Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
For low-value medical care, it helps to have consumer skin in the game, but that isn’t what drives healthcare costs. Healthcare costs are driven by needed care and not the overuse of unneeded care.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyY05fD9dk4
Venezuela is run by a corrupt dictatorship.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Be76NQm-c78
“Thanks to a bill approved as part of the package that ended the federal shutdown, intoxicating hemp products will be federally prohibited as of November 13, 2026, a year after President Donald Trump signed the legislation. Unless Congress intervenes, that ban will put an end to a $28 billion industry that offers psychoactive beverages, edibles, flower, and vape cartridges to consumers in dozens of states.”
https://reason.com/2025/11/24/psychoactive-hemp-products-will-be-federally-prohibited-in-a-year-unless-congress-intervenes/
“A recent Transportation Department audit of Hurricane Sandy relief funds found $95 million in questionable costs and $2.9 billion in unspent money.”
https://reason.com/2025/11/25/taxpayers-still-paying-for-hurricane-sandy-relief-mismanagement-13-years-later-new-report-finds/
“The lawmakers note that “no one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our Constitution.” Although “we know this is hard,” they say, “your vigilance is critical,” and “we have your back.”
That stance is legally uncontroversial. According to the Judge Advocate General’s Operational Law Handbook, “soldiers have a duty to disobey” orders that are “manifestly illegal.” Examples include intentional targeting of civilians, torture of prisoners, looting of property, and suppression of constitutionally protected protests.
Trump nevertheless claims reiterating this well-established principle amounts to “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR FROM TRAITORS,” which he says is “punishable by DEATH!” Yet the video plainly does not qualify as sedition or treason.”
https://reason.com/2025/11/26/trumps-habitual-charges-of-treason-reflect-his-authoritarian-impulses/
“”Walmart just announced that the cost of their standard Thanksgiving meal is reduced by 25 percent this year from last year,” Trump said recently, failing to account for the fact that the price change is due to Walmart…changing the goods offered via their Thanksgiving meal bundle (and drastically shrinking its size) to get prices lower for cost-burdened consumers.”
https://reason.com/2025/11/26/is-the-poverty-line-really-100000/
“Elon Musk finally rolled out a long-requested feature on X, the site formerly known as Twitter: It is now possible to see the geographic location where a given user likely resides. (Yes, it’s possible to fool the system with a VPN.) And what this has revealed is that some—by no means all, but some—highly visible accounts associated with rightwing politics, support for President Trump, extremely anti-interventionist America First foreign policy views, and more sinisterly, racist and antisemitic comments, are not American at all. They reside in foreign countries such as Pakistan, Nigeria, and Bangladesh.”
https://reason.com/2025/11/26/elon-musks-account-based-in-feature-has-already-improved-x/
“these materials, although controversial in their advocacy for insurrection, squatting, and anarchy, are all squarely constitutionally protected speech. The government cannot infringe upon one’s First Amendment right to read, possess, or write—unless the author is inciting imminent lawless action—anti-government or pro-revolution literature. And while some may see the ideas in Sanchez’s box as dangerous, anti-government zines and pamphlets are far more similar to the Revolutionary-era literature popular when the First Amendment was passed than today’s social media landscape, as Seth Stern of The Intercept points out.
However, after President Donald Trump signed an executive order in September designating “antifa” as a “major terrorist organization, prosecutors, like the ones in Sanchez’s case, are attempting to use materials that “explicitly [call] for the overthrow of the United States Government, law enforcement authorities, and our system of law” as evidence of criminality, despite their constituitonal protection.”
https://reason.com/2025/11/26/texas-man-faces-up-to-40-years-in-prison-for-transporting-constitutionally-protected-pamphlets/
“some scientists in Iowa figured out how to extract sugar from corn, and high-fructose corn syrup was born.
But there was a problem. The high-fructose corn syrup that American corn farmers were producing was more expensive than sugar. To get food and beverage companies to buy what Andreas was selling, Andreas needed to make his sweet stuff more attractive in the market.
And one way to do that is to make your competitors’ products more expensive.
That’s exactly what the federal government has been doing for decades. In 1976, President Gerald Ford tripled the import tax on sugar. If you tax something, you’ll get less of it. Or, well, you get a more expensive version of it. That’s exactly what happened with imported sugar.
By 1988, sugar came to sell at 22 cents a pound in the United States despite the world price being just 10.5 cents per pound, with each cent increase adding $250 to $300 million to Americans’ collective food bills.
Faced with the rising price of sugar in the mid-1980s, candy and soda companies did the thing that made economic sense: They stopped using sugar and switched to high fructose corn syrup.”
https://reason.com/2025/11/26/how-special-interests-twisted-federal-sugar-policy-to-cost-consumers-2-5-billion-every-year/
“From the beginning, America was a mixture of peoples. John Adams wrote that it resembled “several distinct nations almost” and pondered whether such a collection could truly cohere. Leaders marveled as the first census revealed an array of languages, religions, and origins. Yet over time, Americans did form a common identity—not through blood or inherited culture but through shared ideals. National unity solidified after these ideals were articulated in the Declaration and given lasting institutional form in the Constitution.
…
Constitutional limits exist because the Founders feared unchecked power, whether exercised by a ruler or by majorities which have at times been egregiously wrong. The Constitution protects a pluralistic society from the dangers of centralized authority and ideological certitude. In a nation as varied as ours, those protections are not optional.
…
The Constitution doesn’t guarantee national unity. It guarantees something better: a system that channels conflict without destroying liberty. As Wood notes, democracy can be volatile. The Founders knew that well. Their answer is a framework that moderates collective impulses while preserving the rights of individuals and minorities.”
https://reason.com/2025/11/27/some-say-the-constitution-has-failed-this-thanksgiving-heres-why-it-hasnt/