“House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., rejected an emergency moratorium on artificial intelligence development Sunday during CNN’s ‘State of the Union,’ warning that slowing American innovation could allow China to pull ahead as tech executives and lawmakers intensify calls for new AI safety measures. ‘We have to resist Congress jumping in and imposing some sort of emergency moratorium,’ Johnson said. ‘Here’s what I’m proposing: I think the leaders and providers of these platforms need to come together in a meeting with us and figure out what the right balance is. We cannot put a moratorium on this because China will overlap us.’ … Humans First, a grassroots conservative [sic] movement against new data centers, is pushing a policy framework that opposes blanket data-center moratoriums while calling for local control and rejecting eminent domain for projects.” (09/13/26)
“[W]hen secular Zionism arose in the late 19th century, which proposed an ‘ingathering of exiles’ (that is, virtually the entire Jewish diaspora), most observant Jews opposed twisting their religion into a nationalistic movement in search of statehood. They feared that a state would replace God and Torah. They also believed that a Jewish state would endanger their emancipated status in their home countries and require domination of the Palestinian Arabs. The anti-Zionists’ prophecy proved correct. In light of the Holocaust, which changed the presentation of Zionism from an ingathering project to a refugee program, Jewish anti-Zionism faded but did not disappear.” (09/11/26)
“More than a third of the U.S. population today is under 30 years of age. This is the only America they ever have known. They may have seen the new World Trade Center, which is, in a kind of perverse victory for continuity in aesthetics if nothing else, about as ugly as the old one, but its symbolic status is mostly lost on them. Those of us who are older want to tell them that this is not normal, but, of course, it is we who are the outliers, we graybeards with our books and our memories. This is not the ‘new normal’—it is just normal, from the wider historical point of view. What we should be trying to make them understand is not that this is not normal but that normal is not good enough.” (09/11/26)
“A federal appeals court on Friday ruled against a Trump administration order that forced a coal plant in Michigan to stay open beyond its scheduled closure. The J.H. Campbell coal plant in West Olive was slated to close in May 2025, but has remained open under an emergency order by Secretary Chris Wright’s Energy Department. … The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled the government’s actions went beyond its authority. … The lawsuit was filed by the states of Michigan and Illinois and a number of environmental groups.” (09/11/26)
“When Karyann Parkinson’s 5-year-old son, Sam, asked if he could walk about a half mile to their neighborhood pond to collect goose feathers, she didn’t have a hard time saying yes. It was June. They’d walked the route before, including that morning. Her son is mature, and their surroundings are part of what the homeowners association describes as a ‘secure, multi-generational gated community.’ The risks were low, and yet Karyann is fast becoming famous for what came next. … Thanks to Karyann’s transgression — trusting her son — she was placed on Virginia’s child abuse and neglect registry for seven years. In court, she was found guilty of ‘contributing to the delinquency of a minor’ — a Class 1 misdemeanor — and given a six-month suspended jail sentence.” (09/11/26)
“A federal judge sided with the Sierra Club and other groups Sept. 1 to halt a controversial data center project outside Boulder City, Nevada, southeast of Las Vegas. Backed by the Trump administration, the project had come from Townsite Solar 2 LLC, a Houston-based company that had previously received approval for a solar farm in the same location. The legal setback marks a high-profile failure for what would have been the first data center on federal land. Though both the Trump administration and the tech industry seek to build more data centers to support generative artificial intelligence technology like ChatGPT, public sentiment has largely turned against them, particularly in areas plagued by drought, and where people worry about rising energy bills and access to public land.” (09/11/26)
“Over the last several weeks in the lead up to the 25th anniversary of al Qaeda’s attack on the U.S., I’ve had American and foreign journalists ask me the same question: how did 9/11 change America? My answer has generally been some version of this: 9/11 didn’t change us, we allowed it to change us, and in doing so critically damaged our very own political way of life.” (09/11/26)
