Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
The first Trump administration killed North Korean civilians in a botched secret operation on North Korean soil. Trump did not inform Congress.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mwn371XO31s
“Americans who enjoy German lagers, Belgian saisons, and Czech pilsners will get no relief from the higher tariffs that President Donald Trump has poured on their favorite brews.
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The deal locks in the 15 percent tariffs that Trump has imposed on most European goods imported into the U.S., but it also serves as a promise from the Trump administration not to target European goods with product-specific tariffs that could be announced in the coming weeks or months—including potentially huge new tariffs on pharmaceuticals, something the White House has been teasing for months. The deal also creates a pathway for the United States to reduce its tariffs on European cars to the 15 percent threshold, once the E.U. reduces some of its own tariffs on American industrial goods.”
https://reason.com/2025/08/22/trumps-new-trade-deal-with-the-e-u-leaves-out-beer-wine-booze/
The Chinese government didn’t like that a New York state resident had a meeting with Taiwanese officials. They found someone to run against her, supported the opponent, and she lost the election. The Chinese government intervened in this election and successfully changed who represents Americans. The Chinese government has done this to multiple people in multiple elections in multiple countries.
Chinese groups in America have people pledge to achieving Chinese Communist Party specific goals. Chinese Americans in these groups have business interest in China, and the Chinese government can control them by threatening these business interests.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lISewNerBlA
“The new levies — imposed, in part, to pressure Russia to end its war on Ukraine by punishing one of its largest oil buyers — will raise the country’s tariff rate to 50 percent and are likely to inflame tensions between the world’s two largest democracies.
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The Indians, meanwhile, have shown little sign of budging on their Russian oil purchases, which the government has framed as purely an economic decision.
Now, India’s 50 percent tariff rate will be nearly as high as the 55 percent levy Chinese goods face.
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For much of this century, U.S. presidents have sought to pull New Delhi into closer strategic ties — and pry it away from its traditional relations with Moscow — through India’s membership in the China-countering group known as the Quad, which also includes Australia, Japan and the United States.
Those efforts appeared to be bearing fruit as recently as January following a meeting in Washington with top diplomats from Quad countries when India’s Foreign Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar told reporters that New Delhi was willing to nudge the grouping toward a greater defense and security focus. That initiative is likely dead as long as the Trump administration’s tariff punishment continues.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/26/clearly-a-low-moment-u-s-india-relationship-sours-as-new-tariffs-kick-in-00527196
Was the Bill of Rights a Bad Idea? Some Founding Fathers Thought So.
https://reason.com/2025/08/14/was-the-bill-of-rights-a-bad-idea-some-founding-fathers-thought-so/
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
Trump’s big beautiful bill takes away money from growing renewable energy that employs more jobs than coal and toward dying coal. It’s not just bad for the environment, it’s bad business. The bill makes it difficult to use components from China, even though China is one of our key suppliers. This will limit U.S. production.
The bill expands fossil fuel subsidies. Subsidies are essentially giving money to companies. This should be done when certain industries are important to emphasize above and beyond the incentive for profit-making, like environmental benefits. Considering fossil fuels cause deadly air pollution as well as contribute to global warming, subsidizing them makes no sense.
Fossil fuel industries are already built out, so subsidies pay such companies for doing stuff that they were doing anyways. Renewable industries are still developing and growing, so subsidies actually create new business. Once you consider the environmental impacts, fossil fuel subsidies net a negative return.
Trump’s bill has led to a lot of fired scientists. Foreign countries are offering bonuses to hire these scientists. These nonsense policies are producing American brain drain.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tNp2vsxEzk
Trump has authorized lethal military force against drug cartels in foreign countries.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HU2OXRrEhoo
“Trump’s contention that Mexico and Canada could “easily solve” the drug trafficking problem was equally dubious. For more than a century, politicians have been promising to “stop the flow” of illegal drugs, and they have never come close to achieving that goal—not for lack of trying, but because the economics of prohibition doom all such efforts.
Prohibition allows traffickers to earn a hefty risk premium that provides a strong incentive to find ways around any barriers that governments manage to erect. Drugs can be produced in many different places, and they can be smuggled into the country in a wide variety of ways. Any serious effort to prevent drugs from entering the United States would entail intolerable disruption of travel and trade, and it still would not succeed. That challenge is magnified in the case of a highly potent drug like fentanyl because large numbers of doses can be transported in small packages that are hard to detect.
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Since Canada accounts for only a tiny percentage of fentanyl entering the United States, “flood” seems like an exaggeration. In any case, it is not clear what would qualify as “adequate steps” or “satisfactory resources” as far as Trump is concerned. Taking Trump at his word, there is no such thing, because there is nothing that Canada or Mexico can do that will be sufficient to achieve the impossible goal of stopping illegal drugs from entering the United States.”
https://reason.com/2025/08/01/hiking-tariffs-on-canada-trump-demands-adequate-steps-to-achieve-an-impossible-drug-war-goal/
“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.”
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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/