Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
America’s rising debt, inequality, and inability to appropriately tax its wealthy, rhymes with what was happening leading up to the French revolution. The French put off their economic problems until the only solution was revolution.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqFSX7HQjwk
In the first half of 2024, the Trump Organization had an income of 51 million. In the first half of 2025, that number was 864 million. What big new product storming the world did the Trump Organization come out with? That’s a 1,600% increase!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vRLc0SEEJY
Hamas is reinstating control over Gaza and refilling management positions. As long as Hamas remains in power, there will be no long term peace because it is their goal to destroy Israel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNe5o3Io–8
“Texas farmers have long pushed for Mexico to send more water to meet the obligations of the 81-year-old treaty that says Mexico is obligated to deliver 1.75 million acre-feet of water to the U.S. every five years. Trump also threatened sanctions and tariffs against Mexico in April, complaining then that the country had delivered less than 30 percent of the requirement over a five-year window that ended in October.
Mexico argues that climate change-driven drought has hindered its ability to send the requisite water, but officials promised to send 420,000 acre-feet to the U.S. by October.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/12/08/trump-tariffs-mexico-rio-grande-water-00682220
““The only part of the world where the new security strategy sees any threat to democracy seems to be Europe. Bizarre,” said former Swedish Prime Minister and European Council on Foreign Relations co-chair Carl Bildt.”
https://www.politico.eu/article/donald-trump-national-security-strategy-europe/
“Whoever succeeds Dodaro will have to direct ongoing probes into Trump’s funding moves. To date, the agency has issued 11 opinions — five concluding the administration illegally withheld money, two citing some wrongdoing. Dozens are ongoing.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/12/07/gene-dodaro-gao-trump-impoundment-00679550
“For Russian men, war now advertises itself like any other job.
Offers for front-line contracts appear on the messaging app Telegram alongside group chats and news alerts, promising signing bonuses of up to $50,000 — life-changing money in a country where average monthly wages remain below $1,000. The incentives go beyond cash, with pledges of debt relief and free childcare for soldiers’ families and guaranteed university places for their children. Criminal records, illness and even HIV are no longer automatic disqualifiers. For many men with little to lose, the front has become an employer of last resort.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/12/05/russia-planned-war-of-attrition-00672960
“some legal experts say that as a practical matter, the administration — emboldened by the justices — has already managed to eliminate job protections that have been on the books for nearly 150 years.
President Donald Trump’s drive to replace agency leaders and his mass firings across the federal government are all based on the same basic legal concept: the unitary executive theory. It holds that every employee of the executive branch is answerable to, and fireable at will by, the president.
The most extreme version of the unitary executive theory holds that the central premise of the civil service — that rank-and-file government employees shouldn’t be hired or fired for political reasons or simply on the president’s whim — is unconstitutional because it tramples on the president’s power to control the federal government.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/12/07/supreme-court-trump-firings-humphreys-executor-00679728
“The first giant leap backward has been a dangerous weakening of public data, the raw material required to train AI models. The federal government collects troves of data that families and businesses use every day — traffic patterns and census information, nutritional assessments and air quality reports, soil data and economic measures.
…
the administration has spent months ordering agency after agency to delete or hide data that’s politically inconvenient, and indiscriminately firing employees including those who manage valuable datasets.
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Initial research shows the eye-popping potential for AI weather forecasts that could be precise down to a city block or accurate as far ahead as a month. But that’s only possible with the sensor data that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) collects and curates from weather stations, ships, balloons, aircraft, satellites and buoys. The Trump administration has reduced weather balloon launches and removed hundreds of agency staff. It plans to cut back on NOAA satellites and shutter more than a dozen facilities that gather and curate data.
…
The Trump administration has also disrupted the collection of important health data. One example is data the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention gathered for nearly four decades from a representative sample of volunteers to understand risks in pregnancy. That valuable data now remains scattered and hard to access, because the CDC first shuttered the database to avoid collecting data on race and ethnicity in line with the administration’s executive order against “DEI,” and then placed the staff on administrative leave. That makes it harder to learn why Black maternal mortality is more than twice the national average, or how to protect all mothers and newborns. Data on vaccine safety, farm labor, hunger, greenhouse gas reporting and international development have also been deleted or degraded.
For AI to be effective against these immensely complex challenges, the smarter move would have been to expand data collection and support the agency staff who make sure datasets are robust and accessible.
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With steady support from Congress over successive administrations, eight decades of federal research funding made it possible to start new industries, prevent and cure diseases, deter potential adversaries, understand and start to manage environmental risks and expand the boundaries of human knowledge. This research base is where AI itself came from, and to harness AI for the next generation of advances, federal support is essential.
Instead, the Trump administration has frozen grants, attacked leading research universities, curtailed high-talent immigration, ousted thousands of research agency staff and proposed a $44 billion reduction in federally funded research and development — the largest single-year cut in history.
While some take solace in the administration’s cuts sparing specific budget lines for AI research and the new executive order for Energy Department research using AI, that’s like buying more tractors while you kill off your crops. AI is a tool, not the goal itself. The federal government needs to fund not just AI researchers, but researchers in the full range of promising fields that need AI to advance”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/12/03/what-the-trump-administration-is-getting-right-and-wrong-on-ai-00674211
Pistols have never determined who won a war. In WWI, they were less than .1% of kills and wounded. Modern, more compact rifles are more useful than pistols. Rifles have more range, accuracy, and can better punch through modern armor. For some troops, it may be better to carry more rifle ammo than a pistol. Modern pistols are like modern smartphones, there isn’t a huge difference between brands and the chance that one company’s pistol saves your life when another company’s would not, is low.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRlzblOE1-c