Why? Why did the Soviet authorities go to such lengths to hide the truth? The answer is as damning as it is simple: political optics. The Soviet regime valued the appearance of competence over human life. The KGB classified known flaws in RBMK reactors to protect the illusion of technological supremacy. Engineers and scientists who spoke out risked imprisonment, exile, or execution. Careers were destroyed, reputations smeared, and families torn apart to maintain the facade of an unshakable Soviet state. Again, these are facts. Not hyperbole. Not opinion. They are irrefutable facts.
AI IS A MASS-DELUSION EVENT Three years in, one of AI’s enduring impacts is to make people feel like they’re losing it.
Just the beginning. Perhaps you’ve heard that too. “Welcome to the ChatGPT generation.” “The Generative AI Revolution.” “A new era for humanity,” as Mark Zuckerberg recently put it. It’s the moment before the computational big bang—everything is about to change, we’re told; you’ll see. God may very well be in the machine. Silicon Valley has invented a new type of mind. This is a moment to rejoice—to double down. You’re a fool if you’re not using it at work. It is time to accelerate.
How lucky we are to be alive right now! Yes, things are weird. But what do you expect? You are swimming in the primordial soup of machine cognition. There are bound to be growing pains and collateral damage. To live in such interesting times means contending with MechaHitler Grok and drinking from a fire hose of fascist-propaganda slop. It means Grandpa leaving confused Facebook comments under rendered images of Shrimp Jesus or, worse, falling for a flirty AI chatbot. This future likely requires a new social contract. But also: AI revenge porn and “nudify” appsthat use AI to undress women and children, and large language models that have devoured the total creative output of humankind. From this morass, we are told, an “artificial general intelligence” will eventually emerge, turbo-charging the human race or, well, maybe destroying it. But look: Every boob with a T-Mobile plan will soon have more raw intelligence in their pocket than has ever existed in the world. Keep the faith.
Breathlessness is the modus operandi of those who are building out this technology. The venture capitalist Marc Andreessen is quote-tweeting guys on X bleating out statements such as “Everyone I know believes we have a few years max until the value of labor totally collapses and capital accretes to owners on a runaway loop—basically marx’ worst nightmare/fantasy.” How couldn’t you go a bit mad if you took them seriously? Indeed, it seems that one of the many offerings of generative AI is a kind of psychosis-as-a-service. If you are genuinely AGI-pilled—a term for those who believe that machine-born superintelligence is coming, and soon—the rational response probably involves some combination of building a bunker, quitting your job, and joining the cause. As my colleague Matteo Wong wrote after spending time with people in this cohort earlier this year, politics, the economy, and current events are essentially irrelevant to the true believers. It’s hard to care about tariffs or authoritarian encroachment or getting a degree if you believe that the world as we know it is about to change forever.
Spy in the Bag mystery: Expert claims he was asked to 'cover up' MI6 spook's death and reveals SIX glaring red flags that show he was murdered
On August 16 2010, in one of the most mysterious and bewildering deaths ever on British soil, police said he impossibly folded himself inside a red North Face holdall in his bath.
His Pimlico bathroom was spotless and officers found no evidence of Gareth's fingerprints on the padlock of the bag or even the rim of the bath that the bag was found in.
Congress Approves Trump’s Clawback Of All Public Radio And TV Funding
Immigration Detention Has Become a Booming Business for Private Prison Giants
Italian Amazon Workers Strike and Win. Will Unions Elsewhere Follow Suit? Truthout
US Mass Shootings, 1982–2025: Data From Mother Jones’ Investigation
Mother Jones: “This database originally covered cases from 1982 to 2012 and has since been updated and expanded numerous times. For analysis and context on this data—including how we built the database, and a change to the baseline for victim fatalities with cases dating from January 2013—
see our
Guide to Mass Shootings in America. [Editor’s note, 4/24/22: Readers may wonder why this database does not include the New York City subway shooting on April 12, the school shooting in Washington, DC, on April 22, or other such attacks in which fewer than three victims died; for additional context on the challenges of defining and tracking mass shootings, and on our approach, see this pieceand this piece.]
You can scan the underlying spreadsheet by clicking here and download the database in its entirety (in CSV format) by clicking here…”
America Is Watching the Rise of a Dual State
The Atlantic – no paywall – “This article appears in the May 2025 print edition with the headline “A Warning Out of Time.” It has been updated to clarify that Ernst Fraenkel deployed with the German army in World War I to Poland and the Western Front.
As Fraenkel explained it, a lawless dictatorship does not arise simply by snuffing out the ordinary legal system of rules, procedures, and precedents. To the contrary, that system—which he called the “normative state”—remains in place while dictatorial power spreads across society.
What happens, Fraenkel explained, is insidious. Rather than completely eliminating the normative state, the Nazi regime slowly created a parallel zone in which “unlimited arbitrariness and violence unchecked by any legal guarantees” reigned freely. In this domain, which Fraenkel called the “prerogative state,” ordinary law didn’t apply.
(A prerogative power is one that allows a person such as a monarch to act without regard to the laws on the books; theorists from John Locke onward have offered various formulations of the idea.) In this prerogative state, judges and other legal actors deferred to the racist hierarchies and ruthless expediencies of the Nazi regime.
The key here is that this prerogative state does not immediately and completely overrun the normative state. Rather, Fraenkel argued, dictatorships create a lawless zone that runs alongside the normative state. The two states cohabit uneasily and unstably. On any given day, people or cases could be jerked out of the normative state and into the prerogative one. In July 1936, for example, Fraenkel won a case for employees of an association taken over by the Nazis. A few days later, he learned that the Gestapo had seized the money owed to his clients and deposited it in the government’s coffers. Over time, the prerogative state would distort and slowly unravel the legal procedures of the normative state, leaving a smaller and smaller domain for ordinary