this might just be the greatest collab/commercial i have EVER seen.

I am a member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee. There are five of us. Five people, appointed by a parliament most of the planet could not find on a map, who decide, once a year, which human being the world has agreed to call good. I know. I know. I think about it on the tram. We meet in a building on Henrik Ibsens gate, a street named after a man who wrote almost exclusively about people discovering they are frauds, which nobody on the committee finds funny except me. There is a room with a long table and the portraits of the dead laureates looking down, Mandela, the Dalai Lama, a great many earnest men in spectacles, and one portrait we do not discuss, which is Kissinger, 1973, awarded while the bombs were still falling, after which two of our predecessors resigned and the satirist Tom Lehrer said political satire was now obsolete. We keep him on the wall. A reminder. Every family has the uncle. It is October in Oslo, which means the sun gives up around four in the afternoon like a civil servant, and it rains the particular Norwegian rain that isn’t quite falling, just hanging there, judging you. I arrive with wet shoes. I always arrive with wet shoes. There is coffee, because this is Norway and there is always coffee, we drink more of it per person than almost anyone alive, and someone’s wife has sent kanelboller, the cinnamon buns, and we sit, five Norwegians, damp, caffeinated, sugared, and we decide the moral standing of the entire species. Let me tell you how it actually works, because the world imagines a cathedral and it is, I promise you, a book club with a mandate. 287 nominations this year. 208 people, 79 organizations. Anyone can nominate, that’s the secret nobody understands: a professor, a parliamentarian, a former laureate, so the “nominee” list is meaningless, it’s a suggestion box, and every autumn some congressman nominates his own golden retriever and the press writes “SHORTLISTED.” Nobody is shortlisted. There is no short list the public ever sees. There is us, and the coffee, and the rain, and the portraits, and a Norwegian stubbornness that is older than the prize itself. We read reports. The institute’s advisers write them, thick dull documents, and we argue. Our chairman told the BBC once that in the final meeting “there is a high temperature.” High temperature, for a Norwegian, means someone slightly raised an eyebrow and then apologized for it. We don’t do high temperature. We do a long silence, and then Kristin says “well,” and everyone knows exactly what “well” meant, and it’s settled. That’s our shouting. “Well.” You’d have to be raised here to hear the violence in it. Now. This year. I will not say the name, because we never say the name, but you know the name. A certain head of state wanted this prize the way a child wants a thing in a shop window, which is to say loudly, and in public, and with the full belief that wanting it was itself the argument. He said he deserved it. He said he’d ended eight wars, a number that grew most times he said it, like a fish. He had other heads of state phone us. Israel’s prime minister posted it on the internet, “Give him the Nobel.” The leaders of Cambodia and Pakistan announced they’d nominated him, as though announcing it were part of it, as though we tally mentions. A man flew around the globe collecting endorsements for a Norwegian committee the way you’d collect signatures for a petition to the council about a noisy dog. And here, uff da, is the detail I treasure, the one that makes me smile into my coffee. The nomination deadline is the 31st of January. He took office on the 20th. So for all the phone calls, all the posts, all the gilded lobbying, the only nominations that could possibly count for this year’s prize were filed in the first eleven days of his term, before he had, by his own arithmetic, ended a single one of the eight wars. He campaigned all year for a prize whose window had shut while he was still hanging up his coat. We didn’t have to reject him. The calendar did. We just watched. Norwegians are very good at watching. We have long winters. People think we sit there weighing his deeds. We don’t. That’s the thing I can’t make the world understand. We’re not grading his homework. We don’t owe anyone the prize for a ceasefire, however real, however loud the announcement. “He made peace” is not a sentence that ends in a medal, the way he believes it does, the way he believes every good thing ends in his name on it. The will of a dead Swede says the prize goes to whoever did the most for fraternity between nations. A dead Swede, I should add, who made his entire fortune inventing dynamite and selling arms, and spent his last years horrified at his own obituary, which called him a merchant of death, and so bought his way to immortality as a man of peace. The whole prize is one guilty arms dealer’s attempt to launder his name. We are, all of us, administering a dead man’s public relations. I find this clarifying. It keeps me humble. It should keep everyone humble, and it keeps, by my count, no one humble at all. So who did we give it to? An eighty-five-year-old woman. A judge. Born in Durban, under apartheid, granddaughter of a Tamil man who came to South Africa as indentured labor, a bus driver’s daughter from the poor Indian quarter, who became the first non-white woman to run a law practice in her province, who defended Mandela’s people when defending them was dangerous, who sat on the Rwanda tribunal and the court at the Hague, and who, at eighty-five, is right now a judge weighing whether a genocide is a genocide. When we told the world, our chairman said the rule of law “underpins the system we have set up to ensure peace,” and that “peace requires justice.” She wasn’t even in Oslo. She was in Nuremberg. In courtroom 600. The actual room where they tried the Nazis. You cannot stage that. God staged that, and God, it turns out, is a better satirist than any of us. She did not phone us. She did not post. No prime minister demanded it for her on the internet. She had, as far as our deliberations are concerned, the one qualification the loud man could never manufacture, which is that she wanted the work and not the medal. The medal finds those people. It flees the ones who chase it. This is not a rule we wrote. It’s just the only pattern the hundred-odd years of our mistakes has ever shown. The reaction from across the ocean was immediate. His spokesman posted that we “place politics over peace.” Ja. Perhaps. We’re five damp pensioners in a rainy city; of course it’s political, it was always political, it was political when we gave it to a sitting American president nine months into his first term for the promise of things he had not yet done, and we have been quietly embarrassed about that one for fifteen years, so believe me, we had a particular reason this year to prefer a woman with fifty years of verdicts behind her over a man with eight wars in front of him and a deadline already behind him. Here is what he will never understand, the thing I’d tell him on the tram if he ever took one. We are the one prize he cannot buy, cannot post his way to, cannot have a friendly dictator phone in for him. Not because we’re incorruptible, nei, we’re as vain and wrong and human as the portraits on our wall. But because the entire point of the thing, the only power a small cold country’s book club has ever held, is that it goes to the person not performing the wanting. The moment you demand it, you’ve proven you don’t understand what it’s for, and proving that is itself the disqualification. He ran the most expensive campaign in the history of the prize and the campaign was the reason. He was never losing to Navi Pillay. He was losing to the concept. It’s dark now. Four o’clock dark. The buns are gone. Kristin said “well” an hour ago and we all went home. I’m on the tram with my wet shoes, and somewhere across the water a very powerful man is explaining to a camera that the prize is rigged, that we’re corrupt, that he’ll win it next year, and he genuinely might, we’re only five idiots and we’ve been wrong before, Kissinger is still on the wall. But not this year. This year an old woman in Nuremberg, in the room where the law once stared down the exact kind of man who thinks wanting a thing loudly enough should make it his, got a phone call she didn’t ask for. That’s the job. We don’t reward the man who ends the war and announces it. We reward the woman who spent fifty years deciding what a war was. He’ll never see the difference. That’s rather the whole point of him. Takk for i dag. I have to change trams.

AOC: When you see what Robert Kraft did to line up all the stadiums to censor speech in that one specific way, it's become clear it's not just about one music artist or two music artists, but this is about how just a handful of stadium owners and the elite can prevent an entire massive issue, in this case, the genocide in gaza—

This executive order is designed to rapidly expand large-scale AI data centers and the infrastructure needed to power them in the United States. It directs federal agencies to reduce permitting delays, speed up environmental reviews, identify federal land for development, encourage financing, and streamline approvals for power plants, transmission lines, natural gas infrastructure, nuclear power equipment, semiconductor manufacturing, networking equipment, and other technologies supporting AI. The stated goal is to "strengthen American leadership" in artificial intelligence, manufacturing, national security, and technological competitiveness by making it easier and faster to build AI infrastructure. Please read the overview I provide, environmental laws affected are Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, CERCLA, and Toxic Substances Control Act. Endangered animals will be affected as stated in the Executive Order. The military has involvement in Data Center infrastructure management as well. Provided below is a section-by-section overview of: "Executive Order 14318: Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure (July 23, 2025)" federalregister.gov/document… Section 1 - Policy and Purpose This section explains why the order exists. The administration states that Al infrastructure is now considered strategically important for: • National security • Economic growth • Scientific leadership • Manufacturing competitiveness The government declares that it wants to: • Accelerate construction of Al data centers • Reduce federal regulatory barriers • Use federally owned land when appropriate • Expand supporting infrastructure such as power generation and transmission systems In simple terms: the federal government is treating Al infrastructure similarly to other critical national infrastructure projects and wants to build it much faster. Section 2 - Definitions This section defines the key terms used throughout the order. "Data Center Project" A facility requiring more than 100 megawatts of new electrical load for: • Al training • Al inference • Simulations • Synthetic data generation A 100-MW threshold means these are extremely large Al facilities. "Covered Components" These are technologies and infrastructure needed to support Al data centers, including: • Energy Infrastructure • Transmission lines • Natural gas pipelines • Substations • Transformers • Switchyards - Power Generation - • Natural gas turbines • Coal power equipment • Nuclear power equipment • Geothermal systems • Backup power systems - Technology Infrastructure - • Semiconductor manufacturing • Semiconductor materials • Networking equipment • Routers and switches • Data storage systems • Cloud-related infrastructure The definition is intentionally broad so the order covers not only the data centers themselves but much of the industrial supply chain behind them. "Qualifying Project" A project can qualify if it: • Invests at least $500 million, • Adds more than 100 MW of electrical demand, • Supports national security, • Or is designated important by federal officials. These projects receive the benefits offered by the order. Section 3 - Encouraging Qualifying Projects The Department of Commerce is instructed to develop ways to financially support qualifying projects. Possible support includes: • Loans • Loan guarantees • Grants • Tax incentives • Offtake agreements Federal agencies are also directed to identify existing programs that could be used to help these projects. In plain English: the government wants to make financing easier for large Al infrastructure projects. Section 4 - Revocation of Earlier Executive Order This section revokes: Executive Order 14141 The new order replaces the previous framework and establishes a different approach to Al infrastructure development. Section 5 - Efficient Environmental Reviews This is one of the most important sections. Federal agencies must identify environmental review shortcuts that can be used under the: National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) The order encourages: - Existing Categorical Exclusions - If certain activities have already been determined to have minimal environmental impact, agencies are encouraged to use those exemptions more broadly. - New Categorical Exclusions - Federal agencies are directed to develop additional exclusions for qualifying projects. - Reduced NEPA Requirements- The order states that certain federal financial assistance programs may not count as "major federal actions" requiring extensive environmental review, especially when federal funding represents less than 50% of project costs. The practical effect is: Large Al projects may move through environmental review more quickly than under traditional timelines. Section 6 - FAST-41 Permitting This section uses the federal FAST-41 permitting framework. FAST-41 is a law designed to accelerate permitting for major infrastructure projects. The order allows qualifying Al projects to: • Receive expedited review schedules • Be tracked publicly on the federal permitting dashboard • Gain coordinated interagency review The goal is to reduce delays caused by multiple agencies reviewing the same project independently. Section 7 - Streamlining Permitting Review The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is instructed to examine regulations that may slow qualifying projects. Affected laws include: • Clean Air Act • Clean Water Act • CERCLA (Superfund law) • Toxic Substances Control Act The EPA is also directed to identify: • Brownfield sites • Superfund sites that may be suitable for redevelopment as Al infrastructure locations. - Why This Matters - Many former industrial sites already have: • Electrical infrastructure • Transportation access • Industrial zoning which can make them attractive locations for new Al facilities. Section 8 - Biological and Water Permitting Efficiencies This section focuses on: - Endangered Species Act Reviews - Federal agencies are instructed to use programmatic consultations. Instead of reviewing each project individually, agencies can perform broader reviews covering multiple projects over long periods. - Water Permits - The Army Corps of Engineers must examine whether new nationwide permits should be created specifically to support qualifying Al infrastructure projects. The goal is to reduce permitting delays associated with wetlands, waterways, and protected species. Section 9 - Federal Land Development Although not fully visible in some shortened reproductions, Section 9 directs federal agencies to identify suitable federal lands and resources for development of qualifying projects. Agencies such as the Departments of Energy, Interior, Commerce, and Defense are expected to coordinate on site selection and development opportunities. - Practical Effect - Potential locations could include: • Federal lands • Energy-rich regions • Former industrial properties • Military installations where appropriate The objective is to remove land acquisition and siting barriers for large Al projects. Section 10 - General Provisions This is standard executive-order language. It states: • Agencies keep their legal authorities. • Implementation must comply with existing law. • The order does not create private legal rights. • The Department of Energy pays publication costs. This section mostly addresses administrative and legal housekeeping. Overall Takeaway The executive order creates a federal framework for rapid expansion of Al infrastructure in the United States. Its main mechanisms are: 1. Faster permitting 2. Streamlined environmental reviews 3. Financial incentives 4. Use of federal land 5. Coordinated agency approvals 6. Support for power generation and transmission infrastructure 7. Support for semiconductor and networking supply chains Viewed broadly, the order treats large Al data centers and their supporting energy systems as strategic national infrastructure and seeks to reduce the time required to build them. Critics may view it as reducing environmental oversight, and they should, because it is.. while supporters view it as necessary to maintain U.S. competitiveness in Al and advanced computing... 🎩 Jay Wilson