(thread) The idea that going to the Moon was expensive, a big show that led nowhere, gave us nothing but Tang and Velcro — that's all silliness, even if it is the conventional wisdom. We misunderstand Apollo, almost completely.

Imagine how much everyone would rightly be freaking out if we discovered that Chinese AI did what OpenAI is doing.

The thing about a 20 slide deck previously taking hours to construct vs having AI now do it in minutes is that the hours it took to create it in the old world meant that everything was thoughtful, crafted, and scrutinized. In the hands of someone good, it made for breakthrough work. AI is making everyone "think" they are good, but it's getting really tired really fast. I'd say that >50% of the slides I see now are claudeslop.

Neil and Buzz didn't go very far. Map overlays the path traveled by the first men on the moon 50 years ago on a standard football pitch. A small step indeed... Source: buff.ly/2Yr2zgF

11:00 update in Surf City, NJ. Many roads now completely impassable and yes those are waves on city streets

look at it this way: the government represents us and spends our money. the american press's most fundamental job: monitor whatever they do in our name, and fiercely track what they do with our money.

When Xi invokes the Thucydides Trap, as he did again today, he means he sees China as the rising power and the U.S. as the declining power. Kinda weird for an American president to just let that go, especially in remarks delivered in the White House. But these are not normal times.

Trump sued famed pollster Ann Selzer and Gannett's Des Moines Register, who do not have the resources that the likes of Paramount and Disney have, but who fought the case instead of folding. They won today. apnews.com/article/trump-law…

One-third of restaurant operators reported being unprofitable in the first half of 2026, per Chad Moutray, chief economist of the National Restaurant Association, at the FSTEC Conference. Profitability in the industry remains a major challenge.

You even had the Chinese Communist Party telling the Trump administration the press ban was bad.

If you’re wondering the reason why you’re not seeing video of President Trump and Xi Jinping, it’s this: The TV pool that usually handles live coverage of Trump’s events is still in a holding pattern due to his unprecedented ban of CNN, MS NOW and Politico. While journalists for the three outlets are now back at the White House, thanks to a federal judge’s order, the status of the TV pool is a separate matter. The five major networks that make up the pool — CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox News — are waiting on confirmation from the White House that CNN will be allowed to fulfill its pool responsibilities in the future. At the moment, the pool doesn’t have that assurance, so it has not filmed any of Trump and Xi’s events so far today. << this is from our CNN live story -->>> cnn.com/2026/09/24/politics/…

Let's hear no more lies about how Trump has not disobeyed any court orders. This is an explicit and undeniable violation of the order federal judge Timothy Kelly issued last night, requiring the White House to reinstate press access for Politico, CNN, and MS Now.

So the White House is defying a court order on a clear cut first amendment issue while also having Chinese state media at the White House while also putting out US government sponsored, tax-payer funded ads. Do I have that right? Where's my guy Zuckerberg?

On this exact day in 1780, three ordinary militiamen stopped a stranger on a road, searched him, found treason hidden in his boot, turned down a small fortune to let him walk, and in doing so saved West Point and possibly the whole Revolution. Their names were John Paulding, Isaac Van Wart, and David Williams, and almost no one remembers them. They were not famous soldiers. They were young New York farmers, part of the informal patrols that watched the dangerous no-man's-land north of British-occupied New York City, a lawless strip crawling with raiders and spies from both sides. On the morning of September 23, near Tarrytown, they stopped a well-dressed rider who called himself John Anderson. Here is where luck and character collided. The rider, seeing rough men in mixed clothing, guessed wrong and assumed they were Loyalists like himself, and he let slip that he was a British officer. The instant he realized his mistake, he tried to backtrack, but it was too late. The three militiamen were suspicious now, and they decided to search him. They made him strip, and inside his stockings, tucked into his boot, David Williams found folded papers, detailed plans of the American fortress at West Point, its defenses, its garrison, its weaknesses. They had no idea, in that moment, that the man was Major John André, head of British intelligence, or that the papers had been handed to him by Benedict Arnold himself in a treason plot to sell West Point to the enemy. But they knew they had caught something enormous. And then came the test that made them heroes. André, desperate, tried to buy his freedom. He offered them his fine horse, his watch, and money, and by the account given at his trial, a bribe of a thousand guineas in gold, an almost unimaginable sum for three farmers of modest means, enough to change their lives forever. All they had to do was let him ride away. They said no. Three poor young men, offered a fortune to look the other way, refused it, and instead marched their prisoner to the nearest American officer. That single act of plain honesty unraveled the entire conspiracy. The papers exposed the plot to betray West Point. Arnold barely escaped to a British ship. André was tried and hanged. And the fortress that guarded the Hudson, the linchpin of the American position, was saved. The young nation understood what it owed them. Congress voted the three men the very first military decoration in American history, a silver medal called the Fidelity Medallion, its reverse inscribed with a Latin motto meaning "the love of country conquers." Each also received a lifetime pension and a farm. George Washington himself presented them their medals. Remember Paulding, Van Wart, and Williams. Not generals, not statesmen, just three farmers on patrol who happened to stop the right man on the right morning, and who then proved that they could not be bought at any price. The Revolution was saved that day not by a brilliant plan or a famous hero, but by ordinary men who were simply, stubbornly honest when a fortune said they should not be.

Barack Obama at his last press briefing with reporters, 2017: "I have enjoyed working with all of you. That does not, of course, mean that I've enjoyed every story that you have filed, but that's the point of this relationship. You're not supposed to be sycophants. You're supposed to be skeptics. You're supposed to ask me tough questions. You're not supposed to be complimentary, but you're supposed to cast a critical eye on folks who hold enormous power."

New: While ABC is listed as the TV pool for today, I am told they are in a bit of a stand-off with the White House staff and are refusing to go into any events until they have proof CNN is on campus.

If a president can throw news organizations out of the White House because he dislikes their coverage, then no news organization is truly free because it means we are all in the building only at his sufferance.

5/x Maury saw something: a logbook is useless alone, but a whole warehouse is basically a data center. One ship's hourly wind tells you about one afternoon. A hundred thousand of them, plotted by month and by square of ocean, tell you what the wind will do there next March.

4/x In the Depot's storerooms sat thousands of old naval logbooks, decades of them, written up every watch and filed away unread. Wind direction and strength, current, sea temperature, weather, position: every hour of every voyage, recorded by men long since dead.

1/x In the 1840s, a lame American naval officer, grounded at a desk in Washington, cut weeks off the world's ocean voyages without inventing a single machine. His raw material: a warehouse of logbooks nobody had ever read. Matthew Fontaine Maury, Pathfinder of the Seas. A 🧵

An absolutely *stunning* chart via @axios on how search has collapsed as a traffic driver for legacy media