Commentary

“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.

This summer, GGWash has been fortunate to host four interns in college and high school, all of whom have worked closely with our policy team. Working with them has been a full-circle moment for me as this Monday, July 22, is exactly twenty years since I first testified at a public hearing. (Another entry for the ongoing series on what a dork I was.)

It started with the screeching tweet. In 2019, Washington Post reporter Chelsea Janes was covering then-presidential hopeful Kamala Harris’ appearance at her alma mater, Howard University. Janes posted on Twitter (now X) that members of Alpha Kappa Alpha, of which Harris is a proud member, “screeched when she mentioned her time there,” adding, “I didn’t expect to hear screeches here.”