Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
“The attack on Nimruz was, in fact, worse than what came before. Rather than the usual strikes on empty buildings at night, the U.S. military bombed buildings full of people during the day, and it was “the first time that UNAMA had received allegations of civilian casualties of such a scale,” according to the UNAMA report.”
https://reason.com/2025/01/06/was-the-las-vegas-bombing-a-case-of-the-afghan-war-coming-home/
“Monitoring groups including Syria Network for Human Rights (SNHR) – an independent UK-based group – said over 1,000 people died in the violence, more than half killed by forces aligned with the new authorities and others by Assad loyalists. SNHR said the dead included 595 civilians and unarmed fighters, the vast majority Alawite.”
…
“The mass killings were mostly carried out by gunmen from various factions aligned with the new government, including GSS, according to several of the witnesses.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/pray-us-theyve-arrived-syria-134559936.html
Syria’s rebel leader courted the world. Now his forces stand accused of a massacre
https://www.yahoo.com/news/syria-rebel-leader-courted-world-205546247.html
“more than 42,000 Americans die in collisions every year. Based on the above-mentioned research, AVs have dramatically lower bodily-injury rates. If governments slow approval of self-driving cars—or give local governments the ability to stop their use based on anecdotes and irrational fears—then we’ll likely have more deaths and injuries.”
https://reason.com/2025/01/17/the-slow-approval-of-self-driving-cars-is-costing-lives/
Dying In America Is Too Expensive
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTBKxyfOLmc
“The first death has been reported in the ongoing measles outbreak in West Texas, according to a press release sent out by the Texas Department of State Health Services Wednesday.
The victim was an unvaccinated child who was hospitalized in Lubbock last week.
The outbreak, starting in late January, has 124 confirmed cases, the majority of which are either children, unvaccinated people, or both. Eighteen people have been hospitalized, the state health department said.”
…
“According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the last measles death in the United States was reported a decade ago in 2015. Measles was declared eliminated in the U.S. in 2000, which the CDC attributes to its vaccination program.
Vaccination rates for the MMR vaccine in Texas have dropped slightly in recent years following the Covid-19 pandemic.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/26/texas-measles-outbreak-rfk-jr-00002698
“With an annual toll of 40,000 American lives, the deadliness of secondhand smoke is now common knowledge. But it was only a few decades ago that puffing on a cigarette was defended as an act that affected only the smoker.
In the 1980s, researchers for the first time demonstrated that smoking can kill people who never themselves lit a cigarette. Those findings undercut tobacco industry claims that smoking need not be restricted, because smokers had accepted any health risk arising from their habit. Even if that was true, it certainly wasn’t for others forced to breathe polluted air.
Secondhand smoke galvanized the anti-smoking movement. “You’re suddenly not talking about suicide,” said Robert Proctor, a history professor at Stanford University. “You’re talking about homicide.”
By the end of the 1990s, smoking was banned on domestic flights as well as across an expanding number of bars, restaurants, and workplaces. Tobacco use tumbled: In 2000, 25 percent of Americans said they smoked a cigarette during the prior week, down from 38 percent in 1983.
Secondhand smoke is a textbook example of a negative externality: a product’s costs that are paid by society instead of its users. It’s a framework that helped turn the public against tobacco, and it carries lessons for another product that is as ubiquitous today as cigarettes were 50 years ago. And like tobacco, its use can — and often does — kill innocent bystanders. I’m talking about oversized cars.
Over the last half-century, American sedans and station wagons have been replaced by increasingly enormous SUVs and pickup trucks that now comprise 80 percent of new car sales, a phenomenon known as car bloat. Much like secondhand smoke, driving a gigantic vehicle endangers those who never consented to the danger they face walking, biking, or sitting inside smaller cars. Although not widely known, car bloat’s harms are well-documented. Heavier vehicles can pulverize modest-sized ones, and tall front ends obscure a driver’s vision, putting pedestrians and cyclists at particular risk. Deaths among both groups recently hit 40-year highs in the US. The threat of hulking vehicles could even deter people from riding a bike or taking a stroll, a loss of public space akin to avoiding places shrouded in tobacco smoke.
Despite ample research demonstrating car bloat’s harms, American policymakers have done virtually nothing to counteract them. The political headwinds are powerful: Encouraged by carmaker ads depicting SUVs traversing rugged terrain, millions of Americans use oversized vehicles daily simply to get to an office, store, or school.”
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/391733/gigantic-suvs-are-a-public-health-threat-why-dont-we-treat-them-like-one
“While estimates vary, studies agree that air pollution has caused great harm to human health. Max Roser at Our World in Data reviewed information from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) on global air pollution mortality estimates. WHO and IHME report that between 4.2 million and 4.5 million people die prematurely from exposure to outdoor air pollution annually. A 2019 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) calculated that 3.6 million people prematurely die as a result of air pollution from burning fossil fuels. The PNAS study estimated that the 194,000 annual premature deaths in the U.S. resulting from fossil fuel air pollution amounted to the annual loss of 5.7 million life years.
Contrast these estimates with the number of deaths associated with generating nuclear power. The 1979 Three Mile Island partial meltdown caused no injuries or deaths, and Fukushima’s 2011 tsunami-caused disaster may have led to just one radiation-related death years later.
Chernobyl’s reactor blast killed two workers, and 47 emergency workers who doused the core fires later died of radiation exposure. The good news is that a 2018 report by the United Nations’ Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation noted that most people downwind “were exposed to radiation levels comparable to or a few times higher than annual levels of natural background.” Consequently, the report concluded that the “vast majority of the population need not live in fear of serious health consequences due to the radiation from the Chornobyl accident.”
Using air pollution data derived from satellite observations, the NBER economists generally find that bringing a reactor online significantly reduces ambient fine particulate air pollution around the nearest cities. Using estimates provided by the University of Chicago’s Air Quality Life Index, they calculate how much life expectancies would have increased owing to reduced air pollution had the extrapolated trend in constructing new nuclear power plants not stalled.
The economists reckon that the construction of each additional nuclear power plant, by reducing air pollution, could save more than 800,000 life years. “According to our baseline estimates, over the past 38 years, Chernobyl reduced the total number of [nuclear power plants] worldwide by 389, which is almost entirely driven by the slowdown of new construction in democracies,” they report. “Our calculations thus suggest that, globally, more than 318 million expected life years have been lost in democratic countries due to the decline in [nuclear power plant] growth in these countries after Chernobyl.” They estimate the U.S. lost 141 million life years due to the slowdown in nuclear power deployment.
Cautioning that their estimates are only intended to illustrate a hypothetical timeline in which nuclear power plants continued to grow at the same rate as before the Chernobyl disaster, the researchers nonetheless conclude that “air pollution would have likely been much lower, which in turn, would have had significant health benefits.””
https://reason.com/2024/11/29/nuclear-power-saves-lives/
“The same ceasefire agreement was almost signed in May 2024. Instead, the pointless violence continued for several more months—at Americans’ expense.”
…
“Hundreds of Israeli troops have died since May 2024, as well as several Israeli hostages who would have been released under this week’s deal, including at least one American. Hamas has nearly recovered from its military losses by recruiting new fighters, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared in his farewell speech on Tuesday. As Israeli troops withdraw, Hamas fighters will once again be in charge of Gaza.”
…
“Hamas will rule over a traumatized population living in bombed-out wreckage. The dead have still not been properly counted; the official death toll of 46,600 may have missed 40 percent of violent deaths, and it doesn’t include deaths from starvation and disease. Back in May 2024, the United Nations estimated that rebuilding Gaza would take decades and cost $50 billion, money that will not be forthcoming to any Hamas-led government.”
https://reason.com/2025/01/15/nobody-won-the-war-in-gaza/
Did all the death and destruction wrought by Israel trying to get Hamas achieve anything? If Gaza is still ruled by a terrorist organization, won’t it just rebuild, then attack Israel, and this happens all over again?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-N4lGbv-ULE