that evidence is gone.
What we’re left with is studying the structure of the SARS-CoV-2 virus itself and whatever information can be gleaned from the U.S.-funded research that went on at Wuhan leading up to the pandemic.
On both fronts, Fauci, his underlings at the NIAID, and NIAID-funded scientists involved with work at Wuhan have worked to conceal information and discredit notions that COVID might have leaked from a lab.
In late January 2020, Fauci’s aides flagged the NIAID’s support of EcoHealth’s Wuhan research in emails to their boss. A few weeks later, Fauci and Daszak would go on Newt Gingrich’s podcast to dismiss the idea that COVID-19 came from the Wuhan lab, calling such arguments “conspiracy theories.”
Both men also worked to shape the discourse behind the scenes away from any focus on a lab leak. Daszak organized a group letter of scientists in The Lancet, the U.K.’s top medical journal, declaring that they “stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.” Daszak did not disclose his relationship to the Wuhan lab when organizing this letter; The Lancet’s editor would eventually concede that this was improper.
In testimony to the House coronavirus subcommittee in May 2024, Daszak would claim the “conspiracy theories” mentioned in the Lancet letter referred only to such wild early pandemic notions that COVID had pieces of HIV or snake DNA inserted into it. He said a word limit prevented him from being more precise.
Fauci, meanwhile, would help corral virologists into publishing the widely cited “proximal origin” paper in early 2020. In the paper, the authors flatly declared that “we do not believe any type of laboratory-leak scenario is plausible.”
Yet troves of private messages and emails released by the House subcommittee’s investigation show that the authors privately expressed far more openness to a lab leak theory.
One of the paper’s authors, Scripps Research evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen, privately rated a lab leak as “highly likely.” But Andersen had a pending $8.9 million grant application with the NIAID as the paper was drafted. That grant was later approved. In an email, one of the paper’s authors, Edward Holmes, references “pressure from on high” during the drafting process.
The authors of the proximal origin paper say they merely had their minds changed while drafting the paper. They were just following the scientific method.”
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“Fauci’s best defense is that he ran a sprawling agency that doled out billions of dollars in grants. Even the most detail-obsessed administrator couldn’t possibly keep track of every single program and project. And U.S. officials had limited control over what happened in the distant, opaque Wuhan lab.
But even if that’s true, it’s an admission of administrative negligence, since the oversight protocols weren’t followed. It also implies a dramatic failure of the risky research that Fauci championed for pandemic prevention. As Ridley says, the pandemic “occurred with the very viruses that there was the most attention paid to, in the very area where there was the most research going on, where there was the biggest program looking for potential pandemic pathogens, and yet they failed to see this one coming.” At a minimum, gain-of-function research didn’t protect the public from the pandemic.
Meanwhile, the more direct case against Fauci is strong: Not only was he an ardent supporter of research widely believed to be risky, but he manipulated bureaucratic protocols in order to avoid scrutiny of that research, then responded evasively when called to account for his actions. At least one of the programs born out of Fauci’s risky research crusade was pursuing exactly the type of viral enhancements that were present in COVID-19, and that research was conducted at the Wuhan virology lab in the very same city where the virus originated. Lab leak proponents cite the virus’s transmissibility as evidence for a Wuhan leak: After all, EcoHealth was trying to create pathogens primed to spread rapidly in humans.
The evidence is not fully conclusive. But it seems reasonably likely that Fauci pushed for what his peers repeatedly said was dangerous research, that some of that dangerous research produced a deadly viral pathogen that escaped the lab, and that Fauci helped cover up evidence and arguments for its origins.”
https://reason.com/2024/09/14/faucis-pandemic/
“Anecdotal data and some scientific studies suggest that several psychedelic drugs, including ibogaine, may be able to help root out the sources of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other mental maladies. Ibogaine stands out, however, for what may be a unique ability to abruptly end addiction-related cravings while also allowing the person to bypass the agonies of withdrawal.”
https://reason.com/2024/09/15/the-psychedelic-emancipator-of-kentucky/
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Permission Slips for Innovation
https://reason.com/podcast/2024/09/19/why-we-cant-have-nice-things-permission-slips-for-innovation/
“government data show immigrant labor contributes to economic growth and provides promotional opportunities for native-born workers. And a mass deportation event would cost U.S. taxpayers up to a trillion dollars and could cause the cost of living, including food and housing, to skyrocket, economists say.”
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“The latest U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Current Population Survey data shows that as of 2023, native-born Black workers are most predominantly employed in management and financial operations, sales and office support roles, while native-born Latino workers are most often employed in management, office support, sales and service occupations.
Foreign-born, noncitizen Black workers are most often represented in transportation and health care support roles, and foreign-born, noncitizen Hispanic workers are most often represented in construction, building and grounds cleaning.
How has immigration contributed to U.S. growth?
In 2023, international migrants — primarily from Latin America — accounted for more than two-thirds of the population growth in the United States, and so far this decade they have made up almost three-quarters of U.S. growth.
After hitting a record high in December 2023, the number of migrants crossing the border has plummeted.
The claim that immigrants are taking employment opportunities from native-born Americans is repeated by Trump’s advisers. They often cite a report produced by Steven Camarota, research director for the Center for Immigration Studies, a right-leaning think tank that seeks a reduced immigration flow into the U.S. The report combines job numbers for immigrants in the U.S. legally and illegally to reinforce the claim that foreigners are disproportionately driving U.S. labor growth and reaping most of the benefits.
Camarota’s report states that 971,000 more U.S.-born Americans were employed in May 2024 compared to May 2019, prior to the pandemic, while the number of employed immigrants has increased by 3.2 million.
It is true that international migrants have become a primary driver of population growth this decade, increasing their share of the overall population as fewer children are being born in the U.S. compared with years past. That’s according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s annual American Community Survey.
Are immigrants taking native-born workers’ jobs?
Economists who study immigrant labor’s impact on the economy say that people who are in the U.S. illegally are not taking native citizens’ jobs, because the roles that these immigrant workers take on are most often positions that native workers are unwilling to fill, such as agriculture and food processing jobs.
Giovanni Peri, a labor economist at the University of California, Davis, conducted research that explores the impact of the 1980 influx of Cuban immigrants in Miami (the so-called Mariel Boatlift) on Black workers’ employment. The study determined that the wages of Miami’s Black and Hispanic workers moved above those in other cities that did not have a surge of immigrant workers.
Peri told the AP that the presence of new immigrant labor often improves employment outcomes for native-born workers, who often have different language and skill sets compared to new immigrants.
In addition, there are not a fixed number of jobs in the U.S., immigrants tend to contribute to the survival of existing firms (opening up new opportunities for native workers) and there are currently more jobs available than there are workers available to take them. U.S. natives have low interest in working in labor-intensive agriculture and food production roles.
“We have many more vacancies than workers in this type of manual labor, in fact we need many more of them to fill these roles,” Peri said.
Stan Marek, who employs roughly 1,000 workers at his Houston construction firm, Marek Brothers Holdings LLC, said he has seen this firsthand.
Asked if immigrants in the U.S. illegally are taking jobs from native-born workers, he said, “Absolutely not, unequivocally.”
“Many of my workers are retiring, and their kids are not going to come into construction and the trades,” Marek said. He added that the U.S. needs an identification system that addresses national security concerns so those who are in the country illegally can work.
“There’s not enough blue-collar labor here,” he said.
Data also shows when there are not enough workers to fill these roles, firms will automate their jobs with machines and technology investments, rather than turn to native workers.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/data-shows-migrants-arent-taking-040445122.html
“The new numbers indicate that the violent crime victimization rate fell slightly in 2023, although the change was not statistically significant. “Findings show that there was an overall decline in the rate of violent victimization over the last three decades, from
1993 to 2023,” BJS Acting Director Kevin M. Scott reports. “While the 2023 rate was higher than those in 2020 and 2021, it was not statistically different from the rate 5 years ago, in 2019.”
That observation is inconvenient for Trump, who wants to blame Harris for rising crime during the Biden administration. Leaving aside the plausibility of assuming that a president, let alone a vice president, has much influence on crime rates, Trump’s thesis relies on the assumption that violent crime is more common now than it was during his administration. But even according to the data source he prefers, the 2023 rate was statistically indistinguishable from the rate in 2019, his second-to-last year in office.”
https://reason.com/2024/09/16/new-survey-data-undermine-trumps-narrative-of-rising-crime/
“The New York Police Department (NYPD) has a history of protecting bystanders by shooting them. This March, when Brooklyn man Nathan Scott tried to shoot a mugger who had his wallet, the NYPD killed Scott and wounded an auto mechanic across the street. In 2013, after a man in a road rage incident made finger guns and reached for his pocket, the NYPD tased the man and shot two women nearby. In 2012, after a disgruntled ex-employee murdered his coworker outside the Empire State Building, the NYPD shot the murderer along with nine bystanders.”
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“After chef Derrell Mickles allegedly snuck into a subway station without paying his fare on Sunday, the NYPD tried to arrest him. They claim that Mickles muttered “I’m going to kill you if you don’t stop following me” and drew a knife. (Mickles’ mother says the knife was from his job.)
After failing to subdue Mickles with a taser, the officers shot him, two bystanders, and one of their own in the crowded station.”
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“Mickles was within seven feet of the officers when they shot him, the NYPD says. Police are traditionally taught the “21-foot rule,” which says that a suspect holding a knife within 21 feet is close enough to pose an immediate threat. But the 21-foot rule is not a license to start shooting anyone within that distance”
https://reason.com/2024/09/16/nypd-opened-fire-on-a-fare-jumper-shooting-2-bystanders-and-a-cop/