Commentary

While Donald Trump’s agenda and a massive think tank document clearly indicate his second-term strategy for federal workers, nothing captures those plans as succinctly as a statement made by his running mate. If Sen. JD Vance (Ohio), the Republican vice-presidential nominee, were to give Trump “one piece of advice,” he said in 2021, it would be “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state. Replace them with our people.”

I am a white student at Hereford High School — statistically the whitest public high school in Baltimore County — and when I signed up for an Advanced Placement African American Studies class, I was scared. First, because the class was new and I didn’t know what to expect, but second, because I knew that in that class, I would have to grapple with my contribution to the racially disproportionate 85% white population of my school.

“Shrimp kabobs, shrimp creole, shrimp gumbo, pan fried, deep fried, stir-fried. There’s pineapple shrimp, lemon shrimp, coconut shrimp, pepper shrimp, shrimp soup, shrimp stew, shrimp salad, shrimp and potatoes, shrimp burger, shrimp sandwich.” Fans of the 1994 movie “Forrest Gump” may recognize that list offered by the fictional character of Bubba Blue who longed to be in the shrimping business. He was thinking Louisiana.

That is the urgent question of our time. The rapid progress being made on artificial intelligence means that we face a strategic choice about what kind of world we are going to live in: Will it be one in which the United States and allied nations advance a global AI that spreads the technology’s benefits and opens access to it, or an authoritarian one, in which nations or movements that don’t share our values use AI to cement and expand their power?

One can scarcely blame certain residents of Frederick, Carroll and Baltimore counties for protesting construction of a new power line in their backyards. The proposed Maryland Piedmont Reliability Project would bring a 500,000-volt transmission line along a 70-mile-long, 550-foot-wide path from southern Frederick County to an existing Baltimore Gas & Electric line in northern Baltimore County.

Like many team sports, baseball has a lot of unwritten rules, such as don’t steal bases or swing at 3-0 pitches or otherwise try to run up the score when your team is ahead by a large margin. The idea is that you should show respect for your opponent. Frederick County Council has unwritten rules, too. One of those is don’t send drafts of proposed bills that have not been formally introduced to potential opponents of the bill.