Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
“”Every new law requires enforcement; every act of enforcement includes the possibility of violence,” Yale Law School’s Stephen L. Carter wrote in 2014 after New York City cops killed Eric Garner during a confrontation rooted in suspicion that he was illegally selling loose cigarettes.
Every violent enforcement action, I’ll add, involves enforcers acting through a filter of flaws and prejudices.”
“The annual budget deficit—the gap between government spending and tax revenues—would run about $900 billion in 2019, and it would push beyond $1 trillion every year starting in 2022. Debt as a percentage of the country’s total economy would rise steadily, reaching 93 percent of GDP by 2029, the highest level since the years directly following World War II.
Automatic spending on major entitlements would keep government spending high and make reductions difficult. Interest payments on the nation’s rising debt would become one of the country’s largest spending categories. The persistently high levels of debt and deficits, meanwhile, would serve as a drag on economic growth. Overall debt levels were on track to reach the highest levels in the nation’s history.
All of this was reason to worry. “Such high and rising debt would have significant negative consequences, both for the economy and for the federal budget,” the report warned, with reduced national productivity and total wages plus an increased likelihood of a fiscal crisis. In an emergency scenario, policymakers might be more constrained from responding in the most effective way. Debt and deficits were a modest burden on the economy in good times. And the higher they ran, the more economic risk accumulated.
Again, this was the outlook in 2019, when the unemployment rate was below five percent, when the deficit was projected to run about $900 billion over a 12-month span, when daily viral death tolls and case-count heat maps weren’t posted on major news sites like especially grisly weather reports.
In June of this year, the federal deficit was $864 billion.”
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“the United States is in uncharted waters in terms of both public finances and their effect on the economy. And no one really knows where we’ll go from here.”
“Many U.S. companies only partially operate on the mainland, and some of them are basically shut out. Having offices in Hong Kong lets them have a footprint in China without being openly subject to CCP rule”
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“China is exerting more direct control of Hong Kong through the Committee for Safeguarding National Security and another new body called the “Office for Safeguarding National Security of the Central People’s Government in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region,” which is totally under the control of the mainland and not subject to Hong Kong jurisdiction at all. As the lines between the CCP and Hong Kong governance become blurrier, it becomes harder to claim you do not collaborate with or enable foreign governments that operate ethnic concentration camps.
And the NSL asks for much collaboration. Article 43 of the NSL empowers Hong Kong police with authorities to investigate suspected subversion. Specifically, law enforcement can “[require] a person who published information or the relevant service provider [i.e. technology company] to delete the information or provide assistance” including decryption. If the service provider refuses, the police can petition for a warrant to force the intended digital deeds.
In other words, to operate in Hong Kong, a technology company, foreign or domestic, must accept being deputized as a CCP informant. Failure to comply means possible fines of up to $100,000 HKD (around $13,000 USD) and six months in prison.
There are also provisions for surveillance.”
“Under current rules set by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), non-surgical abortion— i.e., the kind that’s induced by pharmaceuticals, not physicians—still requires patients to visit a hospital, doctor’s office, or medical clinic to be prescribed the abortion drugs, even though a patient will go through the process at home.
“A medical or medication abortion uses two drugs to terminate a pregnancy,” explains a new report, “Prescription Denied: Accessing the Abortion Pill,” from Newsy. The first of these pills, mifepristone, “blocks a hormone to induce the abortion. The second drug, misoprostol, completes it by expelling the pregnancy. But mifepristone, which for medication abortion goes by the brand name Mifeprex, is among the most restricted drugs in the U.S. which makes it challenging to get. … the Food and Drug Administration imposes tighter restrictions on Mifeprex than on opioids such as fentanyl.”
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), the National Women’s Health Network (NWHN), and other groups have been pushing the FDA to revise its rules so that abortion patients can see doctors via telemedical appointments and then receive their pills in the mail.
“If the laws and regulations that determine the terms of abortion access in the United States were based on science—not politics—medication abortion would be widely available in the United States without medically unnecessary restrictions on distribution,” states an open letter signed by a range of physicians and health and advocacy groups.”
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“U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang seemed to be in agreement with these advocates and doctors, writing in his decision that “in-person requirements” for abortion pills present a “substantial obstacle” to patients and are likely unconstitutional.”
“At least eight people across the country were hit in the face with rubber bullets and other less-lethal projectiles during the May 30 anti-police brutality protests that erupted after the death of George Floyd. Videos of these partial blindings, which challenge official statements put out by the various police departments, were released yesterday by The Washington Post.
While many of the departments involved claimed to have deployed rubber bullets, tear gas, and other less-lethal munitions to disperse protesters who were throwing objects at officers, footage from the incidents show many people who were partially blinded posed no “obvious threat” to police.”
“The New York Times has looked over video footage showing the NYPD responding to protesters (some of which they gathered from Doucette’s feed) and found case after case of officers shoving, beating, and violently assaulting people who do not appear to be engaging in illegal behavior or, often, even resisting the police. They looked at 60 incidences of troubling behavior by NYPD officers in just the first 10 days of protests.
In one video, in less than a minute, the same police officer harshly shoves an unresisting protester to the pavement, pushes a cyclist, and then picks up and body slams a third protester who was standing and pointing at the gathered police officers as they were apparently breaking up a protest. In another, police beat a man on the ground after chasing him, and one even steps on the man’s neck, notable given that Floyd died from having an officer kneel on his neck for several minutes.
The Times looked over video of police just randomly lashing out and shoving people as they walked by them. They found a video of police officers slamming a man to the ground after he had been arrested and they were leading him away. They found video footage of an NYPD officer grabbing a man and hurling him into a parked car, but not arresting him, and just leaving his body on the street.
And despite the constant refrain from police that these are “isolated incidents,” the Times found behavior repeating itself and multiple examples of each questionably violent response from police.
The Times acknowledges that the videos lack full context, and we don’t see what happened before or after these violent outbursts. But they also note that the city’s policing guidelines order officers to use only the amount of reasonable force “necessary to gain control or custody of a subject.”
An NYPD spokesperson told the Times that four officers have been disciplined for their conduct during the protests in late May and early June, and the department is investigating 51 other instances of possible protest-related police misconduct. The spokesperson declined to actually watch or respond to any specific videos. The Police Benevolent Union that represents most NYPD officers also declined to respond to the Times.”
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“”A lot of this was ‘street justice,'” Philip M. Stinson told the Times. Stinson is a criminologist at Bowling Green University and a former police officer who focuses on studying police use of forces. He saw many of these cases as “gratuitous acts of extrajudicial violence doled out by police officers on the street to teach somebody a lesson.” He described some of the tactics he saw as “sloppy” and “downright criminal.””
“COVID-19 has forced doctors to postpone many types of surgeries, but some things can’t wait. Ophthalmologist Jay Singleton saw one man at risk of permanent blindness on a recent Friday evening in New Bern, North Carolina.
“He had a rare type of glaucoma caused by a large cataract, and the only thing to do was to remove it so the pressure would go down inside the eye,” Singleton says. “We knew it was a very real situation because he already had lost one of his eyes to the same thing.”
Singleton had all the skills and equipment necessary for the job at his state-of-the-art vision center. Unfortunately, the government won’t let him use his space for the vast majority of the surgeries he performs.
North Carolina and many other states impose a regulatory tool called a “certificate of need” (CON), which forces health care providers to prove an unmet need in the market before operating a facility, scaling up, or purchasing major medical equipment. In practice, CON laws block new competition, funneling traffic to big hospital systems—the last thing that should happen during a global pandemic.”
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“”You have to pick a side,” Singleton says. “If you treat it like a business, you must allow other people to enter the market and compete with you like every other business. If you treat it like a public partnership, then you can’t enrich yourself on the backs of Medicare patients. You can’t have it both ways.””
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“15 states—including California, Colorado, and most recently New Hampshire—have eliminated their CON programs.
None of these states has experienced any negative effects. Indeed, Matthew Mitchell, a researcher at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, says states that got rid of their CON laws have more hospitals and surgery centers per capita, along with more hospital beds, dialysis clinics, and hospice care facilities.
“Forty years of peer-reviewed academic research suggests that CON laws have not only failed to achieve their goals but have in many cases led to the opposite of what those who enacted the laws intended,” he says.”
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“Many states, including Connecticut, Georgia, and South Carolina, suspended their CON laws after the pandemic came to America. Other states, such as Rhode Island, rolled back CON laws at hospitals and nursing facilities but not outpatient surgery centers or hospices.
Instead of just being a temporary reprieve, these emergency actions should be expanded and made permanent.”
“The United States Mexico Canada Agreement (USMCA) is an updated version of the nearly 25-year-old, trillion-dollar North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). It includes major changes on cars and new policies on labor and environmental standards, intellectual property protections, and some digital trade provisions.”
“The “one country, two systems” principle — enshrined in the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s de facto constitution — has been in place ever since Britain handed back control of the territory to China in 1997.
As Vox’s Jen Kirby explains, “The ‘one country’ part means [Hong Hong] is officially part of China, while the ‘two systems’ part gives it a degree of autonomy, including rights like freedom of the press that are absent in mainland China. China is supposed to abide by this arrangement until 2047, but it has been eroding those freedoms and trying to bring Hong Kong more tightly under its control for years.””
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“Beijing’s imposition of this new national security law is the most direct and dramatic move China has made toward erasing those freedoms once and for all.”