Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
ICE’s Spending on Weaponry Is Up More Than 600 Percent Over Last Year
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/10/ice-spending-small-arms-weapons-chemical-munitions-increased-700-percent-2025/
“In case after case, Homeland Security’s Public Affairs Office releases incorrect information about arrests carried out by federal immigration officers.
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ProPublica reported last week that it had found 170 U.S. citizens who had been detained by federal immigration officers since Trump’s mass deportation blitz began. Some of them were pepper-sprayed and assaulted, and others were held in detention for days before being released.
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After a video of a Chicago-area teenager being violently arrested went viral earlier this month, McLaughlin wrote on X that the video was “from a year ago” and that the agents involved weren’t ICE. Both claims were false.
McLaughlin also recently claimed that a 13-year-old boy detained by ICE in Massachusetts was in possession of a knife and gun. However, the town’s mayor confirmed during a press conference the next day that “no guns were found” during the boy’s arrest.”
https://reason.com/2025/10/22/homeland-security-wont-stop-lying-about-who-immigration-enforcers-are-arresting/
“the company’s market share decreased by 10 percentage points following its merger in 2014, sitting at around 70 percent in 2024. Live Nation’s FY 24 net profit margin of 2.8 percent—considerably lower than the total U.S. market’s net margin of 8.7 percent—suggests that the firm lacks pricing power. Moreover, the profits Live Nation makes have little to do with the secondary ticket market: “Revenue from fees on concert ticket resale is less than 2% of Live Nation’s revenue,” the company said in a reply to Blackburn and Luján on Friday.
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so long as artists set prices below the market rate, brokers will find a way to get tickets to those who value them the most, with or without Ticketmaster.”
https://reason.com/2025/10/22/live-nations-merger-with-ticketmaster-isnt-responsible-for-high-resale-prices-you-are/
“In her dissent, Judge Susan P. Graber warned that the decision “erodes core constitutional principles, including sovereign States’ control over their States’ militias and the people’s First Amendment rights.” State Attorney General Dan Rayfield criticized the decision, saying that the ruling “sets a dangerous precedent that would allow a president to put Oregon soldiers on our streets with almost no justification.””
https://reason.com/2025/10/22/9th-circuit-court-upholds-trumps-deployment-of-national-guard-in-portland/
“now that Trump’s president, and getting lots of criticism from the media, he’s started calling speech that he doesn’t like “illegal.”
“They’ll take a great story, and they’ll make it bad. I think that’s really illegal, personally.”
He also threatened TV stations: “They give me only bad publicity…maybe their license should be taken away.”
“There’s free speech, and then there’s hate speech,” said his attorney general, Pam Bondi. “We will absolutely target you…if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.”
They will “target” people?
Trump’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman, Brendan Carr, joined in. When Jimmy Kimmel said nasty and incorrect things about Charlie Kirk’s murder, Carr threatened ABC’s TV licenses, saying, like a mafia boss, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.”
Yet months earlier, he’d tweeted: “Dismantle the censorship cartel and restore free speech rights.”
And years earlier, he tweeted that the FCC does “not have a roving mandate to police speech in the name of the ‘public interest.'”
He was right—then.
But power tends to corrupt.
Once Carr was in power, he no longer supported the speech he’d recently promoted.”
https://reason.com/2025/10/22/trump-campaigned-on-free-speech-that-isnt-how-hes-governed/
“The planned, carefully controlled burns that can prevent megafires—known as prescribed fires—rarely qualify. They are, by definition, intentional and therefore generally fail to meet the Clean Air Act’s requirements for exceptional events. The result is a perverse incentive: The uncontrolled wildfire that blackens the skies is given a regulatory free pass, while the low-intensity prescribed fire that could have reduced the risk of that disaster faces red tape and potential penalties.
As a result, states become reluctant to issue burn permits, and fire practitioners scale back projects rather than risk running afoul of federal standards.”
https://reason.com/2025/10/22/the-clean-air-act-is-making-our-air-dirtier/
“this supposed civil libertarian also wrote the majority opinion upholding concentration camps for innocent American citizens. And Black did not even express any public regret over his Korematsu ruling in the decades to come. “It is noteworthy,” the legal scholar Stanley Kutner once observed, “that in an interview shortly before his death, Justice Black maintained that both the President and the Court had been right in their wartime actions.”
According to Black, the outcome in Korematsu was dictated by the existence of emergency conditions and the resulting judicial deference owed to the executive branch. “The military authorities considered the need for action was great, and time was short,” Black declared. “We cannot—by availing ourselves of the calm perspective of hindsight—now say that at that time these actions were unjustified.”
Writing in dissent, Justice Frank Murphy, another Roosevelt appointee and ardent New Dealer, argued that the president’s actions were, in fact, clearly unjustified at the time he took them. “It is essential that there be definite limits to military discretion, especially where martial law has not been declared,” Murphy wrote. “Individuals must not be left impoverished of their constitutional rights on a plea of military necessity that has neither substance nor support.””
https://reason.com/2025/10/23/what-the-japanese-internment-case-teaches-about-judicial-deference-to-presidential-power/
“Under Milei, inflation has dropped massively. The poverty rate has gone down. Public spending has plummeted, and budget surpluses have appeared. Housing supply in Buenos Aires has totally turned around following the repeal of rent control laws.
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But “the policy of managing the currency has become a trap,” adds The Economist. “Even after he partially floated the peso in April alongside an IMF [International Monetary Fund] bailout, he has sought to maintain its level artificially high. Defending the exchange rate has cost Argentina billions of dollars in scarce foreign-currency reserves and has pushed interest rates sky-high, creating a drag on growth. Jobs, rather than inflation, are what now worry voters the most.”
Milei had to get a credit swap from the U.S., to the tune of $20 billion (which he must pay back, though the terms of the deal have not been made clear to the public). He secured a similarly massive IMF bailout back in April. He keeps needing emergency credit lines to keep the peso strong, but it’s not clear that this policy is totally working. It makes sense why he would pursue it in the first place: Prices have historically spiraled out of control, and the central bank is not trusted by the people. In order for some of Milei’s less-popular social safety net cuts to be palatable, the people needed to feel like there was some legitimate stability and predictability in their monetary system, lest they revert to favoring Peronism.
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“Under the exchange rate system that Milei implemented earlier this year, the peso floats freely within a band,” writes Lorenzo Bernaldo de Quirós for the Cato Institute. “When a government tries to maintain a fixed but adjustable exchange rate, it creates perverse incentives. If markets perceive that the currency is overvalued, expectations of devaluation are created, prompting speculators and citizens themselves to take their capital out of the country to avoid losses. To defend the exchange rate, the central bank must use its international reserves, but these are finite.” Reserves are limited; speculators can easily take advantage.”
https://reason.com/2025/10/23/mileis-moment-of-truth/
“A few scenarios are possible. One is that the U.S. really is striking narcotraffickers, and that either their families don’t know their dead relatives are narcotraffickers or are obfuscating. Another possibility is that the U.S. is striking innocent fisherman and calling them narcotraffickers. There could, of course, be a mix of smugglers and fishermen.
But the U.S. government is almost definitely acting illegally here. These people are not combatants. We don’t know if they’re affiliated with groups designated terrorist organizations. Congress has not approved these strikes, and Trump doesn’t even appear to be seeking retroactive approval. When some senators did try to check Trump via the War Powers Act, it didn’t go all that well. And rest assured that Petro, Maduro, and all other who stand to profit are going to keep milking this for all it’s worth, using Trump’s inevitable screw-ups as a means of distracting from their own misbehavior.”
https://reason.com/2025/10/20/did-the-u-s-just-kill-a-random-fisherman/
“Backed by funding from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed in July, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has entered into contracts with companies to provide surveillance capabilities like facial recognition algorithms, an iris-scanning identification app, controversial spyware on smartphones, and a real-time smartphone location and social media tracking system. In September alone, ICE racked up $1.4 billion in new surveillance technology contracts, the highest in at least 18 years
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These contracts are in addition to any privately owned surveillance networks to which ICE has access. Flock Safety, for example, has allowed ICE to access over 80,000 of its AI-powered license plate reader cameras installed nationwide, according to 404 Media. The expansive—and growing—mass surveillance camera network captures the license plate number, make, model, and any distinctive features of all passing vehicles, making it possible to track cars and, by extension, drivers, often without a warrant.
Although ICE has sold its surveillance campaign as necessary to locating and deporting undocumented immigrations, the Trump administration has signaled that the technologies will also be used on American citizens.”
https://reason.com/2025/10/23/ice-is-mounting-a-mass-surveillance-campaign-on-american-citizens/