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Lawsuit: The Regulation Of Untaxed Firearms Under Federal Law Is Unconstitutional

Several Second Amendment advocacy groups, including the National Rifle Association (NRA), have filed a lawsuit to challenge the constitutionality of the National Firearms Act of 1934 (NFA).

President Trump’s One Big, Beautiful Bill erased the NFA’s $200 stamp tax on short-barreled rifles, short-barreled shotguns, any firearm classified by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) as “other,” and suppressors starting Jan. 1, 2026. However, “the firearms are still required to be registered and are subject to” regulations designed to enforce the “now-extinct” tax, the lawsuit says. This “regulatory regime” no longer comports with Congress’ constitutional authority, plaintiffs claim. The lawsuit also argues that “the NFA’s regulation of suppressors and short-barreled rifles violates the Second Amendment.”

“The National Firearms Act’s registration scheme only exists to ensure that the tax on NFA firearms was paid,” Adam Kraut, the Second Amendment Foundation’s (SAF) executive director, said in a press release. “With Congress removing the tax on silencers, short-barreled firearms, and ‘any other weapons,’ the continued inclusion of these items in the NFA serves no purpose, except continuing to retain an impermissible hurdle to the exercise of one’s constitutional right to keep and bear arms.”

The lawsuit, Brown v. ATF, was filed on August 1 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri. The plaintiffs are the NRA, the American Suppressor Association (ASA), SAF, the Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC), Prime Protection STL Tactical Boutique, and two individual members of these organizations. They are suing both the ATF and the DOJ. The lawsuit asks the court to declare NFA regulations “relating to making, transferring, receiving, possessing, or otherwise using” the untaxed firearms and suppressors unlawful and to block anyone from enforcing the challenged portions of the law.

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Operation Warp Speed: The Good, the Bad, and the Deadly

Ihave been a strong supporter of Donald Trump since the first Super Tuesday primary in February 2016, when he trounced the competition in races held in the heart of the ‘Bible Belt.’ Those results convinced me that if any Republican had a prayer (excuse the pun) of winning the White House, he was the only game in town.

One of the key elements of the Trump administration’s response to the Covid pandemic was Operation Warp Speed (OWS). A unique feature of OWS was that it was used, respectively, by Trump’s supporters and detractors to laud or denigrate the initiative, depending almost solely on political party affiliation. This bifurcation even extended to the healthcare establishment, a clear indication that medical science had been eclipsed by political science. In so doing, the physician’s creed, “First, do no harm” was shredded. The impact on patient outcomes, not surprisingly, was devastating.

In an attempt to move the discussion away from political slogans and bumper stickers, and towards a more nuanced assessment, I will examine six major OWS initiatives:

  • Ventilators
  • Masks 
  • Disinfectants
  • Hospital Beds for NYC and Los Angeles
  • Repurposed Therapeutics: Hydroxychloroquine
  • mRNA Vaccine Development, Production, and Distribution

Ventilators

In preparing for airborne pandemics, it had been the consensus for several years that the number of ventilators available would be woefully inadequate. To meet this challenge, Trump pulled every emergency lever at his disposal in order to direct the nation’s manufacturing capabilities towards producing the number of ventilators required. This effort succeeded to the degree that the metrics for ventilator production were quickly exceeded, and a more than sufficient number was produced and distributed. 

Clearly, this was a logistical triumph…but there’s the rub. It was determined early on that almost all patients with Covid-induced respiratory failure who were placed on a ventilator succumbed. You’d think that someone in authority would have made the observation that ventilators caused harm whenever used, and use of this modality would have ceased. Well, if you thought that, you’d be mistaken. Ventilators were used for months after it was clear that they caused harm. So where does responsibility for this debacle reside? Was it with OWS for supplying too many ventilators or with the healthcare providers who, under cover of perverse incentives, continued to use them? 

Masks 

As with ventilators, there was great concern that supplies of masks would be inadequate. Given the fact that more than 100 years of public health policy and practice had demonstrated that mask use outside of healthcare settings was a useless exercise, pulling the trigger on OWS should never have been done. However, when it came to Covid, deliberately fanning the flames of fear overcame sound public health policy, and the trigger was pulled. Sadly, all of the predicted collateral damage that universal masking could cause came to pass (as has been well-documented elsewhere), with none of the purported benefits. An additional adverse consequence that has not been mentioned is to the environment. Between the masks and the plastic straws, I’m surprised there are any sea turtles left! 

Once again, where does responsibility for this debacle reside? Is it with OWS for supplying a huge number of masks or with the public health agencies that continued to push, and, in many cases, mandated a useless modality that could and did cause harm? 

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China’s cyber-abuse scandal: is the government unwilling to crack down on exploitation of women online?

When Ming* found a hidden camera in her bedroom, she prayed for a reasonable explanation, wondering whether her boyfriend had placed it there to record memories of their “happy life” together. But hope quickly turned to horror. Ming’s boyfriend had been secretly taking sexually exploitative photos of not just Ming and her female friends, but also of other women in other locations, then using AI technology to generate pornographic images of them.

After Ming confronted him, he “begged for mercy” but became angry when she refused to forgive him, Ming reportedly told Chinese news outlet Jimu News.

Ming is just one of many women in China who have been covertly photographed or filmed – both in private and public spaces, including toilets – by voyeurs who have then circulated or sold the images online without consent. The sexually explicit pictures – often taken using pinhole cameras hidden in ordinary objects – are then shared online in massive groups.

The scandal has left China reeling and raised questions about the government’s ability – and willingness – to crack down on such behaviour.

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Reclaiming the Beauty of the Spheres

Clever people are using computer programs to produce fake humans, say how great they are, and push them for money. They are designed to be sexually suggestive or work on other human desires for self-gratification, including that of child abuse, because that is how money can be made. 

There can be beauty in a picture, partly through the implied care a person took to capture or produce it. Beauty is not skin deep, and seduction is not beauty – more so when it implies an acceptable path to corruption. It uses a shallow image of reality to fool us. We are being asked, by the tech industry, to become very shallow. We don’t have to comply.

As a child, I grew up in a rural coastal region, where the town’s streetlights were switched off at 11 pm each night. Some nearby areas had no electrical power at all, and the nearest city was 100 miles away. At night, the Milky Way was just that, stretching across the sky, with the Magellanic Clouds clearly visible half the year and Scorpio, Orion, and the Southern Cross part of normal life. 

As street lighting improved, this faded a little, but remained bright and clear, and was unchanged from the hills and farms around. The creek had platypus and blackfish. There were 10 miles of empty sand beach on the coast to the southwest, broken only by a clear water entrance, and the mountains of the promontory to the south backing the wide inlet and islands where mutton birds returned from a yearlong circumference of the Pacific.

This is the stunning reality that humans have lived in, in various forms in various parts of Earth, for a hundred thousand years. Watching the vastness of the universe domed above and a land and seascape fading toward a distant vague horizon must inevitably change the way we view the world and each other. The beauty of the spheres.

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BEYOND PARODY: CBS Mornings Host Worries About America ‘Colonizing’ the Moon, is Reminded There’s No Indigenous Population There

During a conversation with Neil deGrasse Tyson, CBS Mornings host Vladimir Duthiers expressed worry about America ‘colonizing’ the moon and had to be reminded that there is no indigenous population there.

It’s just the latest reminder of how insane our media has become.

Duthiers is basically parroting the type of language you hear on far left college campuses about colonization. It’s one of the many ways the left uses language and ideas to bash our country and its history.

FOX News reported:

CBS host frets Trump admin plans for moon base could usher in new ‘age of colonialism’ in space

On “CBS Mornings Plus” on Wednesday, Duthiers and co-host Adriana Diaz discussed the White House calling for more human space exploration and administration plans to build a nuclear reactor on the moon to precede an eventual U.S. lunar base with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Diaz asked if it was “inevitable that we’re going to have to go to the moon and try to colonize the Moon?”

“We know how the age of colonialism worked on this planet,” the host said. “Should we be trying to colonize and saying that there’s a keep-out zone that no other countries can participate in having?”

Tyson replied by pointing out that it would be difficult to colonize an area that does not have people.

“Well, the — the real problem with the colonization history in Western civilization is that there were people already there,” Tyson said.

Duthiers and Diaz agreed, and Tyson added that “there are no moon beings that were displaced as far as we know.”

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New hate crime charges filed in killing of Israeli Embassy staffers, raising death penalty potential

D.C. federal prosecutors have filed federal hate crime and murder charges against the man accused of gunning down two Israeli Embassy staffers this spring, giving the Justice Department the option to pursue the death penalty in the case.

The newly unsealed indictment lays out the alleged digital footprint of Elias Rodriguez’s antisemitic views that prosecutors say fueled the deadly shooting of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah MilgrIm, a young couple who were days away from being engaged in Jerusalem.

The court documents include a “notice of special findings” that includes the potential for Mr. Rodriguez, 31, to receive the death penalty. 

Surveillance video showed Rodriguez advancing closer to Lischinsky and Milgrim as they fell to the ground, leaning over them and firing additional shots. He appeared to reload before jogging off, officials have said.

The defendant is accused of flying from Chicago to the District with his legally owned pistol to carry out the May 21 attack outside the Capital Jewish Museum. 

The new indictment says Mr. Rodriguez shouted “Free Palestine” when he shot the couple dead as they left the venue, according to court documents. 

Surveillance video allegedly captured Mr. Rodriguez standing over the victims and firing more shots into the couple after he initially downed them.

The filing said he then went inside the museum and claimed he killed the pair “for Gaza” and “for Palestine” while brandishing a red keffiyeh, a traditional Arabic scarf often associated with anti-Israel activists.

Mr. Rodriguez continued to shout “Free Palestine” during his arrest, the indictment said, and made statements about “intifada” and “revolution” as well. He also yelled  “shame on you” at event attendees inside the museum and “shame on Zio-nazi terror.”  

Old social media posts cited in court documents include a 2024 post that said “Happy New Year, Death To Israel.”

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Is Rachel Maddow Trying to Get Trump Killed? It Sure Looks That Way

On Monday of this week, the only night that Rachel Maddow hosts her MSNBC show, she looked depressed and dejected as she delivered her opening monologue.

In her screed, Maddow spent the better part of ten-plus minutes describing the Trump presidency as a dictatorship and saying that the country “has an authoritarian leader.”

What is Maddow doing here? There have already been two attempts on Trump’s life. Is Maddow pushing for a third? It sure looks that way.

Transcript via NewsBusters:

RACHEL MADDOW: Life has not stopped and none of our personal lives have stopped. But also at the same time, life in the United States is profoundly changing. It’s profoundly different than it was even six months ago, because we do now live in a country that has an authoritarian leader in charge. We have a consolidating dictatorship in our country. And it sounds melodramatic to say it, I know, but just go with that for a minute, right?

Think– think in melodramatic terms. Think in cinematic terms. Imagine the cartoon level caricature of what you think a dictatorship looks like. I mean, it’s secret police, right? A massive anonymous unbadged, literally masked, totally unaccountable internal police force that apparently has infinite funding but no identifiable leadership. And they act in ways designed to instill maximum fear and use maximum force.

I mean, when you imagine an authoritarian country, right, what you imagine is masked secret police breaking people’s car windows and snatching people off the streets and out of church parking lots and courtroom hallways and taking them away with no charges, no notice, no paperwork, no explanation, not letting them see lawyers, and then moving them secretly to what are effectively black site prisons where they won’t tell you who’s there and where no one is allowed in to see what’s going on. Right?

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Justice Department charges two Chinese over allegedly smuggling Nvidia chips to China

U.S. authorities arrested two Chinese accused of illegally transporting millions of dollars’ worth of microchips used in artificial intelligence applications to China.

Chuan Geng and Shiwei Yang, both 28, were charged over the weekend for violating the Export Control Reform Act. According to a criminal complaint filed by the Justice Department, between October 2022 and last month, the suspects exported “sensitive technology” without obtaining the proper license or authorization through the U.S. Commerce Department. 

Violating the act carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison, according to a criminal complaint filed by the DOJ.

While Mr. Geng is a lawful permanent resident, Ms. Yang is an illegal alien who overstayed her visa, according to the Justice Department. 

According to the complaint, Ms. Yang and Mr. Geng illegally transported several popular microchips used in AI development, including Nvidia’s H100 general processing unit. The H100 is widely considered one of the strongest GPUs on the market for AI applications, especially in the training of large language models. 

The chips were allegedly shipped through California-based ALX Solutions Inc., which was founded shortly after the Commerce Department issued strict export controls on powerful chips like the H100 in 2022. The DOJ alleges that ALX-connected shipments were tracked to freight-forwarding companies in Singapore and Malaysia, which are commonly used to conceal illegal shipments to China. 

“ALX Solutions has not received payments from the entities to which they purportedly exported goods. Instead, ALX Solutions received numerous payments from companies based in Hong Kong and China, including a $1 million payment from a China-based company in January 2024,” the complaint reads. 

Authorities raided the offices of ALX Solutions over the weekend and seized phones belonging to Ms. Yang and Mr. Geng. According to the DOJ, the phones contained incriminating evidence, including “communications about shipping export-controlled chips to China through Malaysia to evade U.S. export laws.”

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Active Duty Soldier With Top Security Clearance Arrested Trying to Hand Classified Information and Technology to Russian Intelligence

An investigation FBI and the Army Counterintelligence Command has resulted in the arrest of active serviceman Taylor Adam Lee, 22, of El Paso, Texas, on charges of ‘attempted transmission of national defense information to a foreign adversary, and attempted export of controlled technical data without a license.

From the DOJ website:

“According to the criminal complaint, the defendant sought to transmit sensitive national defense information to Russia regarding the operation of the M1A2 Abrams, our Nation’s main battle tank,” said Assistant Attorney General for National Security John A. Eisenberg. “The National Security Division will continue to work with our law enforcement and military partners to ensure that such serious transgressions are met with serious consequences.”

U.S. Attorney Justin R. Simmons for the Western District of Texas: “Our enemies, both foreign and domestic, should be aware that we diligently investigate and aggressively prosecute these cases. I appreciate the investigative work by our partners in the FBI and the Army Counterintelligence Command, and I look forward to continuing our work with them as we proceed with the prosecution of this important case.”

Lee is charged with attempting to provide classified military information on U.S. tank vulnerabilities to someone he mistakenly believed to be a Russian intelligence officer.

The soldier is alleged to have done this in exchange for what he believed was going to be ‘Russian citizenship’.

Lee was stationed at Fort Bliss, and held a Top Secret (TS) and Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) security clearance. Since May 2025, Lee had been allegedly transmitting ‘export-controlled technical information’ on the M1A2 Abrams Tank.

He also offered assistance to the Russian Federation, saying: ‘the USA is not happy with me for trying to expose their weaknesses’, and added, ‘At this point I’d even volunteer to assist the Russian federation when I’m there in any way’.

In July, Lee had an in-person meeting with a fake Russian agent, where the he allegedly passed an SD card to the individual.

The card contained ‘controlled technical data’ that Lee did not have the authorization to provide.

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Four NATO States Agree To Buy $1 Billion In US Weapons For Ukraine

Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and the Netherlands announced they would buy $1 billion in weapons for Ukraine from the US. 

Copenhagen is pledging to buy $500 million in arms that will be matched by the three Scandinavian countries. “Ukraine is not only fighting for its own security, but also for our security,” Swedish Defense Minister Pal Jonson. 

The Wall Street Journal reports this is the first of several weapon sales to Ukraine paid for by NATO members this summer. 

NATO and President Donald Trump recently unveiled a scheme to send Ukraine $10 billion in US weapons funded by Europe and Canada. However, several European countries have announced they will not participate in the program. 

The WSJ report makes mention of Kyiv’s shopping list:

NATO and Ukraine have established a shopping list of Kyiv’s requirements for lethal and nonlethal equipment, dubbed the Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List. NATO, Ukraine and NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe, U.S. Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, will ensure the packages meet Kyiv’s needs. NATO is dividing the list into packages valued at roughly $500 million apiece

Governments are making financial commitments toward the packages and NATO, which has pledged “rapid delivery from U.S. stockpiles” will coordinate delivery of the arms to Ukraine.

Ukrainian President Zelensky celebrated the announcement. “We already have commitments from the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark – over one billion dollars for American weapons that Ukraine will receive,” he wrote on X. “Thank you! This cooperation with NATO countries will continue.”

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