Tag: regulations

BEYOND PARODY: The Associated Press Floats Idea of Gun Control for… MUSKETS

Just in time for America’s 250th birthday celebrations, the liberal Associated Press is suddenly floating the idea of gun control for muskets.

They’re not coming right out and saying it, of course. What they have done is drop an article that basically says: Hey America, did you know that muskets are not regulated like other guns? Their purpose here is so obvious.

The liberal left has never heard of a form of gun control that they didn’t like.

The Daily Caller reports:

The Associated Press posted a short video that appeared to highlight what it called a lack of regulation of flintlock muskets Thursday morning.

Under federal law, flintlock muskets fall into the definition of “antique firearms” under the language of 18 USC 921(16), which exempts them from many of the regulations and laws at the federal level, as well as in most states. In a caption for the video posted on X Thursday morning, the AP noted that while a musket could fire a projectile at 1,000 feet per second, it was exempt from gun regulations under federal law.

“When you look at the Congressional Record from 1968, Senator John Tower’s rationale, which involved committee hearing testimonies from gun collectors and other historical organizations, spent a lot of care and effort into identifying that cut-off date,” firearms historian Ashley Hlebinsky told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “He clearly lays out not wanting to burden historians, collectors, gun owners, and museums and dives into a pretty thorough explanation for why he believes the year should be 1898.”

Modern firearms are typically breech-loading weapons that use self-contained metallic cartridges with smokeless powder (or modern propellants) developed primarily after the mid-to-late 19th century, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). Black-powder muzzle-loading firearms (often classified as “antiques” under U.S. federal law) are older designs that load loose powder, projectile and wadding from the muzzle end, using ignition systems like flintlock, matchlock or percussion cap.

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Sec. Burgum on Economy-Crushing Bureaucratic Creep: ‘80% of What People Were Being Held Accountable for’ Not Original Law

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum argued while speaking at a Breitbart News policy event that the vast majority of the legal hoops the American energy industry has to jump through are setting the U.S. back, while China skips over bureaucracy in the race for AI dominance.

Burgum, the chairman of President Donald Trump’s National Energy Dominance Council, told Breitbart News Washington Bureau Chief Matthew Boyle that the “Silicon Valley Titans” who do not necessarily see eye-to-eye with Trump understand the issue, which is why they largely supported his 2024 campaign. 

“In November ’24, who was standing on stage at the inauguration? Tim Cook, Elon Musk, [and] Mark Zuckerberg,” the secretary said. “I mean, you know, Silicon Valley Titans were all standing there within 20 feet of the president. Think, why?”

“Because,” Burgum said, “They all got behind electing a president that understood that we needed more energy, and that we could not win the AI arms race without more electricity, and that the policies that the competition was offering was going to end up with energy subtraction.”

In its own words, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has stated that their AI theories, technologies, and applications should “achieve world-leading levels” and make China “the world’s primary AI innovation center” by 2030. 

As Breitbart News’s Wynton Hall noted in his latest book, Code Red, “Nearly half of the world’s top AI researchers are Chinese,” and the country produces “nearly twice as many AI-relevant PhDs as the United States does.”

Burgum stated that Trump’s mission to beat China in the AI race is what caused a “giant shift” to occur, with major technology companies throwing their support behind the president in order to achieve this goal. 

“It was important that it was happening because if we were going down a path, which was continuing to do energy subtraction, we have no chance,” the Interior secretary argued. “Now, we have a chance.”

According to Burgum, the Chinese “are not spending years caught up in court, in litigation over a bunch of, say, bureaucratic rules — not even laws.”

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This Is Why the U.S. Can’t Use the Oil It Produces

The United States produces more oil than any other country in the world—averaging 13.3 million barrels per day (MMb/d) in 2024. But strangely, the U.S. also imports about 6.5 MMb/d of crude. This paradox confuses many Americans. Why doesn’t the U.S. just use its own oil? The answer lies in infrastructure mismatches, refinery design, trade economics, and federal laws that restrict the flow of domestic oil.

  1. 🧪 Light Oil vs. Heavy Oil: Not All Crude Is Created Equal
    The U.S. primarily produces light, sweet crude oil, which is low in sulfur and viscosity. Meanwhile, many American refineries—especially those built in the 1970s and 80s—were designed to handle heavy, sour crude, the kind that comes from countries like Venezuela, Mexico, and Canada.

Over 60% of U.S. refinery capacity is optimized for heavy crude processing.
Upgrading a single refinery to handle lighter crude can cost between $100 million to $1 billion.
This means that even though the U.S. produces oil, it’s the wrong kind of oil for its aging refinery infrastructure. So we export light crude (often to Asia and Europe) and import heavy crude to feed our refineries.

  1. 🏗️ Refinery Location and Infrastructure Gaps
    The second major problem is geography. Much of America’s oil production comes from inland fields like the Permian Basin (Texas/New Mexico) or the Bakken Formation (North Dakota). Meanwhile, many of the refineries that need oil are located on the East and West Coasts, far from those production zones.

California, despite being a top 5 oil-producing state, imports ~75% of its crude due to limited pipeline access.
The Keystone XL cancellation and other pipeline delays exacerbate this logistical mismatch.
It’s often cheaper to import oil from the Middle East or Latin America to coastal ports than it is to move domestic crude across the U.S. via expensive trucking, rail, or limited pipelines.

  1. ⚖️ The Jones Act: A Shipping Law That Backfires
    The Jones Act, passed in 1920, requires that any goods (including oil) transported between U.S. ports must use ships that are U.S.-built, -owned, and -crewed. These ships are vastly more expensive to operate than foreign tankers.

A Jones Act tanker costs up to $75,000 per day—nearly 3x more than foreign vessels.
This makes it cheaper to ship oil from Saudi Arabia to New Jersey than from Texas to New Jersey.
The law, originally meant to support the American maritime industry, now creates bottlenecks in the oil supply chain—making domestic crude more expensive to move than imported oil.

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Another Red State, Fully Californicated

“20 years ago Colorado was a Red state and thriving,” the State Leadership Initiative posted late last week. “10 years ago liberals were writing pieces about how Colorado was the next Silicon Valley.” And now CBS News reports that “Colorado is losing businesses and jobs at an alarming rate.”

This was the hope, according to Denver-based 5280 magazine in 2020: “With another tech company setting up an office in Denver, the state could become a magnet for Silicon Valley firms and other prestigious businesses during the worst economic climate in nearly a century.”

Instead of Silicon Mountain, Colorado is quickly becoming “an economic backwater,” as SLI put it, “an omen for what happens when Red states go blue.”

It seems like only last week [It was just last week, Steve —Editor] I shared the schadenfreudelicious tale of how one TDS-suffering Delaware judge launched an exodus of big-name firms led by Elon Musk. Today, I must share similar news about my once-beloved home state of Colorado.

“The Colorado Chamber of Commerce has been sounding an alarm for years about excessive regulation,” CBS reported, and “the Chamber also said that companies are also relocating out-of-state.” According to the story, “since 2019, 98 companies have either left the state, expanded elsewhere, or scrapped plans to move here.” In the last four years, we’ve lost a total of 34 corporate headquarters, too. 

The most recent big name to leave is Palantir, the AI firm recently touted by President Donald Trump for its invaluable contributions to Operation Epic Fury. With basically zero fanfare, the company announced last week that it’s moved its HQ to Miami. 

“We are going to be hurting Colordans not just now, but the next generation, the next generation after that. And we just want to course correct,” tech entrepreneur and investor Dan Caruso wrote to Democrat Gov. Jared Polis in a letter signed by more than 200 business and civic leaders.

Polis and the Democrat-dominated statehouse made some polite noises about maybe looking into something resembling deregulation someday soonish, but Colorado requires so much more.

Let’s go back to something I wrote almost exactly one year ago, when we looked at what Colorado was like before and after 2018, the year Democrats took full control of the state government.

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Today’s Anti-Capitalists Want to Regulate What You Can Eat, How Often You Drive, and the Size of Your Home

It may sound cruel to say so, but such thinking closely mirrors that of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

Planned economics is enjoying yet another revival. Climate protection advocates and anti-capitalists are demanding that capitalism be abolished and replaced with a planned economy.

Otherwise, they claim, humanity has no chance of survival.

In Germany, a book called Das Ende des Kapitalismus (Englisch: The End of Capitalism) is a bestseller and its author, Ulrike Herrmann, has become a regular guest on all the talk shows. She openly promotes a planned economy, although this has already failed once in Germany—just like everywhere else it has been tried.

Unlike under classical socialism, in a planned economy, companies are not nationalized, they are allowed to remain in private hands. But it is the state that specifies precisely what and how much is produced.

There would be no more flights and no more private motor vehicles. The state would determine almost every facet of daily life—for example, there would no longer be any single-family houses and no one would be allowed to own a second home. New construction would be banned because it is harmful to the environment. Instead, existing land would be distributed “fairly,” with the state deciding how much space is appropriate for each individual. And the consumption of meat would only be allowed as an exception because meat production is harmful to the climate.

In general, people should not eat so much: 2,500 calories a day are enough, says Herrmann, who proposes a daily intake of 500 grams of fruit and vegetables, 232 grams of whole meal cereals or rice, 13 grams of eggs, and 7 grams of pork.

“At first glance, this menu may seem a bit meager, but Germans would be much healthier if they changed their eating habits,” reassures this critic of capitalism. And since people would be equal, they would also be happy: “Rationing sounds unpleasant. But perhaps life would even be more pleasant than it is today, because justice makes people happy.”

Such ideas are by no means new. The popular Canadian critic of capitalism and globalization, Naomi Klein, admits that she initially had no particular interest in climate change. Then, in 2014, she wrote a hefty 500-page tome called This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate.

Why did she suddenly become so interested?

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Hey, Guess What the Experts Were Wrong About This Time!

Experts: “Trump said weaker gas mileage rules will mean cheaper cars. Experts say don’t bet on it.”

Carmakers: “Hold my kei.”

Kei trucks are ultra-compact, ultra-efficient pickup trucks designed specifically to fit Japan’s kei-jidosha (light vehicle) regulations, and they’re beloved around the world. But you could never buy one here, thanks to Washington’s ever-tightening Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) regulations, first imposed on new cars and trucks in 1975.

You know, the regulations President Donald Trump rolled back last week.

Trump said, “If you go to Japan, where I just left, and if you go to South Korea and Malaysia and other countries, they have a very small car—sort of like the Beetle used to be with the Volkswagen—they’re very small, they’re really cute, and I said, ‘How would that do in this country?'”

“And everyone seems to think good, but you’re not allowed to build them, and I’ve authorized the secretary to immediately approve the production of those cars… Honda, some of the Japanese companies do a beautiful job, but we’re not allowed to make them in this country and I think you’re gonna do very well with those cars, so we’re gonna approve those cars.”

But the Associated Press’s Alexa St. John is having none of that, apparently, in a piece explaining why Trump is wrong and CAFE is right and just get used to expensive cars forever.

Without doing a Full Frontal Fisking of St. John’s “THE FACTS” article, let me present the facts she missed or ignored.

Trump promised that new car prices might drop by $1,000 under his relaxed standards — really, just going back to the CAFE standards we used just a few years ago, when the planet still wasn’t dying. And that’s great, as far as it goes.

But consumers might be more interested in new, much less expensive, product categories that CAFE forced carmakers out of and American car-buyers away from.

“Average prices have also skewed higher as automakers have leaned into the costly big pickups and SUVs that many American consumers love,” St. John wrote — did I detect a note of disdain? — without mentioning that CAFE is the reason Americans moved away from affordable sedans and station wagons, and into trucks and SUVs.

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Trump Pardons Mountain Runner Michelino Sunseri, Who Was Prosecuted for Using an Unapproved Trail

“In an unbelievable twist that even Hollywood couldn’t write,” mountain runner Michelino Sunseri announced on Facebook yesterday, “I woke up this morning to find out I’ve been given a PRESIDENTIAL PARDON from Donald J. Trump.” Thus ends what Sunseri facetiously described as “the trail trial of the century”—his prosecution for taking an unauthorized route while ascending and descending Grand Teton in record time last year.

Sunseri’s case attracted attention as an example of overcriminalization—in particular, the ways that general statutes authorizing criminal penalties interact with a sprawling federal regulatory code to entrap people who break the law without realizing it. That description pretty clearly applied to Sunseri, who provided the evidence that led to his prosecution by posting a map of his 13-mile Grand Teton route on social media.

On his way down, Sunseri briefly took a quarter-mile path known as “the old climber’s trail” that had been used by six of seven previous Grand Teton record holders. As Cato Institute legal fellow Mike Fox noted in March, “tour guides who charge hefty sums frequently lead hikers up the same route,” which WyoFile described as “a historic trail so well-used that it’s become a skinny singletrack.”

The National Park Service (NPS) nevertheless considered that trail “closed,” although it notified the public of that designation only via two small and ambiguous signs that could easily have been misinterpreted. As the NPS saw it, Sunseri therefore had violated 36 CFR 21(b), which says a park superintendent “may restrict hiking or pedestrian use to a designated trail or walkway system.” It adds that “leaving a trail or walkway to shortcut between portions of the same trail or walkway, or to shortcut to an adjacent trail or walkway in violation of designated restrictions is prohibited.”

The regulation says nothing about criminal penalties, which are separately authorized by 16 USC 551. That law says violations of “rules and regulations” governing the use of public and national forests “shall be punished by a fine of not more than $500 or imprisonment for not more than six months, or both.”

By authorizing prosecution for agency-defined offenses, Congress has created a bewildering situation in which the average American cannot reasonably be expected to know when he is committing a federal crime. The Code of Federal Regulations is so vast and obscure that even experts can only guess at the number of criminal penalties it authorizes—at least 300,000, they think.

“Many of these regulatory crimes are ‘strict liability’ offenses, meaning that citizens need not have a guilty mental state to be convicted of a crime,” Trump noted in a May 9 executive order. “This status quo is absurd and unjust. It allows the executive branch to write the law, in addition to executing it.”

Trump said federal prosecutors generally should eschew criminal charges for regulatory violations based on strict liability and focus on cases where the evidence suggests the defendant knowingly broke the rules. Trump also instructed federal agencies to “explicitly describe” conduct subject to criminal punishment under new regulations and prepare lists of regulatory violations that already can be treated as crimes.

After Trump issued that order, the NPS, which initially recommended Sunseri’s prosecution, reconsidered, saying a plea deal offered by the government, which included a five-year ban from Grand Teton National Park as well as a fine, amounted to “an overcriminalization based on the gravity of the offense.” But federal prosecutors in Wyoming, where that park is located, were undeterred. They proceeded with a two-day bench trial that ended on May 21.

After U.S. Magistrate Judge Stephanie Hambrick found Sunseri guilty in September, prosecutors offered to drop the case in exchange for 60 hours of community service. The U.S. Attorney’s Office described that retreat as “an evolution of what is right,” saying the decision “was made to preserve prosecutive and judicial resources while upholding the best interests of the public and the justice system.”

Hambrick was irked, telling Ed Bushnell, one of Sunseri’s attorneys: “It’s an interesting message you send to the public. If you whine and cry hard enough, you get your way.” But she said she would not decide whether to accept the belated deal until after a hearing on November 18.

Trump’s pardon obviates the need for that hearing. And contrary to Hambrick’s take, it sends a positive message—unlike his pardons for Capitol rioters, corrupt public officials who abused their powers for personal gain, allies in his fight to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, or other supporters with dubious cases for clemency. Sunseri’s pardon is consistent with Trump’s avowed concern about overcriminalization, which was also reflected in his May 28 pardons for two Florida diving instructors who were convicted of federal felonies after they freed sharks they mistakenly thought had been caught illegally.

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Consumer Protection Laws: Unconstitutional Controls That Hurt the Very People They Claim to Help

From rent caps to “price-gouging” laws, a new wave of so-called consumer-protection laws is sweeping state capitols. These measures are marketed as compassion in a crisis — or “fairness” in housing — but their substance is the same: command-and-control price fixing that violates the Constitution, tramples private-property rights, and sabotages the free market’s ability to allocate goods and services when people need them most.

Three recent bills illustrate the trend. Alabama’s House Bill 528 (HB528) and Virginia’s House Bill 1301 (HB1301) expand anti-gouging controls to more transactions and longer periods after emergencies. New Jersey’s Assembly Bill 3361 (A3361) imposes rent control on manufactured-home sites. Nebraska’s Legislative Bill 266 (LB266), however, is a rare bright spot, preempting local rent control and affirming property rights. Together, these bills spotlight the central question: Will states defend a constitutional, republican system rooted in liberty and voluntary exchange, or drift toward administrative despotism under the banner of “consumer protection”?

Protecting Property and Contract Rights

America’s Founders understood what modern lawmakers too often forget: Price controls are a form of compelled exchange that violates liberty. The U.S. Constitution safeguards that liberty in multiple places:

  • Fifth Amendment: “Nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” Price ceilings that force owners to sell below market value are regulatory takings in substance, if not in name.
  • Article I, Section 10: “No State shall … pass any … Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts.” When a legislature dictates the permissible price, term, or escalation of a private lease or service, it impairs the parties’ agreed-upon obligations.
  • Ninth and 10th Amendments: The people retain unenumerated rights, and powers not delegated to the federal government are reserved to the states or the people. These clauses limit government; they do not license it to control every transaction.
  • 14th Amendment (due process and equal protection): Arbitrary economic edicts that single out owners for special burdens invite due-process and equal-protection concerns.

Consumer-protection statutes also collide with first principles. The Declaration of Independence identifies unalienable rights — life, liberty, and property — and charges government to secure them. Free exchange is a peaceful exercise of those rights, and upholds one’s pursuit of happiness. Substituting bureaucratic fiat for voluntary exchange undermines the moral basis of self-government.

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“We’re Living Through A Coordinated Sabotage Of Truth-Seeking Institutions”

“A civilization is defined by its ability to discern truth from falsehood,” writes ‘Camus’ (@newstart_2024) in a post on X.

So, what happens when every apparatus built for that purpose is systematically dismantled?

Bret Weinstein issues a stark warning: we are living through a coordinated sabotage of our truth-seeking institutions.

This is not a minor critique; it is a fundamental attack on the very mechanisms of a functional society.

He argues that the assault is comprehensive:

  • The University System: Once a beacon of knowledge, now a source of unreliable research and curricula that teach verifiably false concepts as truth. The cornerstone of academic rigor has been cracked.
  • Regulatory Agencies: These bodies have been inverted. Their purpose is no longer to protect citizens from harm, but to protect the regulators and the system from the citizens they are meant to serve.
  • Scientific Integrity: We are left grappling in the dark on critical issues. Determining something as scientifically straightforward as the potential link between mRNA vaccines and turbo cancers should be a matter of transparent data. Instead, we are forced to rely on buried anecdotes and studies designed to fail.

This is the realization of René Descartes’ deepest fear – that the very foundations of what we believe to be factual cannot be trusted.

We have been severed from the tools of the Enlightenment, left in a precarious state where anecdote replaces evidence and ideology replaces inquiry.

We are now navigating a world without a compass.

The predicament is not just dangerous; it is existential.

The question is no longer just “what is true?” but “how do we find out, when the paths to truth have been deliberately destroyed?”

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Big Government Locks Young People Out of the American Dream

Last Thursday’s debate among the New York City mayoral candidates highlighted an issue that is among young Americans’ top concerns today: affordability. Democrat candidate Zohran Mamdani, the frontrunner, stated that affordability was the city’s most important problem. Independent candidate Andrew Cuomo and Republican hopeful Curtis Sliwa concurred, arguing the socialist Mamdani’s proposals are impractically expensive.

Mamdani’s emphasis on the affordability issue has benefited him politically, as young people in the city struggle to find decent, affordable housing and are increasingly willing to consider his agenda of greater government intervention and control.

That would be an awful mistake because socialism, regulation, and other government policies are what have caused the affordability crisis that has arisen across the United States. The current U.S. economy is anything but free, and the problems of today’s American economic system are caused almost exclusively by government. Young Americans’ struggles in achieving home ownership reflect the decline of economic freedom in the United States.

Government regulations directly increase the cost of housing, accounting for $93,870 of the $394,300 average price of a new home in the United States in 2021, about a quarter of the home’s cost, notes Paul Emrath, Ph.D., in a study for the National Association of Home Builders.

University of Central Arkansas professor Jeremy Horpedahl observes that “in 2023 it took 31 percent more hours of work to buy a square foot of the median home, compared with 1971.” That has its greatest effect on young households: with housing prices increasing rapidly, those who already have mortgages or fully own their houses gain an ever-greater economic advantage over the young. U.S. home sales in 2024 and 2025 are at their worst in 30 years, Fortune reports.

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