☕️ THE GENESIS SINGULARITY ☙ Wednesday, November 26, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Pilgrims and fowl forgiveness; Trump’s historic AI push and agent-run labs; China lags; Skynet vibes; a new golden era; Florida parents win age-check appeal; America First pops up in our parks.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Wednesday! Tomorrow is Turkey Day, a national holiday imbued with thankfulness, gratitude, and expanding waistlines. (Note: we are officially closed for the holiday tomorrow.) Today’s roundup includes: a little pre-holiday roundup for you; pilgrims and fowl forgiveness; Trump launches biggest AI initiative in history; unstalling the stalled progress of science; an AI supersystem; the singularity of science; fully automated labs run by AI agents; China’s relative weaknesses; contemplating Skynet and the eerie resemblances; the promise of a new golden era; good judicial news for Florida parents as appeals court green-lights age verification law; and latest America First policy discovered in our National Park system.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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Fowl news! First, take a moment to read this annual WSJ Editorial, a brief recurring Thanksgiving feature since 1961. It contains the remarkable first entry from the official Plymouth Colony records, penned by Pilgrim Nathaniel Morton in 1620, probably using his own fingernail as a quill. It describes the day those first brave religious objectors prepared to board their ship in Rotterdam. Afterwards, they courageously crossed the Atlantic in a well-built wooden vessel roughly the size of a portable toilet, packed with a hundred religious separatists who had not yet invented deodorant.

As I said, they were brave.

These few paragraphs in Morton’s diction constitute America’s Pilot Episode, its origin story, whose famished actors launched an unimaginable series of mind-boggling events that ultimately created the most powerful country in history, liberated the entire globe, but also accidentally unleashed hip-hop. So it’s about 50/50. Link to the WSJ editorial.

🦃 Next, in case you missed the magnificent event, yesterday, President Trump officially reprieved the national turkeys, Gobble and Waddle.

CLIP: President Trump pardons Thanksgiving turkeys

Not every turkey got a pardon. “When I first saw their pictures (I probably shouldn’t say this), I thought I’d call them Chuck and Nancy, but then I realized I’d be pardoning them. I’d never pardon those two people,” Trump quipped, reflecting on his near-mistake.

Gobble and Waddle will retire, will not become dinner, but will instead become venerated Turkey Ambassadors at North Carolina State’s poultry research center.

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Yesterday, President Trump captured the science news cycle by signing the latest in his escalating series of AI-related executive orders. This one is a beast. Without exaggeration, it is potentially world-changing (or potentially world-ending, depending on your glass-half-empty point of view). The new order was simply titled, “Launching the Genesis Mission.”

The problem this order aims to solve is that, while we’ve been spending trillions on science research, taxpayers are not really getting a decent return on investment. “Despite research budgets soaring since the 1990s,” the Genesis Fact Sheet explained, “scientific progress has stalled— new drug approvals have declined, and more researchers are needed to achieve the same outputs.”

The “stall” seems to refer to a bizarre and inexplicable phenomenon we’ve discussed before, the Great Freeze in arts, science, music, fashion, and culture that began icing over in the late 1990’s. Everything just stopped. Till then, every decade saw regular progress. After 1990, advancements slowed to glacial speeds.

But set that incomprehensible Great Freeze conundrum aside. One way to look at this new Executive Order is that Trump is trying to shatter the ice dome.

President Trump’s new order was both revolutionary and breathtaking. He’s given the U.S. government two monumental directives under the umbrella of “the Genesis Mission”:

1. Create an AI supersystem trained on all federal scientific data, studies, and information. Include the entire database libraries of seventeen national labs including NASA, NIH, CDC, FDA, DOE (i.e. nuclear), and so on.

2. Maintain a running list of the Top 20 “pressing national challenges” that the AI will be aimed at solving. The DOE simultaneously launched a glossy website offering examples of these“challenges,” including fusion energy, new types of materials, quantum computing, and life-saving medicines.

While many specific details aren’t yet available, the project will also extend to private American companies under licensing deals. For example, the website lists current partners such as Nvidia, Anthropic, OpenAI, Advanced Micro Devices, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, IBM, and Google.

🔥 If it works, the Genesis Mission could conceivably challenge every entrenched industry in the country. That’s why nobody could have done this but Trump. He’s like a one-man presidential demolition team, crashing through all the siloed, risk-averse, bureaucratic fiefdoms of the biggest and most powerful administrative agencies, regulators, and blue-chip companies in the country. “Consensus managers” don’t create space for revolutionary change; it takes a “wrecking ball” leader to tear down the walls first.

“Genesis Missions will transform how science is done in America,” the DOE’s video promised. The Secretary of Energy, who was tasked with leading the mission, compared it to the Manhattan project and the Apollo missions. “The project is about applying AI to science, engineering, and national security. What we’ve seen so far is AI applied to language,” Secretary Chris Wright explained.

The mission’s stated goal is “to double the productivity and impact of American research and innovation within a decade” by augmenting —not replacing— human scientists.

Secretary Wright offered an example: solving the problem of our creaky, antiquated, susceptible energy grid. “It will be transformative in the coming years,” Wright said. “We’re going to have a better, more affordable energy grid in five years.”

It is much more than AI hype this time. Get a load of this:

🔥 Trump’s Executive Order quietly called for a closed-loop, “AI-directed experimentation and manufacturing” platform. In other words, they are planning for ‘AI agents’ to manage fully automated facilities to autonomously design experiments, test hypotheses, and automate entire research workflows— like operating instruments, collecting samples, analyzing data, and refining scientific methods. By itself.

Here is the exact language from Section 3(e) of the order:

“Within 240 days of the date of this order, the Secretary shall review capabilities across the DOE national laboratories and other participating Federal research facilities for robotic laboratories and production facilities with the ability to engage in AI-directed experimentation and manufacturing, including automated and AI-augmented workflows and the related technical and operational standards needed.”

I know. Hello, Skynet! Welcome, my friends, to the machine.

Pursuant to the order, the DOE must review and inventory all federal research facilities capable of hosting robotic laboratories and AI-directed workflows, and develop technical and operational standards for fully automated research environments controlled by AI.

What can we say about all this? The words “historic,” “revolutionary,” and even “Moon shot” seem quaint, clichéd, and inadequate to describe this kind of technological inflection point. Genesis doesn’t merely describe a single, focused scientific goal like Apollo or Manhattan, but rather the creation of a self-perpetuating, self-improving engine for sleepless progress across all scientific domains at once.

Assuming it works, the AI will be able to conduct its own experiments, like mixing different metals together to see if it makes a superconductor. The results are returned immediately, and the AI can tweak the formula and move on to the next combination. The AI’s automated experiments can run all day and night, never take smoke breaks, and won’t need months of woke-worded grant writing and murky approvals.

🔥 If successful, the Genesis inflection point could soar far beyond “just” technology. It could reshape economies, geopolitics, education, culture, arts, and even the essential meanings of human creativity, responsibility, and discovery. It is potentially the ultimate pivot from “human-driven advancement” to “machine-accelerated civilization.”

That may sound like typical tech hyperbole. And the results might fall short of these wild expectations. But they also might not. For the first time in human history, those wild expectations lie within sighting range.

In that sense, the Genesis announcement is less about dry technical breakthroughs and more of a singularity. If you hate change— well, I don’t quite know what to tell you. There’s no previous scale of change to even compare against what looks likely to soon arrive.

No other country has ever undertaken an initiative of this scale, scope, and imagination. No other country on Earth could likely pull it off. Let us count the ways.

🔥 First of all, the U.S. operates the world’s most advanced network of national laboratories (like the DOE labs), supercomputing centers, and scientific data repositories— resources built over generations requiring vast public investment.

America’s tech ecosystem —spanning leading tech companies (all currently onshoring), its top universities, and our startup culture— is unrivaled in its interconnections and innovation capacity. Who else can marshal public and private ingenuity on this level?

We might be the only country capable of integrating AI at this kind of massive, society-shaping scale.

It won’t be China. In some ways, China has already surpassed the US in automation and AI. But China’s culture operates under heavy state censorship that violently constrains unconventional and unapproved thought. Genesis’s unlimited scope poses an unparalleled threat; it could potentially upset every existing entrenched interest.

China’s authoritarian central planners would need to slowly approve every single disruptive development, one by one, thereby strangling any Genesis-like project in the crib.

They wouldn’t even try. The sheer possibility of unapproved, uncontrollable change would make such a project an existential risk for China’s central planners. It would be scrapped long before it could proceed on the scale envisioned by the President. This structural inflexibility is communism’s greatest weakness. Trump is leaning into it, intentionally or not.

Finally, the U.S. leads in both classical and quantum high-performance computing, and it is one of the few countries capable of integrating AI at a massive, society-shaping scale. The Genesis Mission is therefore a uniquely American endeavor, thanks to our existing infrastructure, scale, boldness of mandate, cultural advantages, and deep catalog of agency resources. Other nations —Who? Russia? UK? France? Canada?— might attempt similar programs, but in terms of “pulling it off” at this scale, the U.S. is, for now, peerless.

Genesis teases the potential for untapped technological, economic, and strategic leadership, potentially leapfrogging China and reinforcing the U.S.’s primacy at the outer frontiers of advancement. Trump is racing past everyone else— using stuff that is already laying around in the nation’s agencies’ sheds.

Once again, he recognized a latent, profitable asset where everyone else saw bureaucratic chaos.

Oh— one more thing. You must read between the order’s lines a little, but it seems clear from the Genesis EO that the U.S. government will retain a stake in any new products or technologies developed using its supercomputing cluster. More nontax income. Income that could pay off the debt and obsolete the income tax, say.

👽 I cannot conclude this topic without at least a nod to conspiracy theories and dystopian anxieties. First of all, if you’re an alien enthusiast: The Genesis Mission would be a nifty way to slipstream highly advanced tech —like tech developed from crashed alien spacecraft, say— into the mainstream without anyone noticing. Look what the AI’s inscrutable black box cooked up today: Antigravity!

With a platform this broad, deep, and opaque, almost anything could be folded into the narrative of legitimate, AI-generated discoveries— even the fantastic. After all, AI is a black box. They still don’t even understand how AI works in the first place, not really. It’s crazy, but it’s true.

Finally, it’s worth wondering whether the Genesis Mission could set us on the path to a Skynet-style apocalypse? Absolutely— and it requires no imagination whatsoever. In a reality-blurring twist worthy of Simpsons prophecy, let’s recall that in the Terminator saga, “Genisys” was the all-seeing, all-connecting global OS that morphed into the murderous Skynet. Am I connecting dots again? Not directly. But come on— the parallels are uncanny.

I’m just saying. It’s more than a little weird.

Still, I’m choosing optimism. Ever since AI unexpectedly burst out of Google’s language lab —assuming you buy the official origin story— it was always inevitable that our superlative-chasing President would set his sights on building the biggest, boldest, most magnificent AI platform the world has ever seen. No conspiracy theory required.

Plus, for three centuries, every leap in science has been greeted with existential dread— and yet, each time, humanity has somehow survived in one piece. And, of course, Genesis could ultimately amount to much less than it seems to promise, for any number of reasons. For one thing, the bureaucracy and its corporate allies will probably try to murder it, or regulate it into oblivion, and might succeed.

For now, I’ll keep my eye on the half-full part of the glass. The stakes are astronomical: maybe, just maybe, the Genesis Mission will finally shatter the Great Freeze and usher in a truly Great Thaw— leading to an even truer Golden Era.

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Now let’s turn to some good judicial news, about computers and our relationships with digital devices. Yesterday, the 11th Circuit lifted a stay, allowing Florida to crack down on social media and gaming platforms aimed at young children.

In March, 2024, Florida passed a law requiring social media companies to verify user ages and prohibit kids under 14 from creating accounts, with parental consent required for kids aged 14-15. Existing accounts without age verification must be automatically terminated. It also requires platforms to terminate a minor’s account and delete all personal information upon request of the minor or their parent.

Industry groups representing child-focused, predator-infested platforms like Roblox and Discord sued, and they got the law stayed by a federal district judge.

Yesterday, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals unstayed the law. Now Florida can finally start enforcing it while the case continues. But in the process, the judges also opined that Florida was likely to win the case, which was very bad news for the plaintiffs. “We conclude,” the judges wrote, “that HB3’s limited restrictions likely satisfy the intermediate scrutiny test for content-neutral regulations, so the Attorney General has made a strong showing he is likely to succeed on the merits.”

Florida’s law contained an interesting innovation absent from other states’ attempts to do the same thing. Rather than banning outright all platforms that kids use (such as their school portals and streaming movie services), the law defines certain “addictive” features, such as use by an average child of two or more hours per day along with things like “endless scrolling.”

Yesterday, Florida’s new Attorney General rightfully celebrated the win on Twitter:

Florida has led the nation in parental rights, while California has gone the other way. Under California’s laws, minor children are essentially treated as partly wards of the state. Bureaucrats share decision-making powers with parents, but without any of the responsibilities of housing, feeding, driving them around, or updating them on how much longer the car ride will be.

Hopefully, more states will follow Florida’s example.

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Great news for National Park lovers. Yesterday, the BBC ran an awkward story headlined, “Foreign tourists to pay extra $100 per person to visit US national parks.” Americans pay around $30 per car. Not only that, but non-residents will now pay more than $250 for an annual park pass, while US citizens pay $80.

The dramatic fee hike tracks President Trump’s July executive order, which required enhanced national park entrance fees for non-citizens and overseas visitors. (Permanent residents are considered citizens for fee purposes.)

“These policies ensure that US taxpayers, who already support the National Park System, continue to enjoy affordable access, while international visitors contribute their fair share to maintaining and improving our parks for future generations,” explained Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum.

Doug also announced eight citizens-only, “patriotic fee-free” days for 2026, including Memorial Day, Independence Day, and Veterans’ Day. Free days subsidized by foreign tourists, in other words.

The predictable result of this move is not just more revenue, but lower park traffic, shorter lines for the buses back to the parking lot, and less crowded gift shops. It’s not clear that other countries could effectively retaliate even if they wanted to. Many countries already charge Americans significantly higher entrance fees for their own national parks, sometimes several times the amount charged to locals. In some countries, the difference is even bigger than the new U.S. fee. So. It’s only fair.

America first!

Have a wonderful Wednesday! And Happy Thanksgiving! We have much to be grateful for this year. C&C will be officially closed for tomorrow’s holiday, but you never know. Either way, we’ll reopen on Friday, with an all-new roundup of essential news and commentary. See you then!

Don’t race off! We cannot do it alone. Consider joining up with C&C to help move the nation’s needle and change minds. I could sure use your help getting the truth out and spreading optimism and hope, if you can: ☕ Learn How to Get Involved 🦠

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