Archive for 2025

PROGRESS:

COLORADO: Choked out: How Colorado’s regulatory maze is starving its energy producers.

Few states rival Colorado’s wealth of energy resources, but its oil and gas industry is up against increasing challenges. Small and mid-sized operators, once the industry’s backbone, are struggling with a growing tangle of regulations.

Delayed permits, overlapping oversight and rising fines are making it harder to stay in business, forcing many to reconsider their future in the state.

Ryan Clark, Vice President of Engineering at Petrox Resources and a fourth-generation Coloradan working in his family’s oil and gas business, has watched small operators disappear under the weight of increased regulations.

“Honestly, I don’t know if oil and gas has a future here,” he said. “Growing up, this was a business people built for generations. Now, I don’t see a lot of small operators doing much. And I don’t see a lot of big operators either. It’s like Colorado is pushing everyone out.”

Tyson Johnston, a father of four, serves as the Vice President of Land & Regulatory at Gunnison Energy LLC to ensure energy development is environmentally responsible and economically viable. He takes pride in industry innovations that reduce emissions and support sustainable energy solutions.

Johnston echoed similar concerns. “The end game under Polis will be importing energy. He believes it’s all going to be wind and solar, but the truth is that’s never going to be the case. We’ll be importing oil and gas from states that are less responsible with how they produce.”

I laugh — bitterly — every time I read some earnest tribute to my “libertarian” governor’s light regulatory touch.

Gov. Polis already signed a law banning the sale of pistols to anyone under 21. That strikes me as an unconstitutional infringement although perhaps I’m wrong. He’s expected to sign new legislation banning ammunition sales to 18-to-21-year-olds and requiring shops to store their ammo out of reach. The first part may or may not be constitutional but the second is a very big and expensive FU to gun store owners.

DOGE NEEDS TO CUT MORE: Waiting for the Chainsaw. I suspect that a lot of cuts are being strategically held back for litigation reasons.

THIS IS AN OPPORTUNITY:

Give these people the full J6 cellphone tracking and surveillance treatment, arrest huge numbers, then trace back the funding and prosecute and/or sue the funders. A whole lefty civil disruption / domestic terror network can be taken down.

UPDATE:

Don’t get cocky, kid.

ANOTHER UPDATE: It really does work like this.

Plus:

ARE THERE ANY THAT DON’T? Another Useless Agency Bilking Taxpayers Uncovered. “Some of these things may lie in a gray area, but others are out and out fraud against the American taxpayer. At the very least, these bureaucrats living like kings should be forced to reimburse the federal government for clearly illegal cases of bilking the American taxpayer. For others, they need to be indicted for fraud as an example to others.”

JAMES LILEKS ON THE FIFTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE COVID LOCKDOWNS:

Again, and again, variants and surges. I stopped worrying. I got it, twice. Or to put it another way: I got it, twice. I stopped worrying. Things came back in stages, yet each relaxation felt not like a step towards the old before times, but an ongoing redefinition of some emerging new paradigm. It did not feel as if restrictions were being removed, but new, tightly defined freedoms were being doled out.

The final stage of all this, I guess, was the NYT running a piece that said “Hey, turned out the authorities and media gatekeepers weren’t telling us the whole story.”

That, I suspect, is intended to be the end of the old conversation, not the start of a new one.

Some lingering effects we’ll never lose, and maybe we won’t notice or question, just as 24-year old people who weren’t alive in 2001 take their shoes off in the TSA line because well that’s what you do. If you ask them who Richard Reid was, they’d have no idea.

Read the whole thing.

NO THANKS, I’M STILL SOCIAL DISTANCING: Meet Harry Sisson, the Biden-Loving Feminist Influencer Outed as ‘Possibly Not Gay’ After Multiple Women Accused Him of Being a Sex Creep.

In case you missed it, which you probably did, here’s what happened: An effeminate TikTok influencer, semi-renowned for his obsequious fawning over former president Joe Biden, was apparently outed as heterosexual after multiple female women accused him of being a lying pervert. His name is Harry Sisson, and he’s a 23-year-old social media user who posts professionally (and obnoxiously) about politics. He’s been profiled by numerous mainstream outlets, including NBC News, Vanity Fair, and Semafor. He campaigned for Kamala Harris, appeared on CNN, filmed a TikTok video with Barack Obama, and met with Sen. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) on Capitol Hill earlier this month. He was invited to the White House in 2024, where he met with Biden in the Oval Office and called him “the best president in modern American history.”

Earlier, from Steve: So Another Male Feminist Turns out to Be a Social Media Perv.

HMM: NASA Eyes Plan to Get Boeing Back on Track as SpaceX Alternative.

Boeing Co.’s Starliner is undergoing analysis and upgrades, a test campaign slated for this summer and at least one additional demonstration flight that could cost $400 million or more — all to prove it’s a viable alternative to Elon Musk’s Dragon capsule for getting Americans to orbit.

“We’re working hand-in-hand with Boeing as well on certification of Starliner, getting that vehicle back to flight,” Steve Stich, program manager for NASA’s commercial crew, told reporters on Tuesday evening.

The return of NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams on SpaceX’s Dragon capsule “shows how important it is to have two different crew transportation systems,” Stich added.

His comments were the most bullish in months about the troubled Boeing program. But a question he and other NASA officials stopped short of answering Tuesday is who would foot the bill for such an extensive test campaign, or even the extent of the company’s commitment.

That’s a big if. Boeing was out $1.6 billion on Starliner — it was a fixed-price program and, the company swears, Boeing’s last — before thruster leaks forced CFT to come home without Butch and Suni.

Whether Boeing wants to go even deeper into the red trying to fix the leaky thrusters and on what could be two more flight tests — one manned, one not — is a question the company has yet to answer.

FOR YEARS TALKING OF THE DEEP STATE WAS CALLED CONSPIRACY THEORY. THEN YOU DISCOVER THAT INSIDERS WERE TALKING ABOUT IT IN 1961.

Original document is here.

ROGER KIMBALL: Trump is working overtime to restore the rule of law.

Trump is acting to restore the law from the depredations of lawless, indeed un-constitutional, arrangements whereby the core powers of the presidency and of Congress are undermined by unaccountable bureaucrats.

Second, he is acting to rescue the executive powers of the presidency from the un-Constitutional interference of district court judges. It is the latter that has focused everyone’s attention these last weeks as various judges have issued orders to say that the President of the United States may not fire people who work for him, that he must spend money controlled by agencies of the executive branch, and that he may not deport certain illegal aliens. Here I remind my readers of the first sentence of Article II of the Constitution: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.”

Yes, but that’s awful because then the public has a say.

KEVIN DOWNEY JR: Unlike Raccoons, Demo-Communists Don’t Learn From Their Mistakes. “I’m beginning to believe that the Democratic Party is taking its direction from a right-leaning comedian with a taste for bourbon because, honestly, it’s making so many bad decisions that it’s almost like I am in their command and purposely giving it advice to make it look as though it’s nuttier than squirrel droppings.”

GOOD IDEA: