Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
Sulla lost an election when running based on his successes as a junior officer. Next election, he ran by telling the voters what they wanted to hear and bribing people, and won.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbKMf3I0Vec
The MAGA right is really good at bullshiting. They don’t express the same principles or beliefs from topic to topic. They claim that Democrats did it first when what a Democrat did was different or not as bad, and when two wrongs don’t make a right. When confronted on a specific and important event, they claim ignorance.
Mainstream media is often biased to the right because they are so concerned about not being considered biased to the left that they overcorrect, and because the right is more likely to repeatedly lie and the mainstream isn’t good at holding their feet to the fire; while they will come hard at a liberal for a softer or/and less misleading actions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SE3YAwOtO1w
Andrew Tate appears to have committed serious crimes in Romania, but Romanian politicians let him off the hook to please the Trump administration.
As more people reject vaccines, we have a Measles outbreak.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6eyeOC6Vu0
The US military is weakening compared to its peers and is too heavily relying on aging legacy systems. US military spending is incredibly low compared to the Cold War. If the US doesn’t remain the strongest country, then the US, for all its flaws, will look like an angel compared to the authoritarian countries who will replace the US.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0TTtD8l9lI
Nostalgia is manufactured as easily as plastic trinkets, and it distracts adults who should know better. The 1950s, mythologized by the New Right in its push for a more traditional social and economic order, were not an idyll.
Instead it was an era of shorter life expectancy, of higher poverty by today’s standards, of legal and de facto discrimination, of limited economic opportunity for women and minorities, of gay Americans often being persecuted, and of far fewer consumer goods, technologies, and comforts. Implying that it was a golden age overlooks economic facts and the individuals whose rights and opportunities were sharply constrained.
The left’s narrative—that America remains fundamentally unjust and economically stacked against working families—is equally disconnected from empirical reality. As Michael Strain and Clifford Asness recently detailed in The Free Press, we live in the wealthiest mass-affluent society in human history. Typical workers’ real wages are dramatically higher than they were two generations ago. Post-tax incomes for the bottom fifth of the scale have more than doubled since 1990. Wealth for the poorest quarter of U.S. households has tripled. Consumption, the best measure of a lived-in well-being, is hitting record highs.
These data do not deny that some people struggle, but they show that the dominant narrative of national economic decline is false.”
https://reason.com/2025/12/04/the-horseshoe-of-doom-populists-left-and-right-say-america-is-failing-the-facts-dont/
“the goal of disrupting and deterring drug smuggling would not justify a policy of summarily executing criminal suspects without statutory authorization or any semblance of due process. That is why Trump is trying to justify his bloodthirsty anti-drug strategy by calling his targets “combatants” in a “non-international armed conflict”—a term he has stretched beyond recognition.
Congress has not recognized that purported “armed conflict,” and it is a counterintuitive label for the unilateral violence exemplified by the September 2 attack. The boat that Bradley destroyed, which reportedly “turned around before the attack started because the people onboard had apparently spotted a military aircraft stalking it,” was not engaged in any sort of attack on American targets and offered no resistance. The same was true of the vessels destroyed in subsequent attacks on suspected drug boats
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The violence in such attacks is so one-sided that the government’s lawyers claim blowing up drug boats does not constitute “hostilities” under the War Powers Resolution because U.S. personnel face no plausible risk of casualties. So we are talking about an “armed conflict” that does not involve “hostilities” yet somehow does involve enemy “combatants.”
Unless you accept that baffling premise, the attempt to justify Bradley’s second strike under the law of war is incomprehensible. “Two U.S. officials have said the military intercepted radio communications from the survivors to suspected cartel members, raising the possibility that any drugs on the boat that had not burned up in the first blast could have been retrieved,” The New York Times reports. “The military, they said, interpreted the purported distress call as meaning the survivors were still ‘in the fight’ and so were not shipwrecked.”
In reality, of course, those men were not “in the fight” to begin with, because there was no “fight.” A unilateral act of aggression by U.S. forces hardly amounts to a battle, and it is hard to see how a radio call for help qualifies as the sort of “hostile act” that the Defense Department’s manual says excludes someone from “shipwrecked” status. To illustrate that exception, the manual notes that “shipwrecked persons do not include combatant personnel engaged in amphibious, underwater, or airborne attacks who are proceeding ashore.””
https://reason.com/2025/12/04/boat-attack-commander-says-he-had-to-kill-2-survivors-because-they-were-still-trying-to-smuggle-cocaine/
“Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, an ally of President Donal Trump, has added two organizations to his state’s list of terrorist organizations—an action taken without any safeguards and which deprives the organizations of the right to buy land in the state.
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You don’t have to like the Muslim Brotherhood or the Council on American-Islamic Relations to think the government should be required to prove accusations before punishing people.”
https://reason.com/2025/12/05/texas-governor-strips-two-muslim-groups-of-the-right-to-buy-land-in-the-state-by-calling-them-terrorists/
“In America, housing policy rests on two mutually exclusive goals: we want our principal investment vehicle to be home equity, and for the value of our homes to rise indefinitely and astronomically. But then, we also want the cost of houses to be more affordable. For some reason, nobody seems to consider that we can’t have houses worth more and also cost less. We don’t have a quantum housing market. What we have is supply and demand, and it applies to housing whether we like it or not.
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Starting in the 20th century, politicians decided everyone ought to own a house. A man who owns a house has a stake in his community and is less likely to flush alligators down the toilet or contract communism. That idea kicked into high gear during the Great Depression, when the New Deal created federal subsidies, loans, and tax incentives to help people buy homes.
Today, our tax structure continues to encourage homeownership as a national investment strategy. You can deduct the interest on up to $750,000 of mortgage debt from your federal taxes. And you can deduct much of your local and state property taxes from your federal income taxes. First-time homebuyer credits exist. And because the federal government backs 30-year mortgages as a guarantor, banks are less concerned about risk and charge lower interest.
Add it all up, and Washington subsidizes homeownership to the tune of around $150 billion per year.
On top of all that, when you sell your subsidized home, the first $250,000 of profit—or $500,000 if you’re married—is exempt from capital gains taxes.
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Renters get none of these benefits. No subsidies on the way in, no exemptions on the way out.
So it makes perfect sense to get a mortgage and build equity. But once you have that equity, you will want to protect it. If someone builds an apartment complex across the street, your property value may go down. Cheaper housing near your house means your house is worth less.
That’s why America’s 90,000 local jurisdictions fight to ensure cheap housing never threatens existing home values. “Not in my backyard” (NYMBY) advocates make it illegal to create inexpensive housing through minimum lot sizes, single-family zoning, height restrictions, historic preservation rules, outright bans on apartments, and density limits.
And because of supply and demand, restricting new housing keeps prices high. Build more homes in a city, and prices fall. Even when zoning boards aren’t deliberately conspiring to restrict supply, that is exactly the effect.
So American housing policy literally cannot achieve its stated goals. You cannot have housing serve as the nation’s primary wealth-building tool and also expect affordable housing for everyone.
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Japan has far less regulations and subsidies around housing, and therefore builds more housing and keeps housing affordable.
https://reason.com/2025/12/05/what-america-can-learn-from-japanese-housing/
“While the renewed congressional interest in the legal and moral justification for Trump’s bloodthirsty anti-drug strategy is welcome, that inquiry should not be limited to the question of whether one particular attack violated the law of war.
The details of Bradley’s defense nevertheless illustrate the outrageous implications of conflating drug smuggling with violent aggression. He argues that the seemingly helpless men in the water, who were blown apart by a second missile while clinging to the boat’s smoldering wreckage, still posed a threat because they could have recovered and delivered whatever cocaine might have remained after the first strike.
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In reality, there was no “fight” to stay in. The violence exemplified by this attack is so one-sided that the government’s lawyers claim blowing up drug boats does not constitute “hostilities” under the War Powers Resolution because U.S. personnel face no plausible risk of casualties. So we are talking about an “armed conflict” that does not involve “hostilities” yet somehow does involve enemy “combatants”—who, contrary to that label, are not actually engaged in combat.
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Bradley seems to have determined that the flailing men were engaged in a “hostile act” simply by existing near a boat remnant that might have contained salvageable cocaine. As ridiculous as that position is, it is only a bit more risible than Trump’s assertion that supplying cocaine to Americans amounts to “an armed attack against the United States” that justifies a lethal military response.
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“There is a risk that the focus on the second strike and specifically the talk of ‘war crimes’ feeds into the administration’s false wartime framing and veils the fact that the entire boat-strikes campaign is murder, full stop,” Cardozo School of Law professor Rebecca Ingber, an expert on the law of war, told The New York Times. “The administration’s evolving justification for the second strike only lays bare the absurdity of their legal claims for the campaign as a whole—that transporting drugs is somehow the equivalent of wartime hostilities.””
https://reason.com/2025/12/05/the-threat-that-supposedly-justified-killing-2-boat-attack-survivors-was-entirely-speculative/
“The researchers followed 22.7 million vaccinated individuals and 5.9 million unvaccinated individuals for nearly four years. They found not only that vaccinated people have a 74 percent lower risk of death from severe COVID-19, but also that those individuals have a lower risk of death, period. Specifically, people who received the shots have a 25 percent lower risk of all-cause mortality.
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The researchers sought to control for various confounders, such as a healthy-vaccinee effect, where healthier individuals are more likely to opt for vaccination, or a frailty-related bias, where those in poorer health may avoid it.
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“This study helps to put an end to the misinformation spread about mRNA vaccines,” the study’s lead author, Mahmoud Zureik, told Le Monde. “Providing data on the absence of long-term risks helps strengthen confidence in these vaccines, which will be developed for other viruses and diseases.”
Their results should indeed strengthen confidence. But Kennedy, who has been shifting research dollars to purportedly “safer” vaccines, will likely ignore it.”
https://reason.com/2025/12/05/french-study-on-mrna-covid-19-vaccines-finds-a-drop-in-severe-covid-and-no-increase-in-deaths/