Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
Trump damaging the CDC, which is losing key employees due to the administration not understanding scientific evidence.
Some Israeli military units are exhausted and not showing up for the new invasion of Gaza.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQtLQNCgagQ
Because of the trade war, China is getting more agriculture goods from Brazil than the U.S.. China is building a port in Brazil to get even more from Brazil and even less from the U.S.. Too bad for U.S. farmers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4l_wHA8kvk
Treating the Israelis simply as settler colonialists that inherently need to genocide the people they stole their land from gives the Palestinians no agency. It ignores that Palestinians really could have had a Palestinian state but some Palestinians have repeatedly made that not possible by acts of terror.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qe_ppEHXs3w
“In most cases, Trump’s tariffs are significantly higher than the tariffs charged by other countries on American goods.”
https://reason.com/2025/08/18/trump-promised-reciprocal-tariffs-the-numbers-tell-a-different-story/
In certain situations, a forever war may be the best option. If the cost of the war is low, the cost of total victory too high/total victory is not possible, and the consequences of defeat great, then the best of bad options may be forever war.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DkKPV8n1YI
Trump has authorized lethal military force against drug cartels in foreign countries.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HU2OXRrEhoo
Russia gets more oil revenue from India than China, fueling Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8_3HiGh9rE
“Vladimir Putin’s desire to grab Ukraine’s key defensive lines echoes how Adolf Hitler secured Czechoslovakia’s fortifications.
…
“Ukraine has spent the last 11 years pouring time, money and effort into reinforcing the fortress belt and establishing significant defense industrial and defensive infrastructure in and around these cities,” the institute said.
If that happens, Russia would move its frontline roughly 80 kilometers further west, while Ukraine would be forced to build new defenses on flat and open terrain in neighboring Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk — far harder to hold than the fortified cities it controls now.
…
In September 1938, Adolf Hitler argued that handing over the ethnic-German majority Sudetenland region to the Reich would satisfy his ambitions and end the threat of war in Europe. France and Britain agreed, and browbeat Prague into accepting. Hitler — whose word was as reliable as Putin’s — said he had no further territorial ambitions.”
https://www.politico.eu/article/donald-trump-vladimir-putin-russia-war-in-ukraine-adolf-hitler-czechoslovakia/
The Trump administration made a potentially good deal between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan wants a corridor to its territory that is separated by Armenia. Armenia would consider such a corridor an infringement of its sovereignty. Both sides agreed to let the U.S. and private companies manage the corridor while it remains Armenian territory.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzA3CFdEiMM
“The Trump administration claims its tariffs are drawing countries to the table for tough negotiations. Yet in 2016, TPP partners were already there, ready to sign an agreement that closely reflected U.S. trade standards and practices, having overcome significant domestic hurdles. The TPP’s multilateral negotiating framework actually provided an efficient mechanism for participating countries to modernize their existing bilateral free trade agreements, and it augmented less comprehensive pacts like NAFTA and the Korea-U.S. agreement (KORUS).
The White House claims its new trade deal with Japan pushed “breakthrough openings” in agriculture and food, but the real groundwork was laid a decade earlier, when Shinzo Abe took on Japan’s powerful farm lobby in 2015, clearing the path for the TPP and softening resistance to liberalized agricultural trade. The TPP would have covered virtually all goods, including politically sensitive products like Japanese rice.
The 2025 deal also hardly qualifies as a “free trade deal,” with imports from Japan into the U.S. still subject to a 15 percent reciprocal tariff rate. Those tariffs are a tax on American businesses and consumers.
The TPP, by contrast, was slated to roll back 18,000 individual tariffs, making it “the largest tax cut on American exports in a generation.”
…
Building trade policy on headline‑driven, ad hoc bargains is an unstable strategy—made more precarious when the very tariffs they hinge on rest on contested executive authority. These arrangements may create the illusion of momentum, but without enforceable commitments or structural durability, they offer little of the stability that comprehensive trade agreements provide. The TPP demonstrated how a well‑designed pact could lock in reforms, deepen alliances, and shape the rules of global commerce for decades. Washington’s drift toward improvisation risks ceding that ground to others who are willing to play the long game—and win it.”
https://reason.com/2025/08/07/the-art-of-the-empty-trade-deal/