An 18-year-old woman died this year after complications from her 22-week abortion at a Planned Parenthood in Fort Collins, Colorado. A recent testimony given to the state’s Health and Human Services committee noted she lost a significant amount of blood — a known risk of later abortions — and that she was transported too late for the emergency care she needed. She deserved prompt diagnosis and critical care in her moment of need.

But blue-state legislators, instead of showing concern and protecting women from preventable complications and deaths, are more interested in pushing abortion access than they are in ensuring women’s safety. //

Shamefully, Colorado legislators not only rejected recent legislation that would have implemented common-sense public health and safety standards for facilities performing second and third-trimester abortions, they also shockingly claimed the woman would have died of similar complications in childbirth.

As a board-certified OB-GYN, I can attest that this “medical” conclusion is doubtful since amniotic fluid embolus (AFE), the condition they speculated about, is a unique occurrence in a specific clinical situation. Furthermore, their refusal to truly understand the facts surrounding this young woman’s death distracts from the disastrous risks of unregulated, uninspected, unlicensed dangerous second and third-trimester abortions enshrined into Colorado law.

Tragically, media reaction to this case has been virtually non-existent. When women die in states with any abortion limits on the books, the media is quick to highlight their stories, but when women die where there is unrestricted abortion with no safety protections whatsoever, we hear crickets. //

But countless women who enter abortion facilities are unknowingly denied assurance that they will be cared for by competent, credentialed staff who are prepared to identify and promptly transfer patients suffering complications to nearby hospitals for life-saving treatment when needed or if they are prepared to provide adequate emergency care to the vulnerable women who place their health in the hands of their abortionists.

It seems wildly contradictory that states rightly require other healthcare facilities dealing with maternal care, labor, and delivery to uphold rigorous medical standards but place none on abortion facilities. In Colorado, birthing centers undergo licensing and regulation to define their scope of practice, credential their providers, establish emergency preparedness and staff drills, collect data, and more. Likewise, ambulatory surgery centers may only treat “those that do not generally result in extensive blood loss; require major or prolonged invasion of body cavities; directly involve major blood vessels; or constitute an emergency or life-threatening procedure.”

Hospital labor and delivery units are subject to even more rigorous regulation and inspection, including inspections by the Joint Commission and Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services. These measures are commonsense and exactly what anyone would expect from safe healthcare providers.

Even tattoo parlors are required to prove basic first-aid capabilities and sterilization procedures; yet abortion facilities aren’t even held to these standards.

Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday rolling back a federal regulation he has blamed for poor water pressure. His order would eliminate restrictions the Obama administration placed on how much water can flow from shower heads, an effort to conserve resources. Trump relaxed those standards during his first term, but President Joe Biden put them back in place.

“No longer will shower heads be weak and worthless,” said a draft of Trump’s order, adding that it intended to “make America’s showers great again.”

Trump has for years lamented the effect of low water pressure on his “gorgeous” and “perfect” hair.

Decades of efficiency mandates have made dishwashers weaker, A.C. units feebler, and appliances more expensive. A new rollback offers a rare win for function over dogma.

Baptiste @BaptisteVicini
·
Apr 7
"They amputated their own legs on this," Stewart admitted.

This reveals a deeper issue: complexity as a control mechanism.

By making internet deployment convoluted, officials control who gets access.

The implications are troubling for democracy.

Internet access isn't just convenience—it's opportunity.

When bureaucracy blocks connectivity, it creates knowledge gaps.

Those in power benefit when information access is limited.

Musk retweeted Stewart's viral reaction and ...

Stewart's realization reflects a growing consensus:

The problem isn't about politics—it's about effectiveness.

When these systems prioritize process over people, we all lose.

Technology should connect us, not be used to divide us further.

While the government spends years on paperwork, companies like Starlink deploy solutions in weeks.

This raises questions about whether bureaucracy is intentional.

By keeping access complicated, information flow remains controlled.

This affects our entire society.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court handed down its long-awaited ruling in Bondi v. Vanderstok, upholding the Biden administration’s 2022 rule that allows the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to regulate so-called “ghost guns.” But while headlines may frame this as a Second Amendment loss, that’s not the real story here.

The real story is this: the administrative state just scored another narrow, but important, win—and once again, it did so not through an act of Congress, but through bureaucratic interpretation.

Let’s walk through what actually happened. //

This case was a challenge to the ATF’s rule under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA)—a law meant to prevent executive agencies from exceeding their statutory authority. //

This may sound reasonable on paper—especially given concerns over untraceable firearms—but it opens the door to something much more troubling: the broadening of executive power through regulation rather than legislation.

Congress never passed a law banning or regulating ghost guns. Instead, the ATF reinterpreted existing law to give itself that authority. And the Supreme Court just signed off on that approach.

That’s the real concern here. Not the regulation itself, but the process. //

In a blistering dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas warned that the Court was effectively rewriting the statute to allow the executive branch to regulate products Congress never intended to regulate. He pointed out that the Gun Control Act only allows the ATF to regulate certain gun parts, not any part or unfinished frame that might one day become part of a gun.

He also noted that the logic behind the majority’s ruling could eventually be used to justify classifying AR-15 receivers as “machineguns” under the National Firearms Act—an outcome that would have massive legal implications for millions of gun owners nationwide.

The bill overturns the 2009 Shell Egg Rule, allowing these eggs to be processed safely and efficiently, increasing supply and lowering costs for consumers. […]

In 2009, the FDA required shell eggs to be refrigerated at 45°F within 36 hours to reduce salmonella risk. The rule was originally meant for grocery store eggs, but it was later expanded to include broiler eggs, which come from chickens raised for meat. Before this change, broiler eggs were safely pasteurized and used in processed foods. This unnecessary requirement now forces the disposal of 400 million usable eggs each year, driving up prices and limiting supply.

Donald J. Trump Posts From His Truth Social
@TrumpDailyPosts
·
I am hereby instructing Secretary Lee Zeldin to immediately go back to my Environmental Orders, which were terminated by Crooked Joe Biden, on Water Standards and Flow pertaining to SINKS, SHOWERS, TOILETS, WASHING MACHINES, DISHWASHERS, etc., and to likewise go back to the common sense standards on LIGHTBULBS, that were put in place by the Trump Administration, but terminated by Crooked Joe. I look forward to signing these Orders. THANK YOU!!!
2:13 PM · Feb 11, 2025. //

Most of Biden's regulations would do little to lower emissions significantly or affect the vast climate system. They mostly seemed designed to punish the American people, virtue signal, and send billions to the Green New Deal scammers.

BECS are officially referred to as “voluntary,” and supposedly developed by “consensus,” for state and local governments to implement building energy efficiency requirements. The International Code Council (ICC), through its numerous committees, publishes these codes and generates revenues by selling them to whoever needs them (e.g., code officials, builders, trades, etc.). ICC energy codes are organized and managed under a separate division of the ICC called the International Energy Conservation Code (IECC). //

“Consensus” building energy codes have been largely and silently commandeered by EERE which has accelerated under the Biden administration. “Consensus” comes through “packing the bleachers” of committees with loyalists to further the Net-Zero concept. Tactics include “improving” building energy efficiency codes through “public/private partnerships.” However, the true cause of Net-Zero policies is to advance electrified “energy efficiency” via “clean” (a.k.a. renewable) energy so that consumers can be more readily controlled. //

RedStorm
9 hours ago
I find energy consumption information useful as a consumer on major appliances, for example. Not that I think I’m ‘saving the planet’ by buying an appliance that uses less energy, but I like knowing relatively what that sucker is going to cost me to operate. Same with mileage information about an automobile. Those are useful regulations, requiring producers to provide information that is of value to consumers. Give me information to make decisions that make sense to me and my lifestyle, don’t restrict my options, let the market take care of that. If only regulators could stay in that lane…

DOT should certainly enforce refunds for services charged but not provided. But they shouldn’t lock airlines and airfare search sites into displaying specific charges in a standardized way, the same everywhere. We should be encouraging competition in meeting consumer needs, not making airline sites and Expedia displays the same forever. It’s not only seat and bag fees that matter – and even those don’t always matter!

But they know no matter what they do, they cannot prevent all seamen deaths. So they must devise a way to show that, when that catastrophe happens, they have done everything they could to prevent it. They require detailed analyses showing that any possible mistake or failure by man or machine will not result in a seaman death.

They require that all vendors go through an expensive and restrictive certification process. The yard is no longer free to bid anyone it wants to. Newcomers need not apply. The incumbent vendors enjoy a deep regulatory moat. Their focus becomes maintaining the paperwork required to preserve that moat. Cost is determined by amount of paperwork not quality.

The OSD writes detailed process requirements dictating just how components will be manufactured and who can do that work. They imposes multiple layers of paperwork documenting that all their procedures have been followed. Any change has to go through a long list of sign offs, requiring reanalysis of anything that might be affected. How long these approvals will take is anybody's guess.

They instruct their inspectors to reject any departure from an approved drawing no matter how trivial or beneficial. If an OSD inspector does not show up for a required test, the test has to wait until he does.

What do you think will happen to our shipyard's productivity? I can tell you what will happen. The carefully choreographed system will be thrown into chaos, and grind to a virtual halt. Cost will increase by an order of magnitude or more. Quality will deteriorate drastically. The ships will be delivered years late. They will rarely perform to spec, some will not perform at all.

Why can I tell you what will happen? US naval shipyards resemble Korean yards on the surface but they are controlled by something that looks very much like the OSD system. In fact, the OSD system is modeled on the Navy system. I spent the first decade or so of my career, working within this system. I saw the focus on process rather than substance. I saw the waste. I saw inexplicable decisions go unchallenged. I saw obvious errors turned into profit centers. I saw promotions based not on output, but on keeping the paperwork clean. I saw horribly bloated initial prices followed by enormous overruns. I saw schedules busted by months and then by years. I saw ships that did not work. I saw everybody involved stridently defend the system.

Thank God the OSD does not run nuclear power. We'd have no chance of solving the Gordian Knot.

It’s conservatives who don’t want the government to restrict our speech or gas-powered vehicles or Covid therapeutics. So why are we up in arms over what, according to the “science,” could be a fairly innocuous synthetic color additive made from petroleum, chemically known as erythrosine?

A better question may be: Why was this chemical with zero nutritional value put in our food in the first place? The artificial food coloring was added to make unhealthy food options attractive to kids. The ingredient is often found alongside sugar in foods such as candy, cereal, and juices. Removing the chemical does not deprive anyone of a positive good. Taste will not be sacrificed, simply one tactic to market junk food to kids. Natural ingredients that lack harmful effects, such as beets, are the alternatives to color foods in other countries where the dye has been banned. //

Furthermore, the debate also highlights the difference between conservatives and libertarians. Conservatives are not opposed to government intervention. We’re opposed to ill-defined government intervention, wielded by an unelected bureaucracy captured by corporations, that lacks the support of those who are supposed to have the ultimate say: we the people.

Newsom announced an executive order that he says will help the destroyed areas recover.

“I’m worried about issues of rebuilding as it relates to scarcity, as it relates to property taxes, meaning scarcity of resources, materials, personnel. I’m worried about time to getting these projects done,” Newsom said in an interview with NBC News’s Jacob Soboroff on “Meet the Press.”

Included in the executive order are actions halting environmental regulation in relation “to projects to repair, restore, demolish, or replace property or facilities substantially damaged or destroyed as a result of this emergency” and targeting price gouging. //

anon-mdjj
5 hours ago
That’s all well and good until the Sierra Club ties it all up in court.

Claudius54 anon-mdjj
4 hours ago edited
... and the Kali judges and court system have been rigged for decades toward the very "environmental stewardship", regulation, gas appliance bans, hazardous materials handling restrictions, insurance 'controls', construction restrictions, diversity rules, etc., etc., that will fully constipate any sort of recovery efforts for the foreseeable future. Good luck eluding that reality with a "pen and a phone".

"What you want is irrelevant, what you have chosen is at hand."
-Spock

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is moving forward with a regulatory rule in the final days of the Biden administration that would effectively ban cigarettes currently on the market in favor of products with lower nicotine levels, which could end up boosting business for cartels operating on the black market, an expert tells Fox News Digital. //

It's not a done deal yet; the rule has yet to be finalized. Fortunately, there is a process for these things, and this one is still in the works — and, presumably, open for a new presidential administration to point out that this doesn't pass the stupid test. //

The Biden administration appears to have learned nothing from Prohibition, or any other time the federal government has tried this kind of heavy-handed approach. The Mexican cartels, when they learn of this, will be rubbing their hands together in glee; another billion-dollar black market will soon be opening up, courtesy of the Biden administration, complete with turf wars and all that goes with it. //

anon-hllt
4 hours ago
This a plot. A plot for us smokers to smoke more to cope with lowered nicotine, and thus to pay even more taxes. It’s a hike of the sin tax clothed in another “see how the government cares about you?” lie. It will backfire spectacularly, just like everything else this administration has done under the guise of “caring.”. //

Watt stickdude90
5 hours ago
The process appears to have started during the first Trump administration.

https://natlawreview.com/article/ctp-advances-proposal-set-maximum-nicotine-level-cigarettes

Appalachian Liberty
@Liberty_Xtreme
·
Follow
A group of coal miners from West Virginia have finished building a road from Big Chimney in under a week.

A road that North Carolina Government Officials said would take several months to a year for them to do. #appalachianstrong
4:45 AM · Oct 26, 2024. //

Men doing the work. Celebrities doing the complaining. The contrast cannot be clearer. I admit that I don’t know the politics of those West Virginians, and I don’t know who they are voting for president, but I think I can make an educated guess. Is there any doubt that an EPA hack will step in soon and demand that the Big Chimney terrain be returned to a mass of boulders because the coal miners didn't pull permits and didn't get an environmental study? //

NavyVet Blue State Deplorable
7 hours ago
I don't think EPA will try to do anything; they see the Trump Train a'coming down the track, so they are too busy scrambling and trying to burrow in somewhere. The last thing they want to do is make public asses of themselves right now.

European Union regulators warned Elon Musk's X platform that it may calculate fines by including revenue from Musk's other companies, including SpaceX, according to a Bloomberg article published today.

X was previously accused of violating the Digital Services Act (DSA), which could result in fines of up to 6 percent of total worldwide annual turnover. That fine would be levied on the "provider" of X, which could be defined to include other Musk-led firms. //

Bloomberg's report says that Tesla "sales would be exempt from this calculation because it's publicly traded and not under Musk's full control."

"In considering revenue from his other companies, the commission is essentially weighing whether Musk himself should be regarded as the entity to fine as opposed to X itself," Bloomberg's sources say.

He even takes the step that I rarely see from even the most reasonable of “reasonable” nuclear critics and concedes that “nuclear still has important uses — in particular, where land and sunlight are scarce.” He concedes so much that I’m not always entirely sure what it is we’re disagreeing about.

But a big part of the difference, I think, is probably that Noah lives in California and hangs out with a lot of tech/engineering types for whom all the points about nuclear that he’s conceded are conventional wisdom, and he’s annoyed that a lot of these people have an image of solar (and especially batteries) that’s stuck in the 1980s, rather than seeing these as dynamic, forward-thinking economic sectors. I live in DC, and I hang out with lots of people who work in or adjacent to Democratic Party politics. And among the people I know, the conventional wisdom is toward much too much complacency about the current state of renewables. Many people think that because photovoltaic panels are now cheap, all the problems are solved and the big issue is that you need to say you’re pro-fracking to win Pennsylvania, and they’re looking for linguistics gurus to help them defeat fossil fuel propaganda.

I think that this is all wrong, that the world will remain much more dependent on fossil fuels for the foreseeable future than a lot of progressives want to admit, that there are a bunch of difficult and outstanding problems that need to be solved, and that nuclear policy may provide important solutions to some of those problems. There is, of course, no way of knowing exactly what the future of any technology may hold. But I think nuclear fission remains extremely promising if — and it’s a big if — we change Nuclear Regulatory Commission rules to allow for more innovation.

In 1971, the AEC proposed a radically new regulatory philosophy requiring all nuclear plants be designed to hold all radioactive emissions to levels such that "exposures were as low as practicable". In other words, there is no limit. And the criteria is not whether the benefit of further reduction outweighs the cost. The criteria is: can you afford the reduction?

This was such a departure from standard regulation that, despite their desperation to get plants on line, it did produce push back from industry. But after considerable debate the policy was formally adopted in 1975 with the wording changed slightly to "as low as reasonably achievable" or ALARA.

In practice, As Low As Reasonably Achievable is interpreted by the regulators to mandate any regulation that allows nuclear to remain competitive with alternate sources of power.

The current political climate features two sides: Those who want the government to do more for the people and those who want the government to get out of people's way. It's not necessarily a partisan issue, mind you, as there is an alarming number of folks on the right who believe that Republicans should implement more government but just wield it in a conservative way.

Whatever that means. //

We need only look at government-run programs as they exist now, because they are the best arguments against themselves.

With resounding bipartisan, bicameral support that also achieved enthusiastic support of the Executive Branch, the US has enacted a new law announcing its support of nuclear energy. It has the potential to make an even larger impact on global atomic energy use than the combination of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 and President Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace program of international nuclear energy expansion.

Seventy years ago, that earlier combination of law and policy partially removed the blanket of tight security that had locked up fission energy in the years immediately following WWII. President Eisenhower’s clearly stated goal in enabling commercial atomic energy was to develop “the greatest of destructive forces” into a “great boon, for the benefit of all mankind.”

The “great boon” produced a wave of nuclear power plants that now produce the energy equivalent of Saudi Arabia’s oil production. That energy comes at a low marginal cost without air pollution or greenhouse gases, but nuclear power’s contribution to world energy production leveled off at roughly 2600 TWh/yr 20 years ago.

A growing fraction of the world’s science, engineering, environmental and political leaders agree that the situation needs to be changed. In November 2023, the United States led a coalition of two dozen nations in a promise to take action to triple world nuclear energy production by 2050.

Even before the U.S. signed that declaration of intent, House and Senate Republicans and Democrats began holding hearings, listening to constituents, debating with colleagues and engaging in what used to be considered the normal order of business to produce the ADVANCE Act of 2024. ///

Does this change anything about ALARA or LNT guiding regulations? Then I don't see it as anything more than a response to strong criticism of both. Changing the "mission" of the NRC without changing either of those is just more of the same, just "better". Which is not better for energy availability.

The mission of the NRC is still "avoid accidents", not balancing the tradeoff of "energy is dangerous, lets make sure its both available and safe."

The problem is out of control. No one knows how many separate crimes there are, including the Department of Justice. Researchers have tried counting, with one 2019 effort identifying at least 5,199 statutory crimes. Regulatory crimes are orders of magnitude greater, with estimates of the number of regulatory crimes ranging from 100,000 to 300,000 separate offenses.

This is inconsistent with basic ideas of self-government and the intentions of those who framed the Constitution. Laws with criminal consequences should be carefully considered by the legislative branch, not pushed through by unelected bureaucrats who are not accountable to the people. //

Congress can seize the opportunity and pass some simple and commonsense reforms that would further reduce the power of the administrative state and its appetite for passing criminal laws.

Congress should begin by requiring the executive agencies to simply catalog their regulations that have criminal consequences. After all, if a federal agency does not know if something is a criminal offense, how can the people be expected to? If a “mens rea” requirement is not already in the law, Congress should make all criminal regulations have a “willful” requirement to prevent citizens from being prosecuted for actions they did not even know they took. For new laws, agencies should be required to state the applicable mental state.