Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
The US led the world to reach a huge climate deal. Then, it switched sides.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/11/05/the-us-led-the-world-to-reach-a-huge-climate-deal-then-it-switched-sides-pol-00636033
“In dozens of interviews in villages on Venezuela’s breathtaking northeastern coast, from which some of the boats departed, residents and relatives said the dead men had indeed been running drugs but were not narco-terrorists or leaders of a cartel or gang.
Most of the nine men were crewing such craft for the first or second time, making at least $500 per trip, residents and relatives said. They were laborers, a fisherman, a motorcycle taxi driver. Two were low-level career criminals. One was a well-known local crime boss who contracted out his smuggling services to traffickers.
The men lived on the Paria Peninsula, in mostly unpainted cinderblock homes that can go weeks without water service and regularly lose power for several hours a day. They awoke to panoramic views of a national park’s tropical forests, the Gulf of Paria’s shallows and the Caribbean’s sparkling sapphire waters. When the time came for their drug runs, they boarded open-hulled fishing skiffs that relied on powerful outboard motors to haul their drugs to nearby Trinidad and other islands.
The residents and relatives interviewed by the AP requested anonymity out of fear of reprisals from drug smugglers, the Venezuelan government or the Trump administration. They said they were incensed that the men were killed without due process. In the past, their boats would have been interdicted by the U.S. authorities and the crewmen charged with federal crimes, affording them a day in court.
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The Trump administration has justified the strikes by declaring drug cartels to be “ unlawful combatants ” and said the U.S. is now in an “armed conflict” with them. Trump has said each sunken boat has saved 25,000 American lives, presumably from overdoses. The boats, however, appear to have been transporting cocaine, not the far more deadly synthetic opioids that kill tens of thousands of Americans each year.
Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, said in a statement to the AP that the Defense Department has “consistently said that our intelligence did indeed confirm that the individuals involved in these drug operations were narco-terrorists, and we stand by that assessment.”
So far, the U.S. military has blown up 17 vessels, killing more than 60 people.
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After seeing clips on social media that mentioned his death, relatives broke the news to his mother, but not until after ensuring she had taken her blood pressure medication. Sánchez’s youngest son, a third grader, could not accept for days that his father was gone. He kept asking adults if his father could have survived the explosion, noting he might still be at sea.
No, the adults told the boy. His father was gone.
One of the first to die”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/trump-accused-boat-crews-being-052306566.html
Trump’s deal with China has made things less bad than they were before the meeting, but they are still way worse than they were before Trump engaged in a trade war with China.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dr-gB3BNykQ
“Throughout the Greek debt crisis, the overwhelming majority of Greeks wanted to stay in the Eurozone but bridled at the austerity measures required to do so. Today Greece ranks among the top five economic performers in Europe. Unlike Greece, which required international intervention to implement necessary reforms, Argentina took the task upon itself, the voters rebuking establishment parties and taking a chance on a political outsider. If Greece was worth saving, then Argentina is no less deserving of a lifeline.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/10/24/argentina-deserves-its-bailout-00620337
We don’t seem to be ramping up production of missile interceptors even though we desperately need more.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oW5C5an3nzk
China’s stranglehold on the supply of rare earths is damaging America’s ability to build military equipment and commercial cars. So far, Trump’s trade war on China is costly with little to no reward.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXd0dTfc2Pk
China uses military forces to kill the Philippines and other neighbors by a thousand cuts, slowly encroaching on national waters. China is aggressively using military forces to take territory from its neighbors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TszXa5GsIw
“Colombian President Gustavo Petro says one of the “narcoterrorists” recently killed by U.S. military strikes on boats in the Caribbean was a “fisherman” who had “no ties to the drug trade.” That man’s death, one of at least 32 ordered by President Donald Trump, therefore qualified as “murder,” Petro declared on Saturday.
That much would be true even if the dead man, whom Petro identified as a Colombian citizen named Alejandro Carranza, really was smuggling drugs. Trump’s new policy of summarily executing drug suspects simultaneously corrupts the mission of the armed forces, erasing the traditional distinction between civilians and combatants, and violates long-standing principles of criminal justice, imposing the death penalty without statutory authorization or any semblance of due process.
On September 15, U.S. forces blew up a boat that Trump said was “in International Waters transporting illegal narcotics,” killing three men he described as “confirmed narcoterrorists from Venezuela.” But according to Petro, the attack that killed Carranza happened in Colombian waters, and the target was a “Colombian boat” that “was adrift and had its distress signal up due to an engine failure.”
Trump reacted angrily to that charge on Sunday, calling Petro “an illegal drug leader” who is “strongly encouraging the massive production of drugs…all over Colombia.” He said the U.S. government would punish Petro by ending all “payments and subsidies” to his country.
Notably, Trump did not actually contradict Petro’s claim that Carranza had been erroneously identified as a Venezuelan “narcoterrorist.” And Trump has repeatedly acknowledged that his bloodthirsty anti-drug strategy could threaten innocent fishermen.
After the first strike on an alleged drug boat in early September, Trump joked about the potential for lethal mistakes: “I think anybody that saw that is going to say, ‘I’ll take a pass.’ I don’t even know about fishermen. They may say, ‘I’m not getting on the boat. I’m not going to take a chance.'”
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Trump claims drug traffickers are “murdering” Americans because some of their customers—about 82,000 last year—die after consuming their products. By the same logic, alcohol producers and distributors, who supply a product implicated in an estimated 178,000 deaths a year in the United States, likewise are guilty of murder.
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The Trump administration also argues that the U.S. government is engaged in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels, which makes the boat strikes consistent with the law of war. That claim, Cardozo Law School professor Gabor Rona says, is “utterly without precedent in international law.”
Geoffrey Corn, formerly the U.S. Army’s senior adviser on the law of war, agrees. “This is not stretching the envelope,” he told The New York Times. “This is shredding it.”
Trump, in short, is killing people without a legal justification. There is a word for that.”
https://reason.com/2025/10/22/trump-allegedly-misidentified-a-colombian-fisherman-as-a-venezuelan-narcoterrorist/
Putin easily manipulates Trump, creating erratic support for Ukraine, helping Russia’s war effort.
Lindsay Graham is Trump’s little bitch. The once proud senator can’t speak without sucking up to his daddy.
Enhanced sanctions from Congress keep getting delayed because of Trump.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9Rp9tjYPZI
“The agreement, which Argentina’s central bank announced Monday, allows for a $20 billion currency swap that’s aimed at propping up the Argentina peso ahead of crucial midterm elections that will determine the political success of President Javier Milei, a staunch ally of President Donald Trump.
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Beyond the $20 billion of financing for Argentina through the swap, Bessent has said he’s also organizing another $20 billion in financing that will be funded by private lenders or sovereign wealth funds.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/21/bessent-argentina-economic-deal-00616391