Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
“Manufacturing has been in decline for six months, nearly the exact amount of time since Trump’s new trade wars began.”
https://reason.com/2025/09/04/american-manufacturing-needs-relief-from-trumps-tariffs/
“Vice President J.D. Vance was almost incredulous when a reporter asked him what “legal authority” the Trump administration used to blow up an alleged drug boat off the coast of Venezuela with a drone on Tuesday. “There are people who are bringing—literal terrorists—who are bringing deadly drugs into our country,” Vance said.
Why are they “literal terrorists”? Because the administration said so. President Donald Trump declared just after taking office that he would be designating drug cartels as terrorist organizations. One of them was Tren de Aragua, the organization accused of sending out the drug boat. (The administration tends to play fast and loose with labeling things Tren de Aragua; for all its criminal activities, the gang is not known to smuggle cocaine.) After the drone strike, multiple cabinet officials made sure to use the phrase “narco-terrorist organization.”
…
A terrorist can be anyone the White House declares: an American journalist, a suspected drug smuggler, or another government. The only requirement seems to be that the terrorist is located outside of U.S. soil.
…
Deploying uniformed troops against street crime, flying (unarmed) Predator drones over protesters, blowing up suspected smugglers instead of arresting them—these images are breaking down the political distinction between the “battlefield” and the “homefront.” Last week, U.S. Border Patrol agents were photographed training with mortars during live-fire exercises in Alaska. Since when do American police need artillery?”
https://reason.com/2025/09/04/trumps-drug-boat-drone-strike-shows-how-terrorism-makes-everyone-killable/
“if tariffs are linked to prosperity, it’s an inverse relationship, according to a recent report on America’s declining economic freedom for Canada’s Fraser Institute. The authors, Robert A. Lawson of Southern Methodist University and Fraser’s own Matthew D. Mitchell, write: “High-tariff countries are generally low-income countries while low-tariff countries are generally high-income countries. In the high-tariff countries, average GDP per capita is just $9,703 per year,” while “in low-tariff countries, it is $43,502 per year.”
In 2023, the U.S. had an average tariff rate of 3.3 percent, which put us in the company of such countries as Singapore and Hong Kong (zero percent each), Brunei (0.5 percent), Israel (1.3 percent), New Zealand (1.9 percent), Australia (2.4 percent), and Iceland (3.3 percent). This year’s tariff shift has been marked by wild fluctuations. But the average tariff rate on April 15 was 28 percent and is now around 19 percent. That puts the U.S. amongst the likes of Zimbabwe (18 percent), Chad (18.1 percent), Republic of the Congo (18.1 percent), Algeria (18.9 percent), and Egypt (19 percent).”
https://reason.com/2025/09/05/trump-says-tariffs-make-us-richer-so-why-are-most-countries-with-high-tariffs-so-poor/
After Trump’s FCC apparently badgered ABC into suspending Jimmy Kimmel, Jon Stewart and the Daily Show produce a Trump-compliant episode.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GXNJ3V9lzg
“Monday night on his ABC talk show, Jimmy Kimmel said something dumb about Tyler Robinson, the 22-year-old man accused of assassinating conservative activist Charlie Kirk at a college in Utah last week. Two days later, ABC, which is owned by Disney, announced that it was “indefinitely” suspending the comedian’s show.
Maybe the Disney executives who made that decision—CEO Robert A. Iger and Dana Walden, who oversees the company’s television division—were simply reacting to public outrage at Kimmel’s remarks. But the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel Live! was announced several hours after Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), suggested that TV stations might be fined or lose their licenses for broadcasting the show. That constitutionally dubious threat shows how the FCC can abuse its regulatory powers to suppress speech that offends President Donald Trump and his allies…
If the First Amendment means anything, it means that federal bureaucrats may not punish private companies for giving a forum to politically disfavored speakers.”
https://reason.com/2025/09/18/brendan-carr-flagrantly-abused-his-powers-to-cancel-jimmy-kimmel/
“We collected a dataset with
over 43 million elections-related posts shared on Twitter between
September 16 and October 21, 2016 by about 5.7 million distinct
users. This dataset included accounts associated with the identified
Russian trolls. We use label propagation to infer the ideology of all
users based on the news sources they shared. This method enables
us to classify a large number of users as liberal or conservative
with precision and recall above 90%. Conservatives retweeted Rus-
sian trolls about 31 times more often than liberals and produced
36 times more tweets. Additionally, most retweets of troll content
originated from two Southern states: Tennessee and Texas. Using
state-of-the-art bot detection techniques, we estimated that about
4.9% and 6.2% of liberal and conservative users respectively were
bots. Text analysis on the content shared by trolls reveals that they
had a mostly conservative, pro-Trump agenda. Although an ide-
ologically broad swath of Twitter users were exposed to Russian
Trolls in the period leading up to the 2016 U.S. Presidential election,
it was mainly conservatives who helped amplify their message.”
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.04291
Inside the Secret SEAL Team 6 Mission to North Korea and What Went Wrong | Amanpour and Company
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79djGjRKsg4
““The MAGA Gang (is) desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it,” Kimmel said. “In between the finger-pointing, there was grieving.””
If this is all he said, then this is a political cancellation that goes against everything many on the right used to say they stand for. Kimmel’s statement is not totally accurate, but is hardly beyond the pale.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/17/media/jimmy-kimmel-charlie-kirk-trump-fcc-brendan-carr
The U.S. deadly strike on the potential drug boat appears to have been illegal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKF1e58j5XQ
“An archived version of the study is still available online, and states that “far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides” than the left”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/doj-quietly-deletes-study-charlie-005626328.html