On Monday, January 12, 2026, the Broken Arrow City Council will consider a zoning amendment that would allow construction of a development that would include the Tulsa area's fourth mosque and the first in a Tulsa suburb. Many citizens are upset about it and want to see the council deny the application, but it's important to understand the technicalities of the zoning process and what discretion the City Council has. The City Council does not have to accept the recommendation of planning staff and can weigh many different factors when deciding to change the zoning ordinance. On the other hand, the appearance that the decision was arbitrary and capricious or illegally discriminatory can expose the council to lawsuits, and a legal judgment against the city would be repaid from the sinking fund, which would be replenished by a property tax increase. Here is a description of municipal zoning powers from an article on the Oklahoma Bar Association website:

There are some very basic legal standards to consider when advising a planning commission, governing body or private client. One of the most important is that the Oklahoma Supreme Court has consistently held that unless a zoning decision of a municipality is found not to have a substantial relation to the public health, safety, morals or general welfare or to constitute an unreasonable, arbitrary exercise of the police power, its judgments will not be overturned by the district court. Also, courts may not substitute their judgment for that of the municipal legislative body. The court's duty will be to determine whether the restriction on the use of the property is a reasonable exercise of power under the zoning statute. When the validity of a legislative classification for zoning purposes is fairly debatable, legislative judgments must be allowed to stand.

One significant case upholding this principle is Clary v. Oklahoma City, in which the Oklahoma Supreme Court affirmed the district court's ruling that upheld the city's decision to deny rezoning a single-family home in a residential area for commercial use, finding the question of appropriate zoning as "fairly debatable" and therefore within the city's discretion. On December 18, 2025, the Broken Arrow Planning Commission voted to recommend approval of the zoning change and the conditional-use permit for a place of assembly, file number 25-1766. (Video of the meeting is available here. After public comment, the discussion among the planning commissioners starts about four-and-a-half hours into the meeting. The vote is at about 4 hrs. 50 mins.) The proposal would rezone a 15-acre parcel on the east side of Olive just south of the Creek Turnpike from AG (Agricultural) to CG (Commercial General) and FD (Floodplain), and then would grant a conditional-use permit to allow a place of assembly on a CG-zoned parcel. The two issues are separate, but the second issue is dependent on the first: The zoning change could be granted and the conditional-use permit denied. The Planning Commission voted 4-1 to recommend the rezoning to CG (Robert Goranson, Jason Coan, Jaylee Klempa, Jonathan Townsend voting yes, Mindy Payne, voting no). The conditional-use permit passed 3-2, the three men (Goranson, Coan, Townsend) voting yes and the two women (Klempa and Payne) voting no; Goranson added a stipulation against broadcasts and announcements on the exterior of the facility (public safety excepted) to his motion to approve the Conditional Use Permit. From the Planning Commission agenda item:

BAZ-002469-2025 is a request to change the zoning designation of 15.08 acres from AG (Agricultural) to CG (Commercial General) and FD (Floodplain). The property is located approximately ½ mile north of Tucson Street (121st Street) and just east of Olive Avenue (129th E. Avenue). The Creek Turnpike and its interchange with Olive Avenue is north of this property. The proposed development will have access from Olive Avenue. This property is Comprehensive Plan Level 6, which supports a rezoning to CG. The proposed development includes a commercial retail center along the frontage of the property, the Islamic Center in the center portion. The rear portion of the property is partially floodplain and is planned for a retention pond and vacant land. A Conditional Use Permit for a place of assembly is also a part of this item for consideration. Parking requirements for places of assembly are 1 parking space per 4 seats in assembly area or 1 per 100 sq ft in meeting area without seats. The conceptual development layout details 726 total parking spaces, however, the final number will be determined and approved in the site plan review process for both the Islamic Center and the retail development.... According to FEMA's National Flood Hazard Layer, the rear portion of the property features an area of 100-year flood plain. That area is planned to remain undeveloped currently. All developments will follow floodplain development requirements as set forth by the City of Broken Arrow and FEMA.

All surrounding properties are currently zoned AG. Immediately to the south is Walnut Grove Church, pastored by David Ingles, founder of the Oasis Radio Network. The other surrounding parcels are vacant and wooded. The driveway to The Property Event Center is right across the street. City planning staff, who review each zoning amendment, recommended approval of the proposal.

Recommendation: Based upon the Comprehensive Plan, the location of the property, and the surrounding land uses, Staff recommends that BAZ-002469-2025 and SP-002526-2025 be approved subject to the property being platted. Reviewed by: Jane Wyrick Approved by: Rocky Henkel

The Broken Arrow Comprehensive Plan Future Development Guide Map designates the parcel as Level 6, Regional Employment/Commercial, while the areas to the south are Level 3, Transitional. The conceptual site plan, which is not binding in any way, shows the existing pond remaining, with a septic field next to it. The 20,700 retail strip along 129th East Avenue is shown as "future," while the 23,764 sq. ft. mosque is "Phase 1." The description of Level 6:

Level 6 represents an opportunity to develop regionally significant and highway oriented commercial and employment nodes in Broken Arrow. The Level 6 classification is for a mixture of medium to high intensity commercial and employment uses in the vicinity of major transportation corridors. Nodes along Elm Place, Aspen Avenue, and Kenosha Street, as well as key interchanges along the Broken Arrow Expressway and the Creek Turnpike, are all appropriate areas for Level 6 development. Typical uses could include large shopping centers, big box retailers, commercial, automotive, and office/employment centers.

The Future Development Guide Map shows a half-mile-wide, 2.5-mile-long swath of Level 6 along the Creek Turnpike, extending to both sides, from Florence (111th Street S.) at about 121st East Ave to Elm Place (161st East Ave). This area already includes a Walmart Supercenter, Regal Warren Theater, Reasor's, and a collection of fast-food restaurants. The obvious intention is to have a continuous corridor of car-oriented sales-tax generating businesses along this high-capacity corridor to serve and encourage residential development on Broken Arrow's south side. I've outlined the site of the proposed mosque development in red. The Transportation Plan Map shows a frontage road that would parallel the turnpike on the south side and allow more of the corridor to be developed commercially; it would likely cut through the property. This road has been cited as a reason to deny the rezoning. (If Broken Arrow wants the possibility of building this road in the future, they had better begin acquiring the right-of-way.) While there is a church just to the south, it is in the Level 3 transition area, and not in Level 6, and it is well south of the proposed frontage road. Those subtle differences would warrant somewhat different treatment. At the Planning Commission meeting, State Sen. Christi Gillespie, a member of the Broken Arrow City Council prior to her election to the State Senate last year, argued for denial based on land use planning, transportation planning, and economic development concerns. She posted video of her remarks on Facebook. Gillespie reminded the planning commissioners that the staff recommendation for approval did not bind their freedom to exercise their own judgment. The same thing is true for the City Council: The Planning Commission has made a recommendation for approval, and the City Council has the discretion to deny. Gillespie pointed out that, "Everything we depend on in Broken Arrow to have quality of life depends on sales tax." The Olive (129th East Ave) exit is the first BA exit on the Creek Turnpike when coming from the west, which makes it a strategic location for highway-visible retail businesses to capture dollars from south and east Tulsa residents. Regarding the conditional use permit required to allow a place of assembly on the site, Gillespie noted that there would be three places of assembly within a quarter-mile -- Walnut Grove to the south and The Property Event Center to the west, making three large parcels at this key exit that would not be generating sales tax. The future "measly 20,000 square foot strip center would not begin to offset sales tax lost to this development. Honestly, the applicant -- they acted that they didn't even want to do it, and it wasn't even their idea." I suspect either their land-use attorney or BA planning staff suggested adding the retail strip to the drawing to improve the application's chances for approval. Gillespie reminded the commissioners that Broken Arrow has a precedent for not permitting concentrations of places of assembly. A commenter on Gillespie's video named Clint Babb stated that when a church sought to occupy the former Reasor's on the east side of Elm south of New Orleans (101st St.), the city council denied their application, despite the church including a strip of small shops across the frontage of the building. The city had invested a considerable amount of money into reviving the vintage 1980s retail node now known as New Orleans Square, and they didn't want to see yet another large retail space (originally a 72,000 sq. ft. K-Mart, which opened in 1979) at the intersection occupied by a non-sales-tax-generating use. The septic field shown on the concept drawing, and no plan to connect to the city sewer system, was another red flag for the state senator. Finally, Gillespie called attention to the Creek Turnpike frontage roads shown on the Comprehensive Plan. This proposed development wouldn't allow that road to be built. If the frontage road is blocked, there will be no access from Olive to any business that wants to locate on the S side of the highway; it will have to be accessed from Tucson (121st Street South), putting traffic pressure on that road and on the 121st Street & Olive intersection. Gillespie concluded: "My goal is to ensure we have a common-sense economic development plan for my district. This development does not comply with the Comprehensive Plan, nor does it make business sense for the inevitable growth between Aspen and Olive. It's for these reasons that you have no choice but to vote no." This case against the zoning proposal is not a pretext to discriminate against a particular religion but stands on its own based on the city's interest to encourage and not impede retail development along this strategic corridor. Sen. Gillespie said that even if it were her own church proposing to build on the site, she would oppose it for the reasons stated. It's been too long ago to find the case, but circa 1991, when Christ Presbyterian Church sought to plant a satellite campus in Broken Arrow, they attempted to rent space in the retail strip on the NE corner of Aspen and Albany (145th East Ave. and 61st St.). The city rejected their permit because a church in that location would have made the cocktail lounge at the Holiday Inn (now the Clarion) illegal because of spacing requirements around a church.
- January 09, 2026 at 07:14PM
The Broken Arrow mosque zoning case
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A concerning aspect of the proposed Broken Arrow mosque is its ownership. In a later entry, I'll get into the technicalities of the zoning amendment process and the grounds on which the Broken Arrow City Council might plausibly deny it, but the organization that owns the land is a topic that we explored almost 20 years ago here at BatesLine, in connection with the hostility endured by an anti-terrorist Muslim immigrant from Pakistan from the leaders of Tulsa's Islamic community. The 15-acre property on the east side of Olive Street (129th East Avenue) just south of the Creek Turnpike has been owned by the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT) since 2014. The Islamic Society of Tulsa (IST) purchased the land from the Clarence E. Brooks Trust for $625,000, then later in 2014 transferred the title to NAIT, "to have and to hold said described premises unto GRANTEE as perpetual trustee (in Waqf)." NAIT is also the owner of record of the former Robert Louis Stevenson Elementary School at 46th and Irvington, which is now home to a mosque and Peace Academy (a private school). The property on which the Muslim Student Association mosque at 4th Place and Florence sits is owned by the University of Tulsa; by contrast, the neighboring religious student ministry buildings on the same block are owned by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tulsa and the Wesley Foundation, respectively. September 19, 2014 Journal Record story about the construction of Masjid as-Salam mentions plans for a future Broken Arrow mosque:

The mosque serves about 1,000 Muslims each week, roughly double 1999 levels. Siddiqui said holiday activity now exceeds capacity, leading the Islamic Society to buy 15 acres in Broken Arrow for future development.

A 2006 controversy over claims of American Muslim support of international terrorism called public attention to Tulsa Muslim connections to an influential network of Islamic organizations. Jamal Miftah wrote an op-ed, published in the October 29, 2006, Tulsa World, condemning terrorism in the name of Islam and calling on Islamic leaders in the US to join in that condemnation. He noted the complicity of some American Muslim organizations in financing worldwide terror:

Even mosques and Islamic institutions in the U.S. and around the world have become tools in [Al-Qaeda's] hands and are used for collecting funds for their criminal acts. Half of the funds collected go into the pockets of their local agents and the rest are sent to these thugs.

For his courage, he was confronted at the Islamic Center of Tulsa by the imam and the leader of the operating council and banned. The situation received national attention. That conflict came to mind recently when Helen Pluckrose called upon liberal and reforming Muslims (that is, those who believe in freedom of conscience and don't demand the conversion or subjugation of all humans to Islam) to speak out against violent behaviors by their co-religionists. I called her attention to Miftah's experience to explain why more Muslims don't speak out. I encourage you to read through that entire category of BatesLine articles, which expanded to include Gov. Brad Henry's barely-camouflaged attempt to give Islamic leaders in Oklahoma a special seat at the state government table. As the story developed we learned that the Islamic Society of Tulsa is affiliated with NAIT and ISNA, part of a network of organizations that increasingly dominate Muslim community life in the US. Critics say that the organizations have roots in the Muslim Brotherhood and that significant funding from Saudi Arabia through these organizations has worked to shape the practice of Islam in America after the image of the strict Wahhabi sect of Sunni Islam. The name of one particular Tulsan illustrates the close connections between various national Muslim organizations and the Tulsa Muslim community: Mujeeb Cheema. At the time, Cheema was executive director of NAIT. He is currently listed as a board member of NAIT. Cheema is also currently on the board of the American Halal Institute. He was an incorporator of the Islamic Society of Tulsa at its founding in 1997. In 2003, as chairman of the Islamic Society of Tulsa, he hailed the construction of the Muslim Students Association mosque on the University of Tulsa campus as possibly "the first building constructed on an American college campus for the specific purpose of serving as an Islamic mosque." In 2006, the NAIT website said about itself (emphasis added):

The North American Islamic Trust (NAIT) is a waqf, the historical Islamic equivalent of an American trust or endowment, serving Muslims in the United States and their institutions. NAIT facilitates the realization of American Muslims' desire for a virtuous and happy life in a Shari'ah-compliant way. NAIT is a not-for-profit entity that qualifies as a tax-exempt organization under Section 501(c) (3) of the Internal Revenue Code. NAIT was established in 1973 in Indiana by the Muslim Students Association of U.S. and Canada (MSA), the predecessor of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). NAIT supports and provides services to ISNA, MSA, their affiliates, and other Islamic centers and institutions. The President of ISNA is an ex-officio member of the Board of Trustees of NAIT. NAIT holds titles to mosques, Islamic centers, schools, and other real estate to safeguard and pool the assets of the American Muslim community, develops financial vehicles and products that are compatible with both the Shari'ah (Islamic law) and the American law, publishes and distributes credible Islamic literature, and facilitates and coordinates community projects.

A February 8, 2004, front-page feature story in the Chicago Tribune recounts a battle over the Bridgeview, Illinois, mosque, which was founded in the 1950s by Palestinian immigrants, but taken over by newcomers, funded by Kuwaiti donors and Saudi and UAE governments, and deeded to NAIT in the 1980s, over the objections of long-time members. (Here is the article on Newspapers.com: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)

Beitunia farmer Khalil Zayid arrived in 1939 and rented a room along 18th Street in the heart of the Arab community on the South Side.... Like many in the Islamic world at the time, Zayid and the other Beitunia immigrants practiced a form of Islam that allowed Muslims to socialize freely. They viewed their religion as an important part of life, but not all of life. Men and women could mingle. The women wore short sleeves and did not cover their hair. The men sometimes ran liquor stores even though many Muslims believed Islam forbade selling alcohol. While they wanted to succeed in America and fit into society, they also wanted a place of their own to practice their religion and hold on to their culture. But in all of Chicago, there was no real mosque or official religious leader for Arab Muslims. In 1954, about 30 families from Beitunia, including Zayid's, decided that something needed to be done. They formed the Mosque Foundation and started raising money for a formal place of worship. Zayid stepped forward to become the group's first prayer leader, holding services in a storefront. He had no formal Islamic training, but he considered himself a religious man.... Most of the Beitunia immigrants who had dreamed of their own mosque are now gone. The congregation's first prayer leader, Khalil Zayid, worshiped there until he died in 1988. He was never allowed to lead prayers at the new mosque. Many of the early leaders' children attend other mosques or pray at home. Leila Diab, the daughter of a founder, rarely prays in Bridgeview. She said she tried to meet with Sheik Jamal several years ago, but he insisted that she cover her hair, and she refused.... Sheik Jamal and other [Bridgeview] mosque leaders still pursue a controversial agenda. In March 2002, the mosque hired a new assistant prayer leader--the same man who had run the local office of an Islamic charity until it was closed by the federal government for alleged terrorism ties. Even a few board members questioned whether he should have been hired so quickly. At a prayer service last May, Sheik Jamal raised $50,000 for Palestinian activist Sami Al-Arian, a former professor at the University of South Florida who is charged with being the U.S. leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad. To rally donors, the sheik called Israel "a foreign, malignant and strange element on the blessed land." Al-Arian denies the charges against him. Oussama Jammal, the mosque president, defended the fundraising for Al-Arian. "We raised for his legal defense. That's allowed under U.S. law," he said. "If people were against this, they wouldn't have paid." In December, at an Islamic conference in Chicago, Sheik Jamal said that Muslims should not listen to contemporary music and that women should not travel long distances without chaperones. He also praised Sayyid Qutb, whose writings helped lay the foundation for Muslim Brotherhood beliefs. The mosque remains so conservative, several former leaders said, because more and more mosque officials are Brotherhood members. Mosque leaders declined to comment on the Brotherhood, but director Bassam Jody noted that most of the mosque's 24 directors belong to the Muslim American Society--a group with strong ties to the Brotherhood. The mosque vice president runs the society's local chapter.

Stephen Schwartz, an academic, a journalist, and a follower of Sufism, testified in 2003 before the Senate Homeland Security subcommittee about the spread of Wahhabi influence in the American Muslim community through NAIT and related organizations:

Wahhabi-Saudi policy has always been two-faced: that is, at the same time as the Wahhabis preach hostility and violence against non-Wahhabi Muslims, they maintain a policy of alliance with Western military powers -- first Britain, then the U.S. and France -- to assure their control over the Arabian Peninsula. At the present time, Shia and other non-Wahhabi Muslim community leaders estimate that 80 percent of American mosques are under Wahhabi control. This does not mean 80 percent of American Muslims support Wahhabism, although the main Wahhabi ideological agency in America, the so-called Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) has claimed that some 70 percent of American Muslims want Wahhabi teaching in their mosques.1This is a claim we consider unfounded. Rather, Wahhabi control over mosques means control of property, buildings, appointment of imams, training of imams, content of preaching -- including faxing of Friday sermons from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia -- and of literature distributed in mosques and mosque bookstores, notices on bulletin boards, and organizational solicitation. Similar influence extends to prison and military chaplaincies, Islamic elementary and secondary schools (academies), college campus activity, endowment of academic chairs and programs in Middle East studies, and most notoriously, charities ostensibly helping Muslims abroad, many of which have been linked to or designated as sponsors of terrorism. The main organizations that have carried out this campaign are the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), which originated in the Muslim Students' Association of the U.S. and Canada (MSA), and CAIR. Support activities have been provided by the American Muslim Council (AMC), the American Muslim Alliance (AMA), the Muslim American Society (MAS), the Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences, its sister body the International Institute of Islamic Thought, and a number of related groups that I have called "the Wahhabi lobby." ISNA operates at least 324 mosques in the U.S. [as of 2003] through the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT). These groups operate as an interlocking directorate.

In a 2002 Q&A with National Review, Schwartz had this to say about Wahhabist influence over American mosques (emphasis added):

Unfortunately, the U.S. is the only country outside Saudi Arabia where the Islamic establishment is under Wahhabi control. Eighty percent of American mosques are Wahhabi-influenced, although this does not mean that 80 percent of the people who attend them are Wahhabis. Mosque attendance is different from church or synagogue membership in that prayer in the mosque does not imply acceptance of the particular dispensation in the mosque. However, Wahhabi agents have sought to impose their ideology on all attendees in mosques they control.

How many mosques are held in trust by NAIT is hard to determine. The list on their website is empty. NAIT's self-proclaimed role as a guarantor would allow it to step in should local mosque leadership choose to reject Wahhabism and embrace a more liberal, American-flavored version of Muslim life. This is a similar dynamic to that of liberal Christian denominations who owned local church property; conservative congregations seeking to leave a liberalizing denomination like the Presbyterian Church USA and the Episcopal Church, because of their objections to the denominations' embrace of left-wing ideology and rejection of the Bible, were forced either to abandon their long-time homes (e.g., Falls Church, Virginia) or to pay a hefty ransom to retain the facilities built with the sacrificial gifts of local members (e.g., Tulsa's Kirk of the Hills). Discover the Networks has detailed and lengthy articles on the North American Islamic Trust and its parent organization, the Islamic Society of North America, carefully and precisely documenting their connections to terrorist-linked organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood and the Holy Land Foundation.

A financial subsidiary and "constituent organization" of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT) was founded in 1973 in Indiana by members of the Muslim Students Association of the U.S. & Canada. NAIT is a tax-exempt nonprofit endowment that not only subsidizes the construction of new mosques in the United States, but presently claims to hold the mortgages on more than 325 existing mosques, Islamic centers, and Islamic schools in 42 states. Some sources indicate that NAIT holds the mortgages to about 27% of all U.S. mosques, which is roughly consistent with the Trust's own claim; other sources place the figure much higher, at somewhere between 50% and 79%. Because NAIT controls the purse strings of these many properties, it can exercise ultimate authority over what they teach and what activities they conduct. Specifically, the Trust seeks to ensure that the institutions under its financial influence promote the principles of Sharia Law and Wahhabism.... At the 2007 trial investigating allegations that the now-defunct Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development had engaged in the illegal financing of terrorism, both NAIT and ISNA were named as "unindicted co-conspirators" and as "entities who are and/or were members of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood." Prosecutors presented copious evidence that ISNA had used NAIT to divert funds to leading Hamas officials like Mousa Abu Marzook, and to a number of Hamas-run institutions (such as the Islamic University of Gaza and the Islamic Center of Gaza, the latter of which was founded by the late Hamas leader Ahmed Yassin). The designation of NAIT as an "unindicted co-conspirator" was upheld in 2009 by a federal judge, though that judge ruled against the previous public disclosure of the designation. Many media outlets have repeatedly mischaracterized this as a lifting of the designation.

There is one non-NAIT mosque in Tulsa: The Tulsa Islamic Foundation, located on 61st Street east of Mingo, is a Shia mosque affiliated with Imam Mahdi Association of Marjaeya and Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani of Najaf, Iraq.
- January 04, 2026 at 07:23PM
NAIT: Owner of Broken Arrow mosque land
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KJRH ran a story today on Jasmine "Jazzy" Smith, an 18-year-old Oklahoman who is undergoing treatment in Florida for conditions related to Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome:

TULSA, Okla. -- An 18-year-old Oklahoma singer whose life revolved around performing is now fighting for her health after a rare connective tissue disorder left her nearly bedridden.... "When I was a dancer, cheerleader, I always dislocated things, subluxed my knees, shoulders, and then subluxed my neck," Smith said. "Then after like a few months, it just all I started regressing really badly, and I was noticing really weird brain patterns." Doctors eventually diagnosed her with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, a rare connective tissue disorder that can affect nearly every system in the body. Months ago, her health collapsed completely. She endured long hospital stays, severe head and spinal pain, multiple daily seizures, and days without sleep.... In Florida, doctors diagnosed Cervical Cranial Instability, a malformation, and Intracranial Hypertension -- conditions linked to Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome that increase brain pressure and cause regressions to systems in her body.

The news story describes it as rare, but at a prevalence of 1 in 3,100 for the most common type, hypermobile EDS (hEDS), there's a decent chance that someone in your world has Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (a disorder affecting the formation of collagen in the body). At that prevalence, there could be around 1,300 people in Oklahoma with EDS. The effects vary and for many are not as severe as Jazzy Smith has experienced. Because collagen is everywhere, seemingly unrelated symptoms -- joint hypermobility, headaches, tachycardia, allergic reactions to foods (mast cell activation disorder) -- may all be downstream of the same root cause, but doctors who are unaware of EDS may just try, unsuccessfully, to treat the individual symptoms. Recently we met someone who had worked in the medical field and had EDS symptoms, like frequent shoulder dislocation and tendon rupture as a side effect of Cipro (see note below), but had never heard of EDS. There needs to be more awareness. Tulsa is blessed with at least one doctor, David Chorley at Axis HealthCare in Bixby, who understands EDS, and there are online communities like EDSOK - Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome Oklahoma, which can help you find EDS-aware specialists and resources for learning to live with EDS. An EDS patient named Deborah Cusack has developed a nutritional approach, called the Cusack Protocol, which "focuses on improving connective tissue integrity and function through a combination of supplements targeting specific cells involved in collagen production and tissue repair. NOTE: People with EDS are one class among several who are at risk for tendon rupture and other severe side effects from the fluoroquinolone family of antibiotics, which includes ciprofloxacin (marketed as Cipro and generic ciprofloxacin), ciprofloxacin extended-release (marketed as Cipro XR and Proquin XR), gemifloxacin (marketed as Factive), levofloxacin (marketed as Levaquin), moxifloxacin (marketed as Avelox), norfloxacin (marketed as Noroxin), and ofloxacin (marketed as Floxin).
- January 01, 2026 at 06:34PM
Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome not as rare as you might think
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Edited and updated from the version originally published on December 25, 2012 Merry Christmas to anyone who happens by BatesLine today. My Christmas Eve was spent doing a little bit of last-minute shopping, including a visit to the Nut House for some pecans and to Persnickety Consignments in Catoosa for one of their hand-painted, glow-in-the-dark Christmas ornaments celebrating the Blue Whale and the Route 66 Centennial. I picked up some barbecue from Rib Crib just an hour before they closed at 5 (out of ribs, of course) for an early dinner. My wife and I and our two local children attended our church's Christmas Eve Lessons and Carols candlelight service, which once again featured a Nativity-themed poetical homily written and recited by our pastor. I wore a green sweater over a red shirt for a family photo after the service, but it was only for appearance's sake; it was warm and muggy as we left the building, reminding us of our Christmas 2013 in Sarasota, Florida. I drove home through several midtown neighborhoods to look at lights. A favorite extravagant display on 30th Place east of Utica is missing this year, replaced by a For Sale sign, a sign with a sad story behind it. Christmas day will be quiet, and just the four of us. We'll make phone calls to connect with far-flung family. With such a small group, we've decided on dinner out, although we'll make our traditional breakfast casserole for the morning. At some point, we will listen to this year's Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from King's College, Cambridge, and enjoy the solo chorister sing the opening verse of "Once in Royal David's City," the Old Testament prophecies of the Messiah, and the bidding prayer that opens the service. While Lessons and Carols is an Anglican tradition, it is encouraging to see how it has escaped its cradle and found a home in Bible-believing churches of many different denominations. As a Holland Hall high school student, I attended and sang in the annual service of Christmas lessons and carols at Trinity Episcopal Church, modeled after the annual Christmas Eve service from the chapel of King's College, Cambridge. My 8th grade year was the first year I was required to attend, and I expected to be bored. Instead, I was entranced. My last two years in high school, I was a member of the Concert Chorus and was privileged to join in the singing of Tomas Luis de Victoria's setting of O Magnum Mysterium, an ancient poem about the wonder that "animals should see the newborn Lord lying in a manger." As a senior, I was one of the 12 Madrigal Singers. The six ladies sang the plainsong setting of Hodie Christus Natus Est (Today Christ Is Born), repeating it as the students processed into their places. Then all 12 of us sang Peter J. Wilhousky's arrangement of Carol of the Bells, with the 3 basses landing on the final satisfying "Bom!" on that low G. At the beginning of Trinity's service, after the processional, Father Ralph Urmson-Taylor, who served as Holland Hall's Lower School chaplain, would read the bidding prayer. Confessing Evangelical has it as I remember it. It's worth a moment of your time to ponder.

Beloved in Christ, be it this Christmastide our care and delight to hear again the message of the angels, and in heart and mind to go even unto Bethlehem and see this thing which is come to pass, and the Babe lying in a manger. Therefore let us read and mark in Holy Scripture the tale of the loving purposes of God from the first days of our disobedience unto the glorious Redemption brought us by this Holy Child. But first, let us pray for the needs of the whole world; for peace on earth and goodwill among all his people; for unity and brotherhood within the Church he came to build, and especially in this our diocese. And because this of all things would rejoice his heart, let us remember, in his name, the poor and helpless, the cold, the hungry, and the oppressed; the sick and them that mourn, the lonely and the unloved, the aged and the little children; all those who know not the Lord Jesus, or who love him not, or who by sin have grieved his heart of love. Lastly, let us remember before God all those who rejoice with us, but upon another shore, and in a greater light, that multitude which no man can number, whose hope was in the Word made flesh, and with whom in the Lord Jesus we are one forevermore. These prayers and praises let us humbly offer up to the Throne of Heaven, in the words which Christ himself hath taught us: Our Father, which art in heaven...

The bidding prayer was written by Eric Milner-White, dean of the chapel of King's College, who introduced the Lessons and Carols service there on Christmas Eve 1918. Jeremy Summerly describes the prayer as "the greatest addition to the Church of England's liturgy since the Book of Common Prayer." In some versions, the prayer for "all those who know not the Lord Jesus, or who love him not, or who by sin have grieved his heart of love" is dropped, perhaps because of political correctness and religious timidity, but they seem to have been restored in recent years. Who needs prayer more than those who reject the Way, the Truth, and the Life? The phrase "upon another shore, and in a greater light" always gives me goosebumps as I think about friends and family who are no longer with us, but who are now free from pain and delighting in the presence of the Savior they loved so dearly in this life. As he wrote those words, Milner-White, who had served as an army chaplain in the Great War before his return to King's College, must have had in mind the 199 men of King's and the hundreds of thousands of his countrymen who never returned home from the trenches of Europe. This year that number includes my father, who was Christmas cheer personified for our family and for many Tulsans for the last two decades. The staff at Philbrook Museum, where he held court every year since 2005 that they'd had a Santa, very kindly invited my sister and I and our families to one night of the Festival and presented us with Christmas ornaments honoring his memory. His successor at Philbrook is a fine gentleman and was a good friend and colleague to Dad, and it was nice to Dad's custom-built throne still in good use. Added this year to the number of those who rejoice on another shore and in a greater light are several other men who were fathers in the faith: Brother Gerald E. Dyer, the pastor at First Baptist Church of Rolling Hills who baptized me in 1972 and who went on to serve pastorates in Baxter Springs, Kansas, and Miami, Oklahoma; Dr. Donald R. Vance, a world-renowned expert in Hebrew and Semitic languages, co-editor of Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia: A Reader's Edition, a former professor at ORU and teacher at ACA, and a faithful friend; and Ray Rose, who was my boss at Burtek back in the late 1980s, and who set an example of living out his Christian faith both in and out of the workplace. On the very same day that my dad left this life, my Aunt Gerry, my mother's youngest surviving sister, left us, too. Aunt Gerry was a voracious reader. When I was young she would lend me her favorite sci-fi novels, and she gave me albums that introduced me to Monty Python and Willie Nelson (and Willie Nelson introduced me to the Great American Songbook). She spent several years as a reporter and editor at small-town newspapers in southeastern Oklahoma and was a skilled grant writer. Remembering those who have gone on before leads us to the final verses of the Epiphany hymn, "As with Gladness, Men of Old", which describes "another shore" as "the heavenly country bright":

Holy Jesus, every day Keep us in the narrow way; And, when earthly things are past, Bring our ransomed souls at last Where they need no star to guide, Where no clouds Thy glory hide. In the heavenly country bright, Need they no created light; Thou its Light, its Joy, its Crown, Thou its Sun which goes not down; There forever may we sing Alleluias to our King!

The final verses of the processional hymn also speak to that blessed hope:

And our eyes at last shall see Him, Through His own redeeming love, For that Child so dear and gentle Is our Lord in Heaven above; And He leads His children on To the place where He is gone. Not in that poor lowly stable, With the oxen standing by, We shall see Him; but in Heaven, Set at God's right Hand on high ; When like stars His children crowned, All in white shall wait around.

MORE: "Once in Royal David's City," the processional hymn from King's College Lessons and Carols, was Christmas 2023 Hymn of the Week at Word and Song by Debra and Anthony Esolen. This year's broadcast of the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from King's College Cambridge marked its 107th anniversary. You might be able listen to the service for the next four weeks on the BBC Sounds website, but this year, because of changes in BBC policy, you might need to use a VPN and a private browser tab and an account registered to a UK address to listen. A pre-recorded video of the service, called Carols from King's, is available internationally for download at a price of £8.33 (about $10 US). You can view the booklet for the service and an article on the history of the service here. (Direct link to service booklet PDF. Direct link to history booklet PDF.) The history of the Lessons and Carols service was presented in this 15-minute BBC program, Episode 8 of the series "A Cause for Caroling." Alas, it was not repeated this year, so it is not available through the BBC, but it is available through Audible and as an audio CD.) Edward White Benson, first Bishop of Truro, originated the service of Nine Lessons and Carols in 1880. It was published in 1884 and began to be used more widely. From the 2018 service booklet:

The 1918 service was, in fact, adapted from an order drawn up by E. W. Benson, later Archbishop of Canterbury, for use in the large wooden shed which then served as his cathedral in Truro at 10 p.m. on Christmas Eve, 1880. A. C. Benson recalled: 'My father arranged from ancient sources a little service for Christmas Eve - nine carols and nine tiny lessons, which were read by various officers of the Church, beginning with a chorister, and ending, through the different grades, with the Bishop'. The idea had come from G. H. S. Walpole, later Bishop of Edinburgh.Very soon other churches adapted the service for their own use. In the immediate aftermath of the First World War, Milner-White decided that A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols would be a more uplifting occasion at King's than Evensong on Christmas Eve. He used Benson's plan, but wrote the now-classic Bidding Prayer to set the tone at the beginning. Since then the spoken parts, which provide the backbone of the service, have only occasionally changed.

MORE: John Piper explains what Christmas is all about in 115 words:

Christmas means that a king has been born, conceived in the womb of a virgin. And this king will reign over an everlasting kingdom that will be made up of millions and millions of saved sinners. The reason that this everlasting, virgin-born king can reign over a kingdom of sinners is because he was born precisely to die. And he did die. He died in our place and bore our sin and provided our righteousness and took away the wrath of God and defeated the evil one so that anyone, anywhere, of any kind can turn from the treason of sin to the true king, and put their faith in him, and have everlasting joy.

STILL MORE: Author William Federer, on the Eric Metaxas Show, explains the evidence that establishes December 25 as the date of Christ's birth. At her blog, A Clerk of Oxford, Eleanor Parker has written a great many articles about the Anglo-Saxon commemoration of the Christian year. This Twitter thread and this blog entry will lead you to a series of articles on the "O Antiphons," the Latin poems of praise to Christ that are read at vespers over the week prior to Christmas day, each one naming a title of Christ reflecting a different aspect of His glory -- Wisdom, Lord, Root of Jesse, Key of David, Dayspring (Morning Star), King of Nations, and Emmanuel (God with us). Her essay from 1st Sunday in Advent 2020 reflects on Advent, Christmas, and time, on 2020's lack of holidays, the impossibility of "pressing pause" on life, the origins of Christmas and claims of cultural appropriation, the emotional impact of the season. A worthwhile ramble on a gray day. It's all worth reading, but this passage stood out to me, and it cites that wonderful phrase from the bidding prayer that undoes me every year:

The British festival year used to involve numerous seasons and holidays when people could gather together, in extended families and in local communities; now for many people in that 90% it's almost all concentrated on Christmas, and that's a lot of pressure. Of course advertisers exploit that pressure for their own ends, so many of us have a vision in our heads of the 'perfect family Christmas' which may bear little or no relation to how we have actually experienced the season. (I'm sure the journalists are attacking the imaginary advertisers' Christmas more than anything they've seen in real life.) It's typical of the modern Christmas, most of all in its focus on family and childhood, that it leads people to places of strong emotion, both good and bad. Whether your memories of childhood Christmas are happy or unhappy ones, when Christmas comes round there's no escaping them. Whatever your family is or isn't, or whatever you want it to be, this is the time when you are insistently pushed to think about it and to compare yourself to others. Any sense of loss or deficiency in the family is made worse by the contrast with images of other apparently perfect families, or by remembering past happiness, or imagining what could or should be. Grief is harder. Absences are more keenly felt. It's a season when one phrase or one note of a song can open floodgates of emotion, calling forth profound fears, griefs, and longings which in ordinary time we might manage to contain. Christmas used to be a season of ghost stories, and it's certainly a time when it's hard not to be haunted by memories - even happy memories, of 'those who rejoice with us, but on another shore and in a greater light'. You can call that sentimental, or irrational, but it's very powerful all the same. And it's no coincidence - of course it isn't - that this is all intensified because it takes place at midwinter, when the days are very short and the nights very long; when the weather is cold and hostile; when light is lowest, and the shadows longest. There's a reason we call this season 'the dead of winter', with all the sterility and hopelessness that implies. That makes the Christmas brightness all the brighter, or the darkness all the darker - the lights and the warmth and the company all the more welcome, or their absence all the more painful. It's a bleak and lonely and isolating time of year, at the best of times; and these aren't the best of times. How much more endless the empty evenings seem now in November than they did in April, now they begin at four o'clock in the afternoon! The 'it's just one day' people can go on saying that as much as they like, but this particular day, after nine months of isolation or separation from family, is going to be hard for a lot of people.

Just remember: If you didn't fulfill every Christmas tradition you wanted to honor, give every gift you wanted to give, sing every carol on or before December 25, there are still eleven days of Christmas remaining! RELATED: Tom Holland writing in Unherd in December 2020 on The Myth of Pagan Christmas. Holland takes us back to the Christmas feast at the court of King Athelstan in Amesbury in 932, and looks back from there to the idea of measuring time from the birth of Christ:

Bede, more clearly than any Christian scholar before him, had recognised that there was only the one fixed point amid the great sweep of the aeons, only the single pivot. Drawing on calendrical tables compiled some two centuries earlier, he had fixed on the Incarnation, the entry of the divine into the womb of the Virgin Mary, as the moment on which all of history turned. Years, by Bede's reckoning, were properly measured according to whether they were before Christ or anno Domini: in the year of the Lord. The effect was to render the calendar itself as Christian. The great drama of Christ's incarnation and birth stood at the very centre of both the turning of the year and the passage of the millennia. The fact that pagans too had staged midwinter festivities presented no threat to this conceptualisation, but quite the opposite. Dimly, inadequately, gropingly, they had anticipated the supreme miracle: the coming into darkness of the true Light, by which every man who comes into the world is lit.

He concludes with this:

This year of all years [2020] -- with a clarity denied us in happier times -- it is possible to recognise in Christmas its fundamentally Christian character. The light shining in the darkness proclaimed by the festival is a very theological light, one that promises redemption from the miseries of a fallen world. In a time of pandemic, when the festive season is haunted by the shadows of sickness and bereavement, of loneliness and disappointment, of poverty and dread, the power of this theology, one that has fuelled the celebration of Christmas for century after century, becomes easier, perhaps, to recognise than in a time of prosperity. The similarities shared by the feast day of Christ's birth with other celebrations that, over the course of history, have been held in the dead of winter should not delude us into denying a truth so evident as to verge on the tautologous: Christmas is a thoroughly Christian festival.

- December 25, 2025 at 03:09AM
A bidding prayer for Christmas, A. D. 2025
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Today, I stopped to do some Christmas shopping at the new Decopolis Tulsarama Station on Historic Route 66 at 5717 E. 11th St. The Decopolis Discovitorium has been open since 2020 at 1401 E. 11th St. in the Meadow Gold District, but Tulsarama just opened on November 22, 2025, a bit less than a year before U.S. Highway 66's centennial on November 11, 2026. Tulsarama, named after Tulsa's 1957 celebration of Oklahoma's semi-centennial, is like a collection of little specialty shops in one location. The building was originally Creech's Cafe, but for most of its existence was McCollum's Restaurant, sitting just west of the Will Rogers Motor Hotel and amidst a mile of motels on what was then Tulsa's eastern outskirts. Just inside the door from the parking lot, you'll see displays with photos and text on the history of the building and the area, and even an old menu. Every room is beautifully and imaginatively decorated by owner William Franklin, who is an accomplished painter of murals, portraits, and trompe l'oeil, with work installed around the globe. Right along 11th Street is the bright and sunny Tulsarama ice cream parlor, serving a dozen hand-dipped flavors from Tulsa's Big Dipper Creamery. The booths are decorated with owner William Franklin's whimsical Tulsarama Gang comic strips, each one illustrating an aspect of Tulsa's history, and with artwork and articles from Oklahoma's 50th anniversary. 1957 was the high-water mark of Route 66 and the post-World War II great American road trip, when locally-owned small businesses dominated the two-lane roads that took Americans across the country. In the corner of the ice cream parlor, there's a Tulsa Visitor Center, with free maps and brochures, as well as books for sale about Route 66, Oklahoma, and Tulsa. They've got the new Route 66: The First Hundred Years by Jim Ross and Shellee Graham. The complex also encompasses FableRealm Bookstore, which has books, toys, and gifts related to popular fantasy fiction series. Just beyond the bookstore, you reach William's Tulsey Town Art Gallery, with prints celebrating Art Deco and Tulsa history. There are prints of historic Oklahoma maps, of architect Paul Corrubia's evocative 1937 charcoal sketches of Tulsa landmarks, and of William Franklin's own paintings of Tulsa's architectural gems. There are plans to offer painting classes in this room early next year. You can also find handmade, leather-bound journals, and the pottery of Jezz Strutt, who offers some Tulsa and Route 66-themed items. Decopolis, a combination gift shop and museum devoted to celebrating Tulsa's Art Deco heritage, first opened in a storefront in the parking garage at 6th and Boston in 2012. In 2016, the store moved a block north into the Thompson Building at 5th and Boston. The downtown location closed at the end of 2020, but Meadow Gold District location had opened in October of that same year and is still thriving today. The Discovitorium features dinosaur, sci-fi, and fantasy-related gifts, toys, and books. It includes a mini Tulsa Art Deco museum where you can pick up a free Tulsa Art Deco downtown walking tour map. William's dream is to add a new and bigger Discovitorium and a full-fledged Tulsa Art Deco museum to the new Tulsarama complex. In a Facebook post from last week, he talks about the tourism impact of many individual small-business initiatives, but they need local support to succeed and grow:

[Tourism as an industry] is a new thing for Tulsa that I believe has huge promise and potential for growth. Go to the Meadow Gold District and check out the "Route 66 Giants" and the fun shops and restaurants that have sprung up there in just the last couple of years. This is just one, small part of what promises to be a whole new, vital industry which could bring fun, excitement, money and jobs, to Tulsa, to you. There is a saying, You can make a big splash in two ways, throw in a big boulder, or throw in a lot of coordinated pebbles. All the little tourism related attractions and businesses along Route 66 in Tulsa, and in our neighboring towns, could make a wonderfully big, fun, neon colored splash! BUT this is still a nascent enterprise and we are facing what looks to be a tougher year than normal. Right at the time when a lot of small Tourism related businesses on Route 66 in Tulsa have just started, or expanded. So we could use a little extra attention this week and next from the good people of Tulsa to help us out. Our BIG dream? We would like to add a full fledged Museum, the DECOPOLIS Tulsa Art Deco Museum, a new bigger Decopolis Discovitorium and Mesmer Island Dino Adventure, to the same TulsaRama & FableRealm Books property. A wonderful new attraction for you to visit and enjoy! Scheels? Once we achieve our plans, we will leave them in the dust.

Over the last year, amidst exciting concept sketches and photos of construction progress, William shared the frustrations of the City of Tulsa permitting process, which slowed everything down and put hopes of opening for the Route 66 Centennial year in jeopardy. Individual entrepreneurship, individual owners each with their own quirky vision, is what built Route 66 and made it memorable, and yet city leaders focus their attention on top-down, government-funded "attractions" like the Cry Baby statue. People like William don't need government subsidies, they just need the city to make the permitting process as painless, predictable, and quick as possible. Redirecting weird statue money to improving government services would be a good start. I hope you'll take time to visit Decopolis's two locations and the many other locally owned businesses along Tulsa's Route 66. Both stores are open 10-6 tomorrow, Christmas Eve, and remember, there are twelve days of Christmas, starting with Christmas Day, so you can keep shopping and giving gifts through Epiphany.
- December 23, 2025 at 08:52PM
Shop Decopolis's new Tulsarama location
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I tend to keep browser tabs around for a long time. I find an interesting story that I want to write about, but never get around to it. I'm going to try to get through a few in this entry, but will not let myself spend more than an hour. Here are a few recent stories on new laws passed this year by the Oklahoma legislature. OK property owners can repurchase seized land after Nov. 1: This Fox23 story from October 28, 2025, reported on State Rep. Tom Gann's (R-Inola) bill to force the Oklahoma Transportation Commission (aka ODOT) to give the previous owners an opportunity to buy their land back if it is surplus to requirements. This was already being done if the previous owners still had a remnant of the land adjacent to the land that was taken; this bill requires that opportunity for a total taking as well. HB1103 was authored by Gann and sponsored by Sen. Ally Seifried in the Senate, and it passed by wide margins in both houses. (12:40) Oklahoma leaders say behind-the-meter law protects ratepayers from data center costs: This is a News on 6 story from December 14, 2025, about an interview with State Rep. Paul Rosino and former State Rep. Jason Dunnington on an unidentified bill the story says passed in 2024:

"BTM basically says companies, data centers, if you want to come to Oklahoma and set up shop, then you pay for your own power," Dunnington said. "You build it yourself, you use your own power. That alone, the legislature looking out for the utility rate payers by passing that was massive, and it needs to get talked about more."

SB 480 actually is from the 2025 session, and it passed without opposition in both houses, with dozens of legislators signing on as co-sponsors. The new language doesn't appear to require large data centers from buying electricity from the existing public utilities, but it allows them to generate electricity on site, if they at least partially using natural gas. It exempts these private power-generating companies from being regulated by the Corporation Commission as public utilities. Here's a news story on a new Chickasha industrial park being developed under the new law. Previewing the bill before the session, the Oklahoma Electric Cooperative described SB 480 as "raising new challenges for [rural electric] cooperatives around infrastructure planning and peak demand." There's some weird, interesting language that was deleted -- a special carveout for some company in Washington County and for generation of "green hydrogen." The Washington County language appears to date from 1971. ("Amended by Laws 1971, HB 1080, c. 26, § 1, emerg. eff. March 22, 1971; Amended by Laws 1971, HB 1257, c. 322, § 1, emerg. eff. June 24, 1971") The "green hydrogen" language was added by HB 4065 in 2024. The same Oklahoma Electric Cooperative bulletin mentions HB 2752, which was to ban the use of eminent domain by private companies for renewable energy facilities (e.g. wind and solar farms) and to require a Certificate of Authority from the Corporation Commission before using eminent domain to extend high-voltage lines, using a process defined in HB 2756. Both bills passed overwhelmingly, but HB 2756 became law without the governor's signature. (That's 58 minutes work, mainly spent looking up the actual bills -- easier if the news report mentions the bill number -- reading through them, and finding related stories.)
- December 23, 2025 at 12:29PM
New Oklahoma laws on eminent domain and power generation
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Is Oklahoma setting itself up to ruin farm land and waste tax dollars in pursuit of AI riches, only to end up with massive, unusable, empty buildings? John Mecke, writing at Development Corporate, sees the same dynamics at work in AI infrastructure finance that led to the dot-com bubble and telecom crash right after the turn of the millennium.

The numbers are staggering. In a single week in late 2024, Alphabet announced a $40 billion plan for AI infrastructure, while Anthropic committed $50 billion for new data centers. An unprecedented gold rush is underway to build the physical backbone of the artificial intelligence revolution. Private equity firms, infrastructure funds, and sovereign wealth pools are pouring hundreds of billions into what they believe will be the defining infrastructure investment of the decade. But as the investment mania accelerates, a critical question is being quietly asked in boardrooms across Wall Street and London: What is the exit strategy? For the private equity and infrastructure funds backing these colossal, multi-billion-dollar projects, the lack of a clear path to liquidity presents a risk that could undermine the entire boom--or worse, trigger a collapse reminiscent of the telecom crash of 2000-2001.

In other words, how are investors going to make money in the short run on investments that may take most of a decade to generate revenue? Mecke offers and elaborates on four concerns: 1. The Great Mismatch: Short-Term Money Chasing a Long-Term Game

Data center infrastructure represents a long-duration, capital-intensive play that typically requires 10-15 years to generate optimal returns. Yet the capital flooding into the sector comes predominantly from funds with much shorter investment horizons.... The problem intensifies when you consider the construction timelines. CBRE research shows that power delivery delays and electrical infrastructure shortages mean new data centers now require 3-4 years from groundbreaking to operation. Add another 2-3 years for the facility to reach stable cash flow, and you're looking at 6-7 years before an investor sees meaningful returns--consuming most of the intended hold period before the asset is even fully operational.

Mecke points to AI cloud provider CoreWeave's lower-than-expected IPO valuation, debt burden, and burn rate as a cautionary tale. 2. The "Digital Ghost Town" Risk: How Today's Cutting-Edge Tech Becomes Tomorrow's Stranded Asset Mecke recalls the massive fiber optic build-out of the 1990s, but internet traffic growth was far less than the projections that fueled half a trillion dollars of debt-leveraged investment. Tulsans will remember the resulting price collapse and corporate layoffs. Improvements in compute efficiency, technological breakthroughs on the horizon, and the shift from compute-intensive AI model training to less demanding inference operations all point to deceleration in demand for processing, space, and power. "The risk of building what amounts to digital ghost towns--billions of dollars in concrete, steel, and silicon gathering dust--is not theoretical. It's the natural consequence of building infrastructure for a technology that's evolving faster than the construction timelines themselves." RELATED: William Langdon writes that Oklahoma's AI-infrastructure strategy is centered on an obsolescent, copper-connected, GPU-centered, power- and water-hungry technology, while more efficient Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) technology is emerging:

That undermines the entire pitch behind Oklahoma's data-center subsidies: You don't need massive cheap water, cheap electricity, huge tax giveaways -- if your hardware is built on the latest technology. It also means that if a data center built today with GPU farms gets converted (or partly reused) tomorrow for TPU-based infrastructure, much of the "infrastructure footprint" -- high voltage lines, oversized cooling, oversized water delivery -- becomes wasted. A white elephant.

3. Too Big to Sell: When Scale Becomes a Liability For Mecke, this involves not the size of the facilities, but the valuation of the investment. When the original investors demand a return on investment, there are few potential buyers big enough to pay what the investors expect, and the end result may be the Big Data customers scooping up the infrastructure at bargain rates.

73% of projects under construction are already preleased, primarily to a small number of hyperscale customers (Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta). This concentration means the market isn't liquid--it's locked. When it's time to sell, there are no alternative buyers beyond the hyperscalers themselves, who have every incentive to wait for distressed pricing rather than pay peak valuations.

4. The Flawed Escape Routes: Why Traditional Exits Don't Work Mecke explores the possibility of IPOs and more creative financial strategies as possibilities to attract investors, but notes worrying protections for insiders that make this industry a bad deal for future investors:

Analysis of CoreWeave's IPO structure by Mostly Metrics reveals troubling details designed to protect insiders while exposing retail investors. Magnetar Capital's "Penny Warrant" allowed them to buy shares for $0.01 each--a price unavailable to public investors. Founders cashed out nearly $500 million pre-IPO, de-risking their positions while marketing the company to retail buyers at full price. This pattern--insiders reducing exposure while retail bears downside risk--is classic bubble behavior.

Mecke goes on to list several warning signs: the massive amount of capacity in the construction pipeline or in the planning stages; long waits for grid connections and rising electric costs; the possibility of debt markets deciding enough is enough; and the question of how quickly AI capacity can be monetized by attracting customers still figuring out how to integrate AI into their businesses. Each of the factors listed above were factors in the bursting of the telecom bubble. The fiber optic infrastructure "eventually found its purpose, enabling the streaming, cloud computing, and mobile revolution that followed. The fiber was there when demand finally caught up--just not in time to save the original investors."

The question isn't whether AI will transform computing--it almost certainly will. The question is whether the current infrastructure buildout is properly sized, timed, and financed to capture that value. History suggests that revolutionary technologies often create their greatest wealth in the second wave, after the first wave of investors has built too much, too fast, with too much debt. As AI infrastructure investments scale into the tens of billions, the most important question may not be who is funding it, but who will be left holding the keys when the music stops.

Which takes us back to William Langdon's Substack essay. Politicians chasing these developments are offering discounted access to water and tax incentives, all in hopes of a small number of long-term jobs. Langdon calls on policymakers to ensure that the developers are responsible for the risks, not simply reaping the rewards:

Require infrastructure costs to be borne by developers -- not taxpayers or ratepayers. If you want to build a supercomputer campus, pay for the grid upgrades, water infrastructure, environmental mitigation, and long-term maintenance.

- December 11, 2025 at 01:10PM
Tech bubbles old and new
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A place that seemed mysterious, mythical to me as a 10-year-old has been in the news lately. What was empty land back then (and still is, half a century later) may become a massive 10-square-mile master planned development with an adjacent data center. It was 1974. I remember when I first saw it, and I was fascinated. Our family lived in a little house in Rolling Hills, a subdivision in northwest Wagoner County, unincorporated at that time. Maps of Tulsa didn't show our neighborhood. City insets on road maps were sized for "Tulsa proper," the city limits prior to the massive 1966 annexation which tripled the city's land area and took Tulsa's eastern boundary to the Wagoner County line. A typical city map stopped at Garnett or 129th East Avenue. As a map nerd, I was frustrated that my neighborhood and its environs were treated by cartographers as terra incognita. I was 10 when I got a copy of the 1974 edition of the Oklahoma state highway map. I probably picked it up at the Tulsa State Fair, along with a bagful of other brochures and bumper stickers to be found at the booths in the IPE Building. The Oklahoma Department of Highways (now ODOT) issued a state map every year, and there were all sorts of fascinating details that Rand McNally didn't show -- little towns, unincorporated communities, wildlife refuges, city limits of small cities, and Sandstone Creek ("World's First Upstream Flood Prevention Project"). On the cover was a photo of the Nellie Johnstone, Oklahoma's first commercial oil well; when we lived in Bartlesville we walked past the oil well replica often on our way to the swings at Johnstone Park. The back of the 1974 Oklahoma map was themed "Highways to History" and filled with black-and-white photos of land runs, Indians, chuck wagons, and Will Rogers. There were inset maps for Oklahoma City and Tulsa, and this time the Tulsa map showed all of Tulsa, along with towns to the west and the east and the fence lines they'd established to defend against further Tulsa expansion. Our neighborhood was there! There was Catoosa, there were the old roads we took to get to the port and Owasso, along with the new port highway under construction. And there, on the east edge of the map, coming with a mile of our house, was a big, gray, blocky tornado, stretching from Apache to 66th Street south, from 201st East Ave east beyond the edge of the map labeled Fair Oaks. The Wagoner County map from around that time showed Fair Oaks stretching all the way to 313th East Avenue, a half-mile from the Verdigris River. Stretching 7 miles east to west and 8.5 miles north to south, Fair Oaks' land area was bigger than any other city on the map except Tulsa itself -- bigger than Broken Arrow, Sand Springs, and Sapulpa. According to the index on the other side, in the 1970 census, the massive municipality of Fair Oaks had a population of... 23. 23 residents over 15.2 square miles, possibly the least dense municipality in the USA. Part of the area covered by Fair Oaks was familiar to us. We drove east on Highway 33 (Admiral Blvd) a few times a year to visit grandparents in Mountain Home, Arkansas. Families from our church had moved from Rolling Hills to build homes on bigger lots near a little store and gas station near Midway Road (257th East Ave) and Admiral (I remember it as Nuckolls' Store, but it was also Fugate's and Tramel's), and we'd go out to visit once in a while; that area wasn't in Fair Oaks, but it was surrounded by Fair Oaks. No one had heard of Fair Oaks. Despite the big footprint, Fair Oaks seemed to have no foothold in tangible reality. Thanks to online map and newspaper archives, we can reconstruct the early story of Fair Oaks: Older county highway maps (like this 1936 Wagoner County map) show mining sites roughly running north-south along Evans Road (225th East Ave, two miles east of the Tulsa County line). The Croweburg coal formation, illustrated in this 1982 Oklahoma Geological Survey map of potentially strippable coal beds in eastern Oklahoma, surfaces along a line from about Admiral and 241st East Avenue running south-southwest to 91st Street and 209th East Avenue. This 1927 Wagoner County production map shows a significant amount of natural gas exploration in the area as well (along with the location of a number of long-lost communities and railroad spurs). Aerial photographs going back to 1941 show the scars of coal mining, like this photo covering Pine to 21st Street, Evans Rd (225th East Ave) to Oak Grove Road (273rd East Ave). The long thin lakes visible throughout this area on satellite imagery are old coal strip mines that have filled with water. This 1974 map of surface-mined coal lands shows thousands of acres in the Fair Oaks area disturbed and only a small portion near Catoosa partially or fully reclaimed. Property ownership maps from 1936 (see also here) showed that much of the future Fair Oaks footprint in Wagoner County was owned by rancher L. S. Robson. Interestingly, the Robson name doesn't show up in newspaper clips about the town until 1999. On Thursday, August 26, 1966, two new Wagoner County towns filed for incorporation: Oak Grove, a few acres around an existing community centered on a church, a store, and a cemetery at 51st Street and 273rd East Avenue (Oak Grove Road); and Fair Oaks, inaccurately described in news accounts as "6 miles east of the County Line on 71st Street." A 1972 survey showing the Fair Oaks town limits show the original townsite as a quarter-mile-wide L shape with the lower left corner at 11th and Oak Grove Road, about 222 acres. From what I recall of municipal incorporation law back then, you had to be at least so many miles (perhaps five) from an existing city limit in order to incorporate -- this was to discourage the creation of enclaves and the multiplication of municipal governments that would strangle the growth of existing cities and towns. But once you incorporated, you could annex land that would bring you near or up to the boundaries of other cities. Protecting future mining from being regulated by an expansionist City of Tulsa would have been a strong reason to incorporate Fair Oaks, although none of the newspaper accounts I've read have mentioned coal mining at all. The timing is interesting: Tulsa's big annexation took effect March 25, 1966, and these new towns were created just five months later. In 1968, City of Tulsa officials were planning for a third airport (after Tulsa International and Riverside), somewhere on the east side of the metro area, which was the direction of growth at that time. The Tulsa Airport Authority's consulting engineer identified five possible site, and in November 1968 recommended an 1,100 acre site in Wagoner County, roughly around 11th Street and 225th East Ave (Evans Rd), likely including land owned by the Robson family. TAA voted in December to accept the recommendation. By the time the TAA met on February 4, 1969, it was known that Fair Oaks would soon be annexing a massive amount of land, including the TAA's preferred third-airport site. At that meeting, Cal Tinney offered the Tulsa Airport Authority nearly three square miles in Wagoner County for the third airport. Tinney's land was between 31st and 51st Street, County Line Road to 215th East Ave. On February 8, 1969, the Fair Oaks town trustees approved Ordinance No. 1, expanding the town from 222 acres to over 15,000 acres, and extending west toward Tulsa, north into Rogers County, and south toward Broken Arrow. The Tulsa World story at the time inaccurately described the land as six miles west of the Will Rogers Turnpike entrance. The report stated:

With its growth, the town inherited a private trash pit near Oklahoma 33, a gasoline war raging along the same highway and varying numbers of unlicensed dogs running loose. The annexation proceeding took place at the ranch home of Mrs. Marie Steely, a widow. She and her brother-in-law, Ralph Steely, and a farmer neighbor, W. W. Repschlaeger, are the town's trustees. They passed a motion to annex in response to a petition signed by 15 property owners. In the words of the town's attorney, Sam Bassman of Claremore, "Fair Oaks has as much right to annex property as any incorporated community in the state."

The report said that it was unknown what effect annexation into a different municipality would have on Tulsa's proposed airport plans. Fair Oaks could choose to ban airports or impose impossible regulations. Tulsa taxpayers rendered the issue moot: A city bond issue proposal for $1,125,000 to purchase land for the third airport was one of 16 out of 18 city and county bond questions that were defeated in a September 9, 1969, election. Only 31.2% of voters supported the measure. 23 was the population of the expanded Fair Oaks in the 1970 census. By 1980, the population had grown to 384, and by the 1990 census had grown to 1,133, living in 382 households. According to the U. S. Census Bureau, the town's total area in 1990 (as it had been since 1969) was 15.2 sq. mi. -- 12.0 sq. mi. in Wagoner County and the remainder in Rogers County. For all that land, and despite some highway frontage, Fair Oaks had no retail stores to generate sales tax and offered no municipal services. While none of the news stories to this point have mentioned the Robson family, this June 1969 map showing land ownership around the Port of Catoosa and the McLellan-Kerr Navigation System shows that most of the land within the boundaries of Fair Oaks are owned by "Nick Robson, et al." Owners listed on the original townsite were L. W. Steely, Nick Robson et al., and Walter Repschlaeger, Jr. Nick Robson's October 1999 obituary says, "Robson was a principal in the organization of the Konklin Volunteer Fire Department, the organization of Wagoner County Water District No. 3 and in the formation of the town of Fair Oaks, serving as the town's clerk." It also mentioned that the ranch had been established in the 1920s by his father, L. S. Robson. The "et al." may have been other Robson family members, such as Nick's sister Helen Robson Walton, wife of Walmart founder Sam Walton. A March 1975 document posted on an anti-MPD-6 Facebook group shows Catoosa coal magnate Frank McNabb (namesake of the Catoosa High School stadium) leasing mineral rights for up to 10 years to a list of 14 Robsons and Waltons, including Nick Robson and Sam and Helen Walton. The lease covered 4 square miles, Admiral to 31st, Evans to Oneta Roads, and Admiral to 11th, Oneta Road to Midway Road. It was a few months before Nick Robson's death, in May 1999, that the prospect of industrial development prompted the Robson family and City of Tulsa leaders to begin talking publicly about Tulsa annexing part of Fair Oaks. We will pick up the story there next time. MORE: The proposed Fair Oaks Master Planned Development (MPD-6) would transform 6,229 acres of undeveloped land in the Wagoner County portion of the City of Tulsa. This is separate from, but adjacent to, the controversial 339-acre Project Anthem data center south of 11th Street and just west of the Creek Turnpike. MPD-6, a proposed zoning change, was discussed by the Tulsa Metropolitan Area Planning Commission (TMAPC) at their November 5, 2025, meeting, but the applicant asked for a continuance to January 7, 2026. Stay tuned. Plate 2 of Oklahoma Geological Survey map 33 shows the coal fields of Wagoner County in more detail. Click here, then enter "Geologic Map 33" in the search bar to see all five plates and the accompanying report, covering coal geology in Tulsa, Washington, and Wagoner Counties. About "gasoline wars": Before the 1973 Arab oil crisis, service stations fought for customers by slashing the price of gas as a loss-leader. Repairs and oil changes were where the real money was to be made. But none of the stations along 33 were within the Fair Oaks town limits.
- November 30, 2025 at 11:43PM
The Fair Oaks story: Part 1: Founding
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The filing period for the 2026 Oklahoma school board elections begins Monday, December 1, 2025, and ends Wednesday, December 3, 2025. Candidates file at the election board of the county which contains the district; for districts that extend into neighboring counties, candidates file in the county in which the school district headquarters is located. Across Oklahoma, every geographical K-12 (independent) school district, K-8 (elementary) school district, and technology center district has at least one seat up for election every year. Filing is open each day from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. The school primary election will be held on February 10, 2026, and the general election on April 7, 2026. If only two candidates file for an office, no primary will be held. If three or more candidates file, a primary will be held, and if one candidate receives more than 50% of ballots cast, that candidate is elected; otherwise, a general election will occur with the two candidates receiving the highest number of ballots in the primary. Elementary school districts have three board members elected at-large and also elect one member every year to a three-year term. Technology Center districts have seven members with rotating seven-year terms. Independent school districts in Oklahoma (except for three) have five board members who serve five-year terms, and Ward 1 will be up for election this time around. Oklahoma City, Enid, and Tulsa districts each have seven election districts, each with a board member elected to a four-year term, and Oklahoma City also has a board chairman, elected by the entire OKCPS district to a four-year term. I should point out for those new to our state that in Oklahoma school district government is completely disconnected from county or municipal government. Although school districts often take the name of the city or town where they're headquartered, their boundaries do not align with municipal boundaries, and the City of [Place] has no involvement in the management and operation of [Place] Public Schools. In the Tulsa Technology Center district, the term of District 7 board member Dr. Jim Baker is expiring. District 7 covers the southernmost part of the Tulsa Tech district, including all of Liberty, Glenpool, and Bixby school districts, the bulk of the Jenks school district, and portions of Union and Broken Arrow districts. This year, two Tulsa Public School board seats are up for election: District 4, held by conservative Republican E'Lena Ashley, and District 7, held by progressive Democrat Susan Lamkin, the current board president. In 2022, Ashley conducted a door-to-door, grassroots campaign to defeat the incumbent, while Lamkin prevailed in a high-dollar battle against former District Attorney Tim Harris, a conservative Republican. District 4 is the eastern part of the TPS district (basically anything between Pine and 31st Street east of Memorial), while District 7 is the southernmost strip (roughly south of 51st between the Arkansas River and Memorial). In most years, the vast majority of school board seats draw only one candidate. That's not surprising when the filing period falls at the beginning of the Christmas season when our energy and attention is focused elsewhere. Even if there is an election, it typically draws very low turnout. The two-month-long campaign period features short days, cold temperatures, bad weather, and holidays, all of which hinder door-to-door campaigning and volunteer availability. BatesLine has long promoted the idea of holding municipal, school district, and county elections in the fall of odd-numbered years, with two-year terms for every school board seat. This creates a regular rhythm of election season, with statewide and federal elections alternating Novembers with local elections. We won't know for sure who's running until the close of filing. In state elections, you could often get advance notice by seeing which candidates for a given race had filed a Statement of Organization form with the State Ethics Commission, required within 10 days of your campaign spending or receiving in excess of $1,000. Soon, we'll be able to do that for school and municipal races as well. SB 890, authored by Sen. Julie Daniels and passed unanimously in both houses this past session, moves reporting for county, municipal, independent school district boards, and technology center boards to the State Ethics Commission. The changes in the law went into effect on November 1. (Daniels, a Republican, represents Senate District 39, covering Washington & Nowata Counties and northern Rogers County.) That's good news for the public, as we'll no longer have to file an open records request with the school board clerk and pray for a timely response. Eventually, we'll be able to search for all reports on a given school board race on the web, with no gatekeeper. Rather than request filings from various county election boards, city and town clerks, and school district clerks, rather than having to decipher and digitize handwritten reports, we'll be able to search online through electronically filed reports for nearly every elected office in the state. But not quite yet. The State Ethics Commission has been rolling out a desperately needed update to their online filing and search website, known as Guardian. Guardian 2.0 is in beta-test, and the Ethics Commission has prioritized the tools needed for campaign committees, lobbyists, and elected officials to file required reports, but the public search functions are not yet operational. The Ethics Commission website advises: "Campaign finance information remains available by request until public reporting tools are fully enabled [by emailing] [email protected]." Keep in mind that some school board candidates may have filed Statements of Organization for this election with the district clerk prior to the new law taking effect. For now, we'll have to look to public announcements and the daily report from the election board to track who has filed for next year's school board races.
- November 28, 2025 at 10:57PM
Filing begins for 2026 Oklahoma school board elections
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The National Archives has been digitizing its collections, and I came across these papers pertaining to the Tulsa Race Massacre aka Tulsa Race Riot while researching the previous item about the Tulsa HOLC "redlining" map. DR-6.08 Oklahoma, Tulsa Co. Riot Reports and Statistics This is a 218-page report issued at the end of 1921 compiled for the Tulsa County Chapter of the American Red Cross by Maurice Willows, who was brought from St. Louis to serve as Director of Disaster Relief in the wake of the massacre. Willows's grandson, KTUL anchorman Bob Hower, drew on these records to compile the book 1921 Tulsa Race Riot, Angels of Mercy. The report includes newspaper accounts of the disaster and its aftermath:

These clippings record the activities of the Public Welfare Board [original], the National Guard, the Police Department, the Mayor's Reconstruction Committee, the County Commissioners, the Ministerial Association, the Inter-racial Committee and, what is more important, reflect, editorially and otherwise, the consensus of public opinion on questions which will inevitably arise in the future for discussion.

On page 69 of the report, Willows discusses the attempt by the city commission to prevent rebuilding of homes by extending fire limits to encompass the burned Greenwood district. This was denied by the district court, allowing families to rebuild their homes. Page 72 is an addendum describing a Christmas celebration at the Red Cross Relief Headquarters, where over 2000 Greenwood citizens gathered around a Christmas tree (donated by Charles Page) to sing Christmas carols and spirituals. 2700 Christmas packages were distributed, with candies, nuts, and oranges and also practical items, like pillows, clothing, and quilts. The American Red Cross also compiled this Photo Album of the Tulsa Massacre and Aftermath. Many of the pages appear to have been water-damaged. The photo above shows the Disaster Relief Headquarters set up in the original Booker T. Washington High School building, which was not damaged in the riot.
- November 04, 2025 at 09:39AM
Tulsa Race Massacre in the National Archives
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