Her life could inspire one of those biopics about personal triumph, but Jahel Queralt, 43, says her fate is pure chance. The jurist, PhD and professor of political law at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona went from growing up in an isolated house without water or electricity to feeling “like you’ve gatecrashed a party in the wrong shoes” when she arrived in the world of academia. It happened in 2007, in Oxford, when she met Gerald A. Cohen, a leading figure in analytical Marxism and one of the mentors of her theses. He was so approachable that the young woman let her guard down while eating with the other fellows in the All Souls dining hall, inside the most elitist of the Oxford colleges. There she uttered the forbidden word that starts with F: “You do this in Spain and you are totally fucked,” she stated, and immediately heard the rest of the diners clear their throats. People still ask her at parties if she is “the girl who said fucked in the All Souls dining hall.” That, she says near her son’s public school a few yards from the Barcelona zoo, is what happens when “you learned English watching The Wire.”

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TOKYO – China gave global investors one of 2026’s biggest AI thrills. Yet the country that helped ignite excitement about artificial intelligence is home to one of the worst-performing major stock markets. While AI fever has propelled Seoul, Taipei and Tokyo higher, Chinese shares are stuck in reverse.

So what gives? Several forces, actually. Weak household demand, for one. Consumer spending continues to disappoint, weighing on the earnings potential of mainland internet companies, automakers, and retailers.

The post Why China is missing the big AI rally appeared first on Asia Times.

On September 30, SK Hynix’s American depositary shares closed at US$184.15 on the Nasdaq. Earlier that day in Seoul, one ordinary share closed at 1,776,000 won, about $1,308.80. Ten ADSs represent one Seoul share, so each ADS’s slice was worth about $130.88. Comparing those two closing prices gives the ADSs a 40.7% premium. The markets […]

The post Why Americans pay 41% more for SK Hynix shares than Koreans appeared first on Asia Times.

Brussels (European Newsroom) – The European Union should improve how it detects and connects early warnings at its external borders after the mass arrival of migrants in the Spanish autonomous city Ceuta in July, said the chief of the EU border agency Frontex, Hans Leijtens, while insisting that responsibility for border protection must remain with member states. 

“I think we should improve our situational awareness as Europe, and Frontex can play an important role in that,” Leijtens told journalists of the European Newsroom network in Brussels. 

He said a broader picture could be built from satellites, aircraft, observers on the ground and information from social media. Much of the information was already available, he said, but needed to be better connected. 

The remarks come as the European Commission floated plans for a Frontex rapid-response team that could deploy within 24 hours in a crisis. The team would still be sent only at the request of a member state, according to an action plan presented by EU migration commissioner Magnus Brunner in late September. The plan also envisages a larger role for Frontex in returns. 

Leijtens said he did not expect a new Frontex mandate to change the basic division of responsibility. “There I would find it difficult because not only in our mandate but in general protecting European borders is a member state responsibility and we can’t take over responsibility,” he said. 

He described the events in Ceuta as more of a public-order issue than a conventional border incident. Ceuta, a Spanish exclave in northern Africa, saw a sudden mass crossing from Morocco on July 30–31, 2026, triggering a diplomatic dispute among EU countries. Spanish estimates rose from about 72,000 to 80,000 arrivals, while Morocco cited about 40,000. Many people returned before being registered, making the final total uncertain. According to news reports, some 83 people died, and the crisis reignited debate over EU border control, asylum rules, solidarity and Frontex’s role. 

The episode raised a further question for the EU’s early-warning debate: whether the challenge was detecting the signals, sharing them or responding to them. 

Leijtens said the deaths were horrifying and should be prevented. “The fact that so many people lost their lives is absolutely horrifying and something we should prevent.” 

The European People’s Party leader Manfred Weber had called for Frontex to take command in a crisis such as Ceuta. The Commission’s rapid-response plan, by contrast, retains the requirement that a Member State request assistance.  

The Commission’s proposal for a revised Frontex mandate is expected by the end of October. 

It was the first face-to-face between the two men vying to govern California, the most populous state in the United States, with more than 39 million residents, just over a month before the midterm elections. Republican Steve Hilton and Democrat Xavier Becerra arrived at the CNN-organized debate with a twofold mission: lay out their proposals to lead what is considered the fourth-largest economy in the world and, at the same time, attack their opponent and explain to voters why they should not trust the other with their vote on November 3. Neither missed the chance to present their ideas on the state’s difficult economic situation, fears around artificial intelligence, and the ICE raids that threaten undocumented immigrants.

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David Alm | Longreads | October 1, 2026 | 5,726 words (24 minutes)

I got off Interstate 81 to give my soul a break. The back roads of southwest Virginia wind, crest, and plunge through lush valleys of oak, poplar, birch, and maple trees. It’s easy to lose track of time and distance there. People drive slower. Cows graze in pastures. And there are no placards festooned with Motel 6 and Starbucks logos, flattening the American landscape into a homogeneous blur. Any signs you might see are low to the ground and handmade, protesting a data center, for instance, or thanking Jesus.

I’d gone to this rural pocket of the country for the 90th annual Old Fiddler’s Convention in Galax, an independent city of just under 7,000 near the North Carolina border whose population, for six days in early August, balloons to around four times that. They arrive in RVs and Casitas, camper vans and cars to stake out 20-by-35-foot plots in Felts Park, a 28-acre fairground in the heart of Galax, transforming it into a massive, muddy parking lot sprinkled with portable toilets and a cluster of food trucks, offering loaded potatoes, funnel cake, and blooming onions.

The Old Fiddler’s Convention—or just Galax, as the diehards call it—is the oldest and largest fiddlers’ convention in the world, a place where banjo pickers, guitar players, and other maestros of old-time strings gather to see how they stack up. Founded in 1935, Galax has been canceled only twice since then: once during World War II, due to travel restrictions, and again in 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many Galaxers have been going every year for decades, some for as long as they’ve been alive.

There are scads of rules: If you play clawhammer-style banjo in the bluegrass band competition, you will get disqualified. Same if you play bluegrass-style banjo in the old-time competition. If you break a string while performing, you must stop immediately. Playing time during competition is limited to two minutes and 30 seconds. And, crucially, no electric instruments of any kind are allowed, either on stage or in the tightly packed fairgrounds, where self-described hillbillies, accountants, firefighters, and session musicians pick day and night in blistering, impromptu jams amid the RVs. 

One does not merely attend Galax. It’s not a music festival. There are no headliners, and no full-set performances. There is a single stage, and over the course of six days, contestants take it one after another to play one song for a panel of judges and a smattering of spectators. There are more than a dozen categories, little changed in the past century: old-time fiddle, guitar, dulcimer, folk song. Cash prizes for individual players range from $35 to $285; a campsite and contestant pass together cost $175. “The prestige of being judged a ‘winner at Galax,’ and the respect for one’s musical talent that goes along with it, far outweighs any monetary award,” wrote Fred Burton in the March 1984 issue of Bluegrass Unlimited. 

In the 1980s and ’90s, cars lined up days before the gates to Felts Park opened. The fairgrounds got so full back then that people slept in the horse stables that used to line one end of them. Once, Elizabeth Taylor made a surprise appearance with her then-husband, Virginia Senator John Warner. Rumor has it that members of Old Crow Medicine Show and Leftover Salmon have shown up at Galax, under the radar, just to jam. 

And yet, despite appearing well attended to my virgin eyes, the Old Fiddler’s Convention’s numbers are down from the pre-pandemic years, and way down from peak Galax. Folks say it’s not like it was. Maybe, as one long-time attendee speculated, it’s that more kids are choosing devices and passive consumption over face-to-face activity with other humans, or that more and more young adults are fleeing southwest Virginia due to the gutted coal, tobacco, and manufacturing industries. Or maybe it’s just that people around there are dying faster than they’re being born. Glen Alexander, a 55-year-old fiddler who’s been going to Galax since he was a child, put it bluntly: “We’re all scared to death this is gonna go away.” 

Tara Linhardt, a professional mandolin player from Leesburg, Virginia, with thick, curly hair and a determined gaze, has been going to Galax since she was in high school, and was happy to advise me on how to survive my first time. Buy what you need locally, she told me; it was cheaper than New York. It will probably rain, so bring mud boots. Find a high patch of ground, because rainwater pools in the low spots. Afternoon jams were open to anyone, but unless I was dead good, I should just observe the nighttime ones, where the “thoroughbreds” play so fast that a newbie like me would only drag it down. 

Tara and her husband, Ian, pulled into Galax late Saturday afternoon, just in time to get a bite before parking their Four Winds RV by the dumpsters behind the Applebee’s at the edge of town. She told me to sleep in my car there, since the church parking lot was already full, and Applebee’s, unlike Hardee’s, doesn’t mind. We’d need to queue up by the gates to Felts Park before seven o’clock Sunday morning to ensure we’d get decent campsites. First-come, first-served. 

I’d arrived earlier that afternoon, hours later than Google Maps had predicted, because I forsook the interstate. The day before, I’d left my home in Brooklyn only to spend two hours driving five miles to reach the Holland Tunnel to New Jersey. I was spat out onto I-78, which at some point blended into I-81, hauling me across Pennsylvania to Staunton, Virginia, where I slept in a former sanatorium. I had recently been laid off from a job I’d held for 13 years, editing reports for a geopolitical risk advisory firm, and needed reprieve. I sought my escape on Route 11. 

In the trunk were a guitar and two banjos, instruments I was determined to spend the week playing in the Blue Ridge Mountains in lieu of applying for jobs and fretting about AI in my Brooklyn apartment. It was the first long road trip I’d taken alone in a quarter-century, and I’d hoped for a reset. Call it a midlife crisis if you want, but I drove cross-country a lot before I moved to New York, always on back roads. America is best seen up close.

After chatting awhile with Tara, Ian, and a luthier named John Hamlett, who’d also parked his RV behind the Applebee’s, I folded myself into the backseat of my Chevy Trax rental and more or less slept. I awoke at 6 a.m. to a downpour, rain pelting the roof of my car like fingertips on a conga drum. 

The four of us caravaned into town, where we waited until almost 9 a.m. to enter the park. We figured it was due to the rain. In fact, it was because of an issue with the gate itself. My source for this intel was none other than the Galax chief of police, DeWitt Cooper, who was directing traffic into Felts Park that day and hails from the Bronx. I’d see Chief Cooper again a couple days later, at Willie’s Food Truck inside the fairgrounds, where we chatted over catfish and collard greens about his philosophy of policing. “Don’t judge based on appearances and treat people with love,” he told me. 

I chose a plot on the far side of the fairgrounds, near a fence and a row of portable toilets, with Tara, Ian, and John all nearby. Our little commune wouldn’t last; the next day, Four Winds got stuck in the mud and Tara had to summon a Moose—one of the men of Moose Lodge No. 733, a fraternal organization that’s managed the Old Fiddler’s Convention since the beginning—to drag it out with a tractor. They found higher ground by the tennis courts and I stayed put. That night it rained again, and I awoke at 5 a.m. in a half-inch of water that had pooled in my tent overnight, soaking my sleeping bag, pillow, and clothes.

It’s no fun to wake up in a puddle, but when it rains in your tent, or the fairgrounds get so muddy that you watch a young woman lose a Birkenstock forever to the muck, or you start to stink because there’s only one public shower in Felts Park, it all feels incidental to what matters more: There’s pickin’ to do. You hear it all around, all the time. A lone fiddle at dawn, guitars easing into the afternoon, jams that grow in size and volume throughout the day, until night falls and Felts Park erupts in a surround-sound jamboree of syncopated banjos, arpeggiated fiddles, and bass notes so low and driving that they cut through it all at ground level. When it’s not raining, those jam sessions continue through the night, practically until the early morning’s still air is broken anew by someone’s fiddle.

My first jam came on Day 0, after the rain abated and I’d set up camp. The Old Fiddler’s Convention wouldn’t officially start until Monday night, with the astoundingly good kids’ competitions—the reigning bluegrass fiddle champion herself, Hollace Oakes, was 14 when she won the adult contest last year—but everyone in Felts Park was eager to pick.

Tara wanted to introduce me to Bill and Nancy Sluys, a couple in their early 70s who’ve been going to Galax every summer for some 50 years. We walked to their site, where Bill, a towering figure with a steady voice and a long, white, braided ponytail, emerged from their Airstream to invite anyone who might “wish to partake” to join Nancy and a few others inside. I told Bill I’d thought of bringing edibles to Galax, but the convention website said state laws concerning drugs and alcohol are “strictly enforced,” and Google’s AI bot, Gemini, warned that law enforcement would be crawling Felts Park with K-9 units, even though recreational cannabis is legal in Virginia for adults over 21.

Bill laughed and said that hasn’t been true in more than 40 years, though it used to be, on account of a music festival that happened once, half a century ago, about 15 miles up the road. Stompin 76 featured Bonnie Raitt, John Prine, and other big names from the time. The festival attracted a huge crowd, including a motorcycle gang that allegedly wanted to keep the party going after the festival wrapped, so they rolled into Galax on their hogs, stocked with methamphetamine, moonshine, and guns. Mayhem ensued. The authorities cracked down after that, ostensibly to maintain law and order in fiddleland. By the mid-’80s, they realized that the Old Fiddler’s Convention really was a family affair and let the fiddlers be. 

A group of six or seven people had gathered outside the Airstream by this point, all brandishing instruments. Bill, who grew up on Long Island, assumed his position behind an aluminum upright bass from the 1930s, while Nancy, a fiddler and banjo player roughly half Bill’s height who grew up in Connecticut, emerged from the Airstream with her fiddle. She sat down on a folding chair, called “Soldier’s Joy” in the key of D, and kicked it off at breakneck speed. This was an old-time jam, and “soldier’s joy” was a Civil War-era euphemism for morphine. Galax had begun.

An old-time jam goes something like this: Anywhere from two to umpteen musicians gather in a circle, knee-to-knee, and someone—usually the fiddler—calls a tune. Before you know it, you’re carried away by a cyclone of fiddles, mandolins, banjos, and guitars, all locked into a swirling rhythm that can, when it’s good, take you to church. 

The tradition dates to the mid-1700s, when Scots-Irish immigrants first settled in Appalachia. Even then, coastal property was for the elite, forcing poorer immigrants inland and south, through the Shenandoah Valley to southwest Virginia, where land was plentiful and cheap. Their music quickly took root. “The Scots brought fiddles and liquor,” Ted McAllister, one of my neighbors in Felts Park, told me. “The Germans brought church music and beer.” 

Over time, Scottish fiddle tunes evolved, as oral traditions do, and began to mix with the musical traditions of enslaved Africans, who had brought with them gourd instruments that would evolve into the American banjo, along with rhythms the Scots had never heard before. Old-time music, in other words, is the music of diasporas, fed into a blender and then worked into a froth. A lot of traditional folk songs came out of this period, too. One that I learned at Galax, “Going to the West,” tells the story of a young man who leaves the mountains of his birth, “where labor is in vain,” to seek the fertile plains out west. It’s the story of my own Scottish forebears, who settled in South Dakota before moving to what is now suburban Chicago, and later, Florida. 

Bluegrass, by contrast, was born in the 1940s, when Bill Monroe and The Blue Grass Boys took those mountain sounds, combined them with Southern church music and blues, and tightened it all into something you might call an uncle of rock ’n’ roll. There’s a reason that Billy Strings plays to sold-out arenas and pickers from around the world can play classics like “Blue Ridge Cabin Home” at the drop of a one-chord. 

Where bluegrass is punchy and clean, designed for the stage, old-time is ecstatic, designed for participation. Bluegrass jams attract spectators who marvel at the players’ pyrotechnics; old-time jams get people on their feet. At Galax, some folks drag big pieces of plywood around the fairgrounds looking for old-time jams, where they’ll lay the board down at the edge of the circle and dance. Flatfooters they’re called: the percussion section. 

The New York bluegrass community has a Signal thread, and through it I met Harrison Corthell, a banjo player from Queens who was camping in what he called the “gayborhood” of Felts Park: two tents and a rainbow flag. Corthell offered to introduce me to Tyler Hughes, who was also camping in the gayborhood. Hughes serves as the executive director of the Crooked Road Heritage Music Trail, a nonprofit founded by the Virginia Assembly in 2004 to boost tourism through music. Alsace has the Route des Vins, and Kentucky the Bourbon Trail. Southwest Virginia has the Crooked Road.

I found Hughes Thursday afternoon as he was setting up the Crooked Road’s information booth. Musicians were streaming by for the clawhammer banjo competition, which was set to begin any minute. As we sat on a park bench, I told Hughes that I’d begun to think of its music as the region’s chief international export of the past 100 years. “I think that’s a fair assessment,” he said, but stressed that he resists thinking of Appalachia’s musical traditions like a natural resource such as iron or coal. “We really try to stray away from an over-commodified, over-commercialized vision of southwest Virginia,” Hughes said. 

Musical traditions can be packaged and sold, after all. Last winter, an Appalachian folk musician named Murphy Campbell discovered that her videos on YouTube had been used to create AI clones of her voice and banjo playing. Someone then used Vydia, a music distribution platform, to share those clones via streaming services and to make copyright claims on Campbell’s own videos. Campbell described her ordeal on Instagram, including trying to address the matter with “agents” at those streaming services: “I’m telling robots to take down music robots made,” she said. Her posts went viral, causing Vydia to ultimately withdraw the copyright claims and ban the user responsible, according to reports. “It’s the wild west,” Campbell said in one of her posts. “And it can happen to anyone.”

I asked Hughes what percentage of the people in southern Appalachia play an instrument of some kind. He guessed around 70 percent. I’d heard the same number from Daniel, a 32-year-old banjo player I’d met earlier in the week, who works at a sawmill in Grayson County. “It’s kinda the only thing goin’ on around here,” Daniel said. He explained that when the cotton mill in Grayson County closed in the late 1980s, “everyone” started using meth. Then opioids. Within the next 20 years, drug overdoses had become a leading cause of death in southwest Virginia. Getting together to pick, Daniel said, “helps you through real hard stuff.”

The guitar I took to Galax is a 1989 Takamine I’ve had since I was 14, when my parents indulged my desire to learn Pink Floyd and Jimi Hendrix songs on the condition that I take classical guitar lessons. I spent my first day or two in Felts Park carrying it around like a security blanket, but I was there to play the banjo. Upon arrival, I realized that I might have been the worst banjo player in Galax. 

I picked up the instrument in 2024, at age 48, in part because my maternal grandfather played one and I was always curious about it. More than that, I wanted to build a mountain banjo, the rustic kind people in Appalachia made from whatever wood they had nearby, animal skins for heads, and guts for strings. I liked their warm, thuddy sound, totally unlike the piercing banjos of bluegrass with their steel strings and resonator backs. So I learned everything I could about how to build one and called my dad to ask if he’d help. I knew the banjo; he knew wood. 

That summer, we spent a week together in his shop in Illinois, building a fretless eastern Kentucky-style mountain banjo out of walnut and ash. Most people in New York ask what it is; everyone at Galax identified it instantly. I’ve since built seven banjos and acquired three more, all different styles. This spring, I carved a neck from a piece of walnut entirely by hand, no power tools, for a 19th-century-style tackhead, the kind played by enslaved Africans on plantations and by Civil War soldiers around the campfire. It’s not just that I’m fascinated by the instrument. As my actual trades—crafting sentences and teaching others to do the same—are increasingly devalued by technology and a society that no longer reads, building banjos gives me one thing that I can hold onto. 

Shortly after my banjo obsession began, I started going to old-time jams in New York City, and later, bluegrass jams. I didn’t—and still don’t—actually listen to old-time or bluegrass music; my tastes trend melancholic. But I missed playing music with other people, something I hadn’t done since college and had begun to crave during the endless, isolated days of the pandemic. In early 2025, I started going to a regular jam session at a bar in Brooklyn called Sunny’s, whose owner has turned it into an institution of roots, bluegrass, and folk music. Some of the best pickers in the tri-state area turn up there each week, along with people like me, there to learn. It took me months to lead a song without blacking out. They call it “jamnesia,” and it’s humiliating. 

After one week among the pickers of southern Appalachia, I got tighter, faster, as if the place itself does some of the teaching. A fiddler friend from New York, who’d been to Galax in the 2010s, was more succinct: “It seeps from the earth.”

Galax is hardly the first fiddlers’ convention; it’s just the oldest one still left. In the days before the railroad and automobile, let alone the World Wide Web, fiddlers’ conventions brought the people of Appalachia together, allowing songs and picking styles to spread like gossip over those hills. They could get pretty wild, and early-days Galax was no exception. Women and children did not go to Galax back then. It was a place where men gathered to let loose—“outside of the eyes of their preacher and their wives,” Rex McGee, a multi-instrumentalist from North Carolina, told me.

I’d heard of the McGee jams already, where “things get weird,” according to a woman I met Monday morning while I waited in line for the shower. Their camp sits right inside Felts Park, steps from the food trucks, identifiable by a 1974 Ford school bus painted an ominous matte grey. They call it the Muddy Creek Bus, for the band that Glen Alexander’s dad formed in the 1970s and soon became the back-up band for Rex and his brother Ralph’s grandfather, Ralph McGee the First, aka the Old-Timer. The Muddy Creek Boys could party as hard as the Old-Timer; it didn’t hurt that they could pick too. By the 1980s, the real show came after hours. Dozens of people would gather outside the bus to watch the Old-Timer, then in his 80s, fiddle with just about anything he could find: a toothpick, a comb, a “coon dick”—literally a bone from a raccoon’s penis. And it was loud. (For any curious fiddlers out there, you can buy four of these on eBay for $39.95.)

Felts Park is a galaxy of legacy camps like the Muddy Creek Bus. Almost everyone I met told me they’d been going to Galax for 40, 50, even 60 years. Their stories are legion, and they love to tell them: The year it rained so hard that one group holed up in an RV for six days with eight people, an upright bass, and “a little bit of cocaine.” The year a couple of young women got into a fight over a guy, went to fisticuffs in the mud, and ripped each other’s shirts off in front of scores of onlookers—“no one wanted it to stop,” one man recalled with a chuckle. The year several people went mudsliding on the tire tracks, which, for reasons unclear, were composed of raw sewage. 

Jimmy Kidd, an 86-year-old Dobro player who’s been going to Galax since he was 29, regaled me with the time he won the guitar competition, in 1969, by playing the Dobro because there was no Dobro competition then. His daughter, Vicky, told me she met Elizabeth Taylor when she came through Galax, in 1977, when Vicky was 12. Taylor was in a wheelchair, Vicky said, and she wasn’t very nice.

Leo Lindblom sat on a low stool cradling a mandolin, his sister Lucy beside him. They’d taken the stage in the kids’ mandolin competition on Monday night, and Leo was focused. With flawless timing and dexterity, the 12-year-old picker dazzled the audience, Lucy accompanying him on guitar, for roughly two minutes. Then he rose from the stool, took a bow, and, with Lucy, exited the stage. 

On Thursday, I met Leo, Lucy, and the rest of the Lindbloms—Marina, Jon, and their nine kids, all but one of whose names begins with an L—at their bus in a gravel parking lot just across the road from Felts Park, where it was a little quieter than Galax Central. The Lindbloms first went to Galax in 2021, after discovering bluegrass at a gift shop in North Carolina while on a family vacation five years prior. All nine of the kids responded instantly to the “happy, upbeat” music coming out of the speakers, and mom and dad bought the CD on the spot. 

The kids, who range in age from 12 to 28 and were all homeschooled, each chose an instrument and formed their two bands, Headin’ Home and The Brothers Five. Now, when they’re not home in Bloomingdale, Georgia, they’re on the road playing festivals and gigs across the country. I asked what makes Galax special. Libby said it gives them a rare chance to slow down, to not have to be “on” all the time, and just spend time together. 

As we sat outside their bus, all 11 of them and me, I asked: Why bluegrass? After all, Marina and Jon met at the Eastman School of Music and played in the Savannah Philharmonic for 10 years. They know Tchaikovsky and Brahms just as well as Bill Monroe and the Carter Family. They could teach their kids classical music, or any other kind. “Our goal, in everything we do, is to glorify the Lord,” Marina explained. And with bluegrass, she said, they are able to give people a bit of happiness, a chance to tap their feet and forget about their troubles for a little while. It’s an act of service. 

Then I turned to Leo, the youngest, who was perched on Lucy’s lap, and asked what he likes about playing music that, surely, most kids his age don’t know anything about. “Everything,” he said, before checking my presumption: All the kids he knows play bluegrass or old-time, he said. He’s met them all through places like Galax. 

I’d registered for the clawhammer banjo competition a month before Galax opened its gates, but by the evening of the contest, I was so worn out from five semi-sleepless nights, as many days packed with conversation and playing, and a dubious diet of beer, bananas, and cheese sandwiches that I decided to sit it out and trekked up the hill to Main Street for some Chinese food. Besides, I don’t even play clawhammer banjo. I’ve developed a hybrid style: I use finger picks, like bluegrass, but keep rhythm by striking the strings with the back of my middle finger, like clawhammer. After five days of watching virtuosos of both styles create magic on their instruments, I wasn’t about to do my mishmash in front of a panel of judges.

As I sat in my air-conditioned booth, hovering over a plate of garlic chicken, I got a call from Tara. Was I going to compete? I told her I’d spent the whole day interviewing people and was exhausted. “You have to participate!” she countered. “I triple-dog dare ya.” I was just delirious enough to bend. Thirty minutes later I was backstage rehearsing my song with John Garrison, who has gone to Galax each of the past 46 years. After a few runs through an instrumental version of “White Freightliner Blues” by Townes Van Zandt, I checked in, slapped a number on my chest, and took the stage. Tara squatted right in front to take video, smiling wide. Our pickin’ was clean, but we landed way outside the money: I bastardized the form and played a copyrighted song. We still got a big round of applause. 

My style served me better in the jams, where more than once people assured me that if it sounds good, ain’t no reason to change it. Some of the best sessions I went to were inside an A-frame tent adjacent to the gayborhood and maybe 100 yards from my campsite. On Monday night, I played fiddle tunes and shared a jar of moonshine in that tent with three young guys who lived just down the road, near the town of Fries, in Grayson County. One of them built a fiddle from scratch; it took him years. I did my version of “White Freightliner Blues” with them, and when we finished, one yipped, “That’s how it’s done!”  

Thanks to the moonshine, I forgot about Tara’s advice to sit out the nighttime jams and hopped over to a bluegrass jam that was really crackin’. At least 10 musicians stood in a circle, and the tempo was hot. I asked a guitar player if I could join. “You’ll have to ask him,” he replied, motioning to the only banjo player in the group. They did not expand the circle to let me in, and I hung awkwardly on the periphery for a song or two before going back to my tent. 

It was one of only two times I felt unwelcome at Galax. The other came after the guys from Fries learned I was a journalist from New York City. I’d gone back to their tent Tuesday afternoon to jam but ended up talking with Daniel, the sawmill worker, instead. He was without his banjo, so while the other guys picked fiddle tunes, I told Daniel I was there to write about Galax and asked if I could record our conversation. He cheerfully agreed, but after that—and I could very well be wrong about this—I sensed that the other guys looked at me sideways. 

Daniel, on the other hand, remained inviting and warm. One afternoon late in the week, I was sitting by my tent when he wandered over to say hello. He wanted to give me a leaf of galax, the rubbery, low-lying evergreen from which the town takes its name. “I thought you’d like this for your story,” he said, and stayed to visit awhile.

I broke camp Saturday afternoon and packed up my car. Before I left Galax, however, I dashed over to catch the “43rd Yearly International Kazoo Championship” a few campsites down from Bill and Nancy’s Airstream, as Tara had assured me it was “not to be missed.” Reporters don’t spend much time at the Old Fiddler’s Convention, and Tara was concerned that I might focus too much on the negatives in my writing—the mud, the gastronomic limitations, the attrition. Like everyone I met in Felts Park, she wanted me to return to New York with a real sense of why they keep coming back, year after year, and of what could be lost if they stopped.

Several dozen people were gathered at the “soup kitchen,” a community tent where, two nights prior, Chief Cooper had served hundreds of Styrofoam cups filled with venison stew, made by Nancy herself, from deer she and Bill had hunted on their property. Now, the ground was muddy and more rain was imminent. The contestants were undeterred, ready to blow their hearts out on plastic kazoos. 

I soon understood Tara’s insistence. The International Kazoo Championship pokes a little fun at the rigidity of the main stage. One by one, each contestant was disqualified for breaking at least one of the competition’s 12 rules, which included “No Fun Not Allowed” and “All Participants Must Be Present In Order To Attend.” They were then each invited to perform again, and one by one, each was named the winner. Then all the contestants and judges second-lined through Felts Park in the rain, led by a trumpet and trailed by a banjo, blowing “When the Saints Go Marching In” on their kazoos.

After a quick walkabout to say my goodbyes, I drove north on Route 221, past the Applebee’s and the Walmart where, at Tara’s urging, I did most of my shopping for the week. That night I met up with a friend from New York, who’d invited me to a 40th birthday party at a 19th-century cabin deep in the woods north of Roanoke. We stayed up late, drinking bourbon and talking about music. I’d rather have been playing it. 

On Sunday morning, I got in my car and continued north on Route 11. As I wound through the mountains, catching the occasional glimpse of semis and cars streaming by on I-81, I played a recording I made of “Going to the West” through the car’s stereo. Brian Muller, who placed third in this year’s mandolin contest, led us in the jam, his plaintive baritone providing the perfect soundtrack to my drive: I leave you here, in this land that you love, ’mid scenes so bright and fair, where fragrant flowers are blooming and music fills the air. I imagined bringing the song to New York jams, and wondered if it would fly.

Passing through the town of Buchanan, a few hours from Galax, I saw a familiar face. Ted McAllister and his wife, Debbie, were getting out of their car just outside the Buchanan Baptist Church. I pulled alongside them, rolled down my window, and said, “Fancy seeing you here.” Ted, guitar case in hand, told me to come inside.

A few dozen people were gathered in the Fellowship Hall for a potluck lunch to celebrate the Buchanan Baptist Church’s 190th anniversary. A preacher named Bill Hartsfield welcomed me at the door. (“Like a field of hearts,” he said with a firm handshake.) Then he walked with me to the serving counter, where I fixed a plate of fried chicken, cheese casserole, and ambrosia salad. We sat down with the McAllisters and two other local musicians, Alan Berry and Mike Lee. “Galax is a subculture of a subculture,” Ted explained as we ate. Music is woven into everything from Sunday morning church services to holiday parties and family picnics. 

We finished our plates and went into the chapel, where, for the next 90 minutes or so, Ted, Alan, Mike, and a banjo player named Kim Wood played bluegrass versions of church hymns for around 20 people. Two little girls danced in the aisle, swept up by the music. Halfway through their set, as I sat in my pew, Ted walked to the pulpit and introduced me. He explained that we’d spent the week as neighbors in Galax, talking, telling stories, picking songs, and he was delighted to show me a little more of “how we do things ’round here.”

I hadn’t been to church in decades, and a couple hours of Southern hospitality won’t make a believer out of me. But hearing Ted and the others play, watching children dance, and meeting people who looked me in the eye and didn’t rush the conversation felt deeply familiar. I may have spent almost my entire adult life in New York City, but I grew up on the Illinois-Iowa border, on the banks of the Mississippi. Church backrooms, potlucks, and ambrosia salad were all part of my childhood. 

By 2:30, I really had to get going. For the second time in two days, I said goodbye to Ted, got in my car, and was on my way. 

A week later, I was back at Sunny’s Bar in Brooklyn, playing songs with a dozen or so people in the bar’s backroom. I called “Going to the West,” and after a quick run through the chords on my latest banjo build, a resonator back with a dragon fretboard inlay that I’d played on stage in Galax, I started singing. It was a little shaky at first, but by the second verse everyone was locked in. 

When we finished, one of the musicians remarked that it was a beautiful song. I agreed and asked if he knew it already. “No,” he said. “But I’m going to learn it now.”

David Alm is a Brooklyn-based writer and editor. His work has frequently been included in Longreads‘ Weekly Top Five and annual Best Features lists. He also teaches journalism at Hunter College-CUNY, where he focuses on feature writing and creative nonfiction.

Editor: Brendan Fitzgerald
Fact-checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo
Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Al Mayadeen | September 30, 2026

The US-Israeli war on Iran has exposed a widening gap between Washington’s promises to protect its allies and its ability to sustain that protection, with expensive missile interceptors being consumed faster than American manufacturers can replace them, The Atlantic reported.

In an investigation titled “The THAAD Delusion,” Christopher Leonard argues that the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system became a cornerstone of US security arrangements in the Middle East despite being developed for a more limited battlefield role.

Iran’s ability to maintain missile attacks has challenged the assumption underpinning that role: that American forces would survive an opening barrage, then rapidly destroy the launchers responsible.

Instead, a prolonged conflict has placed mounting pressure on interceptor supplies, exposing weaknesses in US military planning, weapons procurement, and industrial capacity.

A missile shield built around a short war

According to the report, THAAD was originally intended to protect critical military deployments during the initial phase of a conflict, allowing US aircraft and naval forces time to respond.

Washington subsequently promoted the system as a central component of broader missile shields for regional allies, including the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.

The distinction has become consequential during the war on Iran. While THAAD has intercepted ballistic missiles effectively, Leonard writes that Washington neither accumulated enough interceptors for sustained operations nor established the manufacturing capacity needed to replace them quickly.

US interceptor stocks depleted by sustained warfare

Drawing on estimates from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the report says US forces used more than 150 THAAD interceptors during the 12-day war in 2025 and another 190 to 290 during “Operation Epic Fury.”

CSIS estimated that approximately 250 interceptors remained in the US stockpile. The report notes that additional deliveries could affect those calculations, while Washington has not disclosed its remaining inventories.

The depletion extends beyond THAAD. The investigation also described heavy consumption of Patriot interceptors and offensive weapons, including Tomahawk and JASSM missiles, placing pressure on multiple parts of the US arsenal.

Iran’s sustained attacks strain expensive defenses

The investigation identifies Iran’s combination of ballistic missiles and comparatively inexpensive drones as a major challenge to American defensive planning.

THAAD interceptors cost about $12 million each, according to the report. Repeated Iranian missile launches therefore impose substantial financial and logistical costs even when interceptions succeed.

At the same time, Shahed drones, which the article puts at $20,000 to $50,000 apiece, require separate defenses because THAAD cannot intercept them.

This combination forces defending militaries to confront different threats simultaneously while managing limited ammunition. The report describes regional forces using helicopters and costly air-to-air missiles against drones as pressure on their defenses increased.

Leonard’s central argument is that interception accuracy alone cannot deliver the lasting security Washington offered its partners when the attacker can sustain successive waves.

Industrial weaknesses slow replenishment

The article traces the shortage to years of budget decisions that favored major weapons platforms over ammunition reserves, alongside a concentrated defense industry dependent on vulnerable networks of specialized suppliers.

THAAD missiles require intricate assembly and components sourced from hundreds of companies. Expanding production involves increasing capacity throughout that network, rather than simply adding workers at a final assembly plant.

Pentagon assessments cited in the report found that substantial increases in production for several missile systems could require billions of dollars and take years.

The investigation also scrutinizes defense contractors’ spending priorities. Lockheed Martin distributed $6.8 billion through dividends and share buybacks in 2024, while RTX returned $3.7 billion to shareholders, even as industry representatives argued that factory expansion required advance funding or long-term government contracts.

Washington’s protection promises face scrutiny

The implications reach beyond ammunition shortages. US weapons sales helped bind allied militaries to Washington through shared equipment and reliance on American supplies, the report notes.

However, delayed deliveries and competing wartime demands have prompted some partners to seek alternatives, raising questions about the reliability of those arrangements.

In the Middle East, Leonard argues, attacks on infrastructure and military installations have also challenged the perception that hosting US forces guarantees security.

Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told The Atlantic that the consequences could reshape Washington’s regional position.

“We could be moving away from a Middle East that can be fairly described as being an American-dominated region,” he said.

Three years ago, a category-five hurricane devastated the Mexican resort of Acapulco. Amid images of a shattered city, the impossible emerged: the story of sailors who survived Otis on their boats. Marlon Valdez and Jonathan Chico’s feat was to withstand the winds that destroyed buildings, uprooted trees and dislodged entire hillsides, killing at least 52 people and leaving 31 missing, most of them sailors like them.

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When Donald Trump and Xi Jinping met in Washington last week, artificial intelligence was among the issues dividing their countries. Days earlier, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the two sides had agreed to establish a formal AI dialogue, including an incident line, though its protocols had yet to be worked out. The summit produced no […]

The post What does it mean to win the AI race? appeared first on Asia Times.

The Government is keeping a blacklist of people who question its policies, with social media posts criticising the Government being monitored and investigated by officials.

The post The Government is Keeping a List of People Who Question its Policies appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

As Bibliotecas Municipais de Lagos e Loulé promovem a 21ª edição do Concurso Literário Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, iniciativa que, há mais de duas décadas, aproxima as novas gerações da obra de uma das figuras maiores da literatura portuguesa do século XX.

Dirigido aos alunos dos 2º e 3º ciclos do Ensino Básico e do Ensino Secundário, o concurso contempla as categorias de Texto e Ilustração, tendo como ponto de partida a obra literária da autora. Mais do que estimular a criatividade e a expressão artística dos jovens, a iniciativa procura incentivar a leitura da obra de Sophia, aprofundando o conhecimento do seu universo literário.

Os trabalhos podem ser entregues até 6 de fevereiro de 2027, presencialmente nas Bibliotecas Municipais de Lagos ou Loulé, ou enviados por correio. Cada participação deverá estar obrigatoriamente identificada com pseudónimo, ano de escolaridade, categoria a que concorre e título do trabalho, de acordo com as condições estabelecidas no regulamento.

A apreciação dos trabalhos ficará a cargo de um júri constituído por representantes dos dois municípios organizadores, da Direção-Geral do Livro, dos Arquivos e das Bibliotecas, da Rede de Bibliotecas Escolares e por um autor convidado.

Em cada uma das categorias serão atribuídos 1º e 2º prémios, podendo ainda ser distinguidos trabalhos com menções honrosas. Os vencedores do 1º prémio receberão um cartão-oferta no valor de 400 euros para utilizar em livrarias locais de Lagos e Loulé e diploma de participação, enquanto o 2º prémio corresponde a um cartão-oferta no valor de 200 euros e respetivo diploma. As menções honrosas serão distinguidas com diploma de participação, livros e ofertas de cortesia dos dois municípios.

A cerimónia de entrega dos prémios da 21ª edição terá lugar no dia 17 de abril de 2027, no Centro Cultural de Lagos, reunindo participantes, famílias, comunidade educativa e entidades envolvidas numa celebração da literatura, da criatividade e do legado de Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen.

We have officially received our second rendering of Boeing’s F/A-XX concept, which has now officially won the tender, beating out Northrop Grumman to build the Navy’s next-generation stealth fighter. Let’s take a look at what we can see in this new image and discuss what insights it may provide.

Before we start, it’s worth reminding our readers that we are basing this analysis on two publicly released renders of a highly classified aircraft design. There are deliberate choices made in these renderings to obscure critical features and capabilities and mislead foreign intelligence as to the jet’s intended capabilities. So please keep in mind that the details are bound to change. This is also just a preliminary analysis. We will expand on it once we have more time to digest what we are seeing.

The front quarter view of the jet taxiing to a catapult aboard a carrier shows us a very broad, tailless, heavy tactical aircraft. This is a large jet. Clearly internal volume was a driving design factor, as it should be. You can read more about this in our past reporting here.

The aircraft is depicted with what appears to be a large single-piece canopy with a cockpit for just a pilot. Visibility to the rear looks limited at best. There has been much speculation about the possibility that F/A-XX will have the provisions for two crewmen in order to better take on its complex roles over long distances — in particular acting as a battle manager, including for Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) and other drones. This appears not to be the case, and a high degree of automation and artificial intelligence (AI) will have to help with what will be extremely complex tactical problems the single pilot will face. It’s also worth noting that U.S. Navy carrier air wings have retained two-seat tactical jets for frontline use, with the F/A-18F Super Hornet and EA-18G Growler serving today. If F/A-XX replaces these aircraft, it will be the end of frontline two-seat tactical jet operations for the seagoing service.

We see a very broad nose section, which could (and likely would) contain a relatively giant active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar. There is also a prominent chine-line edge wrapping around the forward fuselage, which is a normal trait of low-observable (stealthy) aircraft. The nose looks a bit more contoured, similar to the only other rendering we have of Boeing’s F/A-XX, compared to the shovel-like design of the company’s F-47 for the U.S. Air Force. Below the rear of this visible chine-line appears to be the engine intakes, mounted on the sides of the lower fuselage. They look to be a blended trapezoidal arrangement and are also set far back from the nose.

The F/A-XX’s extremely stout landing gear are depicted prominently in this new image, with a twin-wheel nose gear and thick mains. These are customary features for a carrier-based fighter and especially a heavy one like this.

The jet’s wings have a positive dihedral just like the F-47 renders, which seems to be something of a trademark of Boeing’s next-generation fighter design. This Klingon Bird of Prey look harkens back to the Boeing Bird of Prey demonstrator, which you can read more about here. We also see the wing’s large trailing edge flaps extended, which would be critical to slow-speed terminal operations around the carrier.

Finally, one thing we don’t see clearly is of particular note: the canard foreplanes that have been featured in F-47 imagery, as well as hinted at in Boeing’s only other F/A-XX rendering. It isn’t clear if they may be blended with the fuselage above the inlet areas and are obscured by the steam, or if they simply do not exist in this rendering. The inclusion of canards has been one of the most debated aspects of the F-47 and Boeing’s F/A-XX design, although they seem to make more sense for a naval fighter considering the tailless jet’s low-speed requirements that are needed to fly off the carrier. Again, you can read our past feature about the canards and our follow-up here and here.

While the aircraft clearly shares distinct attributes with the F-47, it isn’t clear exactly how far the commonality between them goes. We could end up with a literal navalized F-47, which would leverage as much efficiency as possible between the two designs, or we could see major design elements and even proportional changes. The requirements imposed by carrier operations do dictate size and weight, to a certain degree. What lives beneath the jet’s skin – hardware and software – will have the most commonality regardless.

There is also the question of the aircraft caught on a thermal imager flying outside of Area 51, which was likely a Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) demonstrator from Boeing, or at least an aircraft related to those efforts based on how unique Boeing’s design clearly is. It’s always possible that the Navy flew its own NGAD demonstration program. The service has been notoriously tight-lipped about its NGAD risk reduction efforts.

The matter of the F/A-XX aircraft’s formal designation is also a question that remains unanswered. If this is a navalized F-47, then F/A-47 could be the jet’s official designation. If it differs substantially, or the Navy just wants to differentiate their design for whatever reason, we could see a different moniker applied. F/A-45 is possible, too, considering the F-47 was partially named in honor of President Trump, who approved the decision to move the Air Force’s program forward. Trump is the 45th and 47th President of the United States.

So, even on this day of long-awaited F/A-XX revelations, it’s also a reminder of just how much we do not know about both the Navy and the Air Force’s NGAD enterprises and their resulting designs, both of which will now be officially brought to you by Boeing.

Contact the author: Tyler@twz.com

The post What Boeing’s New Rendering Of Its Winning F/A-XX Fighter Tells Us appeared first on TWZ.

After blowing past a self-imposed August deadline, the U.S. Navy has finally announced Boeing as the winner of its F/A-XX next-generation carrier-based fighter competition. F/A-XX has become one of the most hotly anticipated U.S. defense procurement decisions in recent memory after the Pentagon tried to shelve the program indefinitely last year.

Boeing had been competing against Northrop Grumman for the F/A-XX contract. An earlier down-select reportedly eliminated Lockheed Martin back in March 2025.

TWZ has now published an initial analysis of Boeing’s winning F/A-XX design based on what can be seen in the new rendering, which you can find here.

As mentioned, the Pentagon had moved to freeze the F/A-XX program in June 2025. Three months earlier, Boeing had won a separate U.S. Air Force competition to produce what is now called the F-47. U.S. military officials had argued that the U.S. industrial base lacked the capacity to support work on two next-generation fighters simultaneously.

Congress subsequently intervened to keep the F/A-XX program running, but its future had remained very murky until earlier this year. In April, Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) Adm. Daryl Caudle said that a winner of the competition would finally be announced in August. Secretary Pete Hegseth and Acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao both publicly committed to that same timeline later that month. There had been concerns that the program might have slipped back into limbo after that deadline came and went. Adm. Caudle told Aviation Week‘s Brian Everstine that he himself was no longer aware of when this decision might come on the sidelines of the Tailhook Association’s annual convention last month.

Just two weeks ago, Air Force Gen. Dale White, the service’s Direct Reporting Portfolio Manager for Critical Major Weapon Systems, reiterated concerns about industrial capacity in response to a question about potential challenges in building F/A-XXs at the same time as F-47s. White also acknowledged that these concerns were “not unique” to F/A-XX and F-47.

In this context, Boeing’s win today is perhaps unsurprising. The company will be able to leverage design work it has already been doing in relation to the F-47 program, as well as relevant production experience and supply chains. TWZ had previously highlighted similarities between what was seen in a rendering the company released of its F/A-XX proposal and official renders of what it is building for the Air Force. We still have yet to learn just how closely related the two designs are.

It is also worth noting here that Boeing previously pushed back publicly on the assertion that it was not ready to meet Air Force and Navy needs at the same time.

Regardless of any industrial base considerations, top Navy officials have been consistently vocal about the need for F/A-XX, even after the Pentagon’s move to put the program on ice last year. The service has presented the next-generation fighters as essential for staying ahead of top global competitors like China and Russia, as well as smaller adversaries, such as Iran.

“I know these things are expensive, and I know the defense industrial base is compressed, but we have got to figure out how to walk and chew gum here with aircraft,” CNO Caudle said in January, just weeks before the start of major combat operations against Iran. “The folks that used to be not in [the] headspace that I needed a stealth aircraft of this level to fly a mission into their country, will gain capability that the F-18 [F/A-18E/F Super Hornet] will not match against.”

“This is an ever-evolving theme, and when you’ve got partnerships … well coupled with each other across China and Russia and Iran and North Korea, and terrorist groups that are getting that kit from all of those through back-channel ways, our ability to fly with impunity with our existing airframes is fleeting,” he added at that time. “So, if I don’t start building that [F/A-XX] immediately, you’re not going to get it for some time.”

The conflict with Iran, where U.S. crewed and uncrewed aircraft have now been lost to that country’s air defenses, adds a certain weight to Caudle’s comments here.

The selection of Boeing for F/A-XX also comes now as the Navy is making new moves regarding other aspects of its future carrier air wing plans. In particular, the service is increasingly solidifying its vision for new carrier-based Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) drones. Acting as airborne controllers for advanced drones has long been understood to be a key mission for the Navy’s forthcoming sixth-generation crewed fighters.

Update: 5:52 PM ET –

The Pentagon has now issued a full press release for the F/A-XX contract award to Boeing, which is valued at approximately $20 billion. The deal covers the “full-scale development phase” and includes the procurement of “multiple test aircraft for ground, airworthiness, systems, and weapons integration testing.”

“The F/A-XX is a critical pillar in our commitment to maintaining peace through strength. F/A-XX will dominate contested airspace, extend operational reach, and deliver a decisive combat advantage for the warfighter,” Michael P. Duffey, Under Secretary of War for Acquisition and Sustainment, has said in a statement. “The F/A-XX platform represents a crucial, non-negotiable investment in America’s national security and long-term air combat capabilities. We are joining forces with Boeing to field these capabilities rapidly, ensuring our warfighters possess the lethal and highly networked systems required to deter aggression, project undisputed power, and secure absolute air superiority.”

“This achievement marks a new era for the U.S. Navy,” Acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao also said in a statement. “The Sixth-Generation fighter is a generational leap in air superiority and will provide the world’s best aviators with unparalleled capabilities to fight, win, and come home safe. We are excited to partner with Boeing, and for our warfighters to continue to dominate the skies and defeat our nation’s enemies.”

“The F/A-XX will provide advanced carrier-based power projection that extends the range of the most agile and survivable airfields: U.S. Navy carriers. In addition, F/A-XX will be interoperable with manned and unmanned platforms such as Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) and increase the capability of every CCA it teams with,” the press release adds. “Following this contact award announcement, Boeing will deliver the platform to augment and eventually replace legacy F/A-18E/F Super Hornets and EA-18G Growlers beginning in the 2030s, and operate alongside the F-35C.”

The Navy has not yet announced a formal designation for the F/A-XX aircraft. If Boeing’s base design does share significant DNA with the F-47, it is possible that the designation for the new sixth-generation carrier-based fighter could reflect that.

It is also worth noting how muted the F/A-XX announcement has been across the board given how hotly anticipated it was. The contrast with the F-47 contract announcement, which was a live-broadcast event headed up by President Donald Trump from White House, is particularly striking.

Update: 6:14 PM ET –

Boeing has now put out its own press release regarding the F/A-XX contract award, which notes that “technical and programmatic details” about the aircraft “remain classified under U.S. national security and export laws.”

“It’s an honor to be selected to produce the Navy’s first sixth^–generation platform,” Steve Parker, President and CEO of Boeing Defense, Space & Security, said in a statement. “Backed by decades of work, bolstered by game-changing innovations and solidified by the investments we’ve made in new facilities uniquely suited to build multiple products with next generation capabilities, our dedicated and talented team is ready to execute this critical program.”

“Delivering two advanced fighters in parallel was always our plan, and we invested accordingly,” Parker added. “We are ready and able to build multiple concurrent future combat aircraft franchise programs.”

Boeing’s release explicitly highlights a major ongoing expansion of its production and other facilities in St. Louis, Missouri. That work is also widely understood to be supporting the F-47 program, as TWZ reported separately just earlier today.

“Investment in facilities is just one part of the story,” Boeing’s Parker also said. “We’re also investing in technology and people so that we can deliver for our customers.”

As an aside, Boeing also received a separate contract today from the Navy, valued at $16,667,607, to support the final shutdown of the production line for the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet fighter and EA-18G Growler electronic warfare jet.

Contact the author: joe@twz.com

The post Boeing Wins F/A-XX Next Generation Navy Stealth Fighter Contract (Updated) appeared first on TWZ.

A merchant named Robert Keyne showed up crestfallen before the General Court of Massachusetts in Puritan Boston in 1639. His offense: trying to sell at the highest possible price and buy at the lowest possible price, putting his profits above the interests of the community. The judges showed no mercy: they fined him £200 for a practice they described as “extremely wicked and corrupt” and for having embraced “false principles.” Yet those are the same principles that now seem completely natural to us and structure our entire lives.

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Polls are unfavorable for Texas attorney general and Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton. With 38 days until the midterm elections, some Republican politicians have all but conceded the Lone Star seat and remain haunted by the belief that the safer bet would have been to give the nomination to veteran congressman John Cornyn. Paxton isn’t gaining traction, not even after President Donald Trump himself urged voters at the unprecedented Republican convention in September in Dallas — his “Trumpapalooza” — to imagine that on November 3 they would be choosing him instead of the controversial Southern politician.

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For more than three decades, the Bangladeshi political left has maintained an unyielding stance on natural resources like gas, coal, and minerals, insisting that state entities must develop them exclusively. Foreign energy companies are viewed with deep suspicion, while production-sharing contracts are routinely condemned as vehicles designed to siphon national wealth to foreign multinationals. Coal […]

The post Bangladesh energy crisis calls for pragmatism, not political purity appeared first on Asia Times.

Powerus, a US defense company with ties to President Donald Trump’s sons, drew scrutiny after signing a memorandum of understanding this month with the Pakistani Army and offering Islamabad access to Ukrainian drone technology, sparking debate over the deal’s potential impact on India and wider regional security. Powerus was founded in October 2025 by veterans […]

The post Trump family-tied drone maker woos Pakistan at India’s expense appeared first on Asia Times.

Devastated relatives who arrived from abroad visited the site of the collapsed building where four tourists and an elderly couple lost their lives on Friday morning, September 25, 2026. With tears in their eyes and broken voice they told media reporters that they came for the identification of the victims adding that the recognition was […]

The post All six victims of Athens explosion identified appeared first on Keep Talking Greece.

An Essay on What the Fifteen-Minute Consultation Leaves Out

Lies are Unbekoming | September 10, 2026

What follows is twelve documented findings compressed into one sitting. It is written for the reader who has been prescribed one of these drugs, or is caring for someone who has, and who wants to know what the fifteen-minute consultation did not include. Every claim is drawn from the profession’s own literature, its own regulatory filings, its own package inserts, or the admissions of its own senior figures. Where an item is developed at greater length elsewhere in this series, that is noted. The purpose here is not depth on any single item. It is the cumulative weight of the twelve landing together.

Opening

Three percent of the 4,041 patients enrolled in the STAR*D trial remitted, stayed well, and remained in the study through the one-year follow-up.¹

The trial was announced with a cumulative remission figure of 67 percent.² When Ed Pigott and colleagues spent more than five years reanalyzing the data with fidelity to the original protocol, they found the 3 percent figure. When journalists put the 3 percent number to Maurizio Fava, one of the lead investigators, he acknowledged it was accurate. The investigators knew.³

The paper has not been retracted. It is still cited in psychiatric textbooks. The American Journal of Psychiatry ignored a petition signed by more than 1,800 people asking for retraction. The New York Times, repeatedly notified of the fraud, published the 70 percent figure again in a 2024 article praising the drugs.⁴

STAR*D was the largest depression trial ever conducted. It was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health. It was designed by the profession’s most senior researchers. What it proved, when honestly analyzed, was that the drugs did not work.

That fact has been available for over a decade. It has not reached the patients being handed the prescriptions.

The evidence throughout is drawn primarily from Peter Gøtzsche, Robert Whitaker, Peter Breggin, Gary Greenberg, David Healy, and Joanna Moncrieff. What the twelve items share is that none of them are contested at the level of documentation. They are contested only at the level of what the profession chooses to tell patients.

What They Told You Was True

The prescription is written on the basis of a mechanism, a diagnosis, and a trial. Each has failed on its own terms.

1. The chemical imbalance was never demonstrated

The theory that depression results from a deficiency of serotonin was never established in the scientific literature. Joanna Moncrieff and colleagues published a comprehensive umbrella review of the serotonin theory in 2022 and found no consistent evidence for its central claims.⁵ The theory was abandoned by serious researchers decades earlier. It continued to appear in direct-to-consumer advertising and patient education materials because it served a function. It explained why the pill was necessary and why the patient would need to keep taking it.

Steven Hyman, director of NIMH from 1996 to 2001, later observed that “the gold standard was the DSM criteria. It struck me as a fool’s errand to try to develop a biomarker for a fictive category.”⁶ The chemical imbalance was the mechanism proposed for a disease no one could measure, in a category no one could validate.

Chemical Imbalance: The Collapse of a Medical Myth

2. The DSM has no biological markers

After four decades and hundreds of millions of dollars in federal research, not one disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders has a confirmed biological test. Not depression. Not schizophrenia. Not bipolar disorder. Not ADHD. Not anxiety. Not any of the more than three hundred conditions the manual lists.

Robins and Guze proposed a five-step validation process in 1970: clinical description, laboratory studies, exclusion criteria, follow-up studies, family studies.⁷ The five steps were meant to establish, over time, which alleged disorders were real diseases and which were figments. Four decades later, Darrel Regier, who chaired the DSM-5 task force, told Psychiatric News that “validity tests have not lived up to the expectations of Robins and Guze.”⁸ Kenneth Kendler, the field’s leading nosologist, wrote that the diagnostic categories in use had been “heavily influenced by expert opinion” and were “fuzzy constructs that shift when viewed in different ways.”⁹

Thomas Insel, director of NIMH from 2002 to 2015, put it most directly in a 2005 address to the American Psychiatric Association: “The DSM-IV has 100 percent reliability and zero percent validity.”¹⁰ Reliability means clinicians using the same manual will arrive at the same diagnosis. Validity means the diagnosis corresponds to a real thing. Insel was telling the assembled profession that its manual sorted patients consistently into categories that did not exist.

The APA response was to convene committees to plan the DSM-5. The committees did not find biological markers. They could not have. The categories were not built to have biological markers. They were built from clinical description alone. The manual reifies its own criteria.

The consequence for the patient is direct. When the doctor says “you have major depressive disorder,” the patient hears a diagnosis in the sense that a diabetes diagnosis is a diagnosis: a measurable biological state with a known mechanism. What the patient has actually received is a checklist tally. Five of nine symptoms present for two weeks. That is the whole test. There is no blood work, no scan, no biomarker. The diagnostic bible of American psychiatry sits on the shelf as an artifact of expert agreement, not a description of nature.

Manufacturing Madness: The DSM as Instrument of Social Control

3. STAR*D was manipulated

The opening figures bear structural repetition: 3 percent versus 67 percent, admitted by the lead investigator, still not retracted, still cited. Ed Pigott’s reanalysis was published in BMJ Open in 2023.¹¹ The investigators, when confronted, doubled down on the fraud in the American Journal of Psychiatry rather than correct it.¹² The owner of the journal, the American Psychiatric Association, did nothing.

Peter Gøtzsche has documented the specific manipulations. The “remission” threshold was set so low that a patient scoring 7 on the Hamilton depression scale, including endorsement of “feels like life is not worth living,” was counted as symptom-free.¹³ Patients who exited the study were assumed to have remitted at the same rate as those who stayed, a statistical fiction that inflated the numbers by an order of magnitude. Eleven prespecified outcomes were never reported. Suicidal ideation was reported at 0.7 percent in one paper and ten times that in others by the same authors.

The trial that was supposed to establish the effectiveness of antidepressants in real-world practice established the opposite. The profession’s response was to continue citing the announced figure.

Is Psychiatry a Crime Against Humanity? (2024)

What Happens on the Drug

The prescription arrives with the phrase “you may notice some side effects.” The phrase does the work of concealment. Three effects, in particular, are not warned about with the seriousness they warrant.

4. Akathisia carries documented suicide risk

Akathisia is a state of extreme inner restlessness produced by antidepressants, antipsychotics, and antiemetics. The Greek term means inability to sit still. The patient may pace, fidget, wring hands, or endlessly walk. The condition may also present without visible motor symptoms, as unbearable internal agitation the observer cannot see.¹⁴

In 1990, Martin Teicher and colleagues at Harvard published five cases of patients who developed intense suicidal preoccupations on fluoxetine, all associated with akathisia, all resolving when the drug was stopped and returning when it was restarted.¹⁵ Rothschild and Locke published the rechallenge study in 1991: three patients who had made serious suicide attempts on fluoxetine, all rechallenged under controlled conditions, all developing akathisia and becoming suicidal again. One patient said in retrospect: “I tried to kill myself because of these anxiety symptoms. It was not so much the depression.”¹⁶

A study of psychiatric inpatients found that 79 percent of those who had attempted suicide were experiencing akathisia at the time.¹⁷ Another found that half of all fights on a psychiatric ward were akathisia-related. Haloperidol at moderate to high doses made half the patients markedly more aggressive, sometimes to the point of wanting to kill their psychiatrists.

The FDA’s 2004 black-box warning on antidepressants describes what Breggin has called the stimulant syndrome: anxiety, agitation, panic attacks, insomnia, irritability, hostility, aggressiveness, impulsivity, akathisia, hypomania, mania.¹⁸ The label warns that these can occur in nonpsychiatric patients, meaning the drug produces the syndrome by itself, not by unmasking a preexisting condition.

Gøtzsche’s team examined manufacturer trial data and found akathisia miscoded as “hyperkinesia” in Zoloft trials. In paroxetine trials they found not a single case of akathisia recorded, which is statistically impossible given the drug class.¹⁹ The miscoding was systematic.

The FDA-approved label for Zyprexa describes akathisia as “extreme inner anxiety and restlessness.” At least one psychiatric textbook labeled it “agitated depression,” folding the drug’s most dangerous effect back into the diagnosis it was prescribed to treat. The patient who reports the akathisia is told the underlying illness has worsened. The dose is increased.

Mental Health Survival Kit and Withdrawal from Psychiatric Drugs (2022)

5. Benzodiazepine dependence begins at prescribed doses

The FDA-approved label for Xanax states that withdrawal symptoms, including seizures, have been reported after only brief therapy at doses within the recommended range for treating anxiety.²⁰ In the eight-week trials used for FDA approval, patients were worse off at eight weeks than before starting the drug. Between 7 and 29 percent of patients could not withdraw after only six to eight weeks of exposure.²¹

If you are currently taking a benzodiazepine, do not stop it abruptly. Abrupt cessation can produce seizures. Item 12 addresses what safe withdrawal actually requires.

Heather Ashton, the British psychiatrist who ran a benzodiazepine withdrawal clinic at the University of Newcastle for decades, documented that long-term users often required a year or more to taper.²² Some experience withdrawal symptoms lasting years after cessation. Cognitive impairment, depression, and anxiety worse than the original condition are common outcomes of long-term use.²³ Gøtzsche, who has decades of clinical pharmacology experience, has noted that patients report benzodiazepine withdrawal as often worse than heroin. Heroin abstinence symptoms resolve within days. Benzo withdrawal can persist for years.

Anxiety Uncovered: The Truth About Benzodiazepines and Real Solutions

6. ADHD stimulants produce the symptoms they treat on withdrawal

The DSM has a category for stimulant withdrawal, which lists depression, anxiety, irritability, sleep problems, fatigue, and agitation as the withdrawal syndrome after “several days or longer” of use. Rebound hyperactivity, talkativeness, and inattention are documented after a single dose in a placebo-controlled NIMH study of normal children ages 6 to 12.²⁴ Ten of fourteen children in that study showed marked behavioral rebound; three developed euphoria.

If a child is currently taking a stimulant, do not stop it abruptly. Rebound and withdrawal effects are commonly mistaken for a worsening of the original condition. Item 12 addresses safe withdrawal.

The teacher observes the child on Monday morning after a weekend off the drug, notices the child is more scattered and irritable than usual, and concludes the child needs the medication. The child is in withdrawal. The dose is increased. Peter Breggin’s observation from the early 1990s stands unchanged three decades later: if the child continues on Ritalin because they continue to have problems focusing, the disorder may be the drug’s effect.²⁵ Drug-induced inattention becomes the reason to continue and increase the drug.

The Multimodal Treatment Study of ADHD, the largest NIMH-funded stimulant trial, tracked children through eight years of follow-up. By three years, the medicated children showed no advantage over the non-medicated on any measure. They were, however, 2 cm shorter and 2.7 kg lighter than their unmedicated peers, a growth suppression the FDA eventually required on the label.²⁶

The Arithmetic Pill: ADHD, ADD, and the Evidence

What Happens to Your Brain

The drugs act on the brain and the brain responds. What the brain does under sustained chemical assault is documented in the profession’s own imaging studies.

7. Antipsychotics shrink brain tissue on MRI

Nancy Andreasen, editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Psychiatry from 1993 to 2005, began a longitudinal MRI study of over 500 first-episode schizophrenia patients in 1989. In 2003, she reported that frontal lobe white matter volume decreased progressively over the years of treatment.²⁷ In 2011, her team published in Archives of General Psychiatry the finding that antipsychotic exposure was directly associated with volume loss.²⁸ In a 2008 interview with the New York Times, Andreasen stated it plainly: “The more drugs you’ve been given, the more brain tissue you lose.”²⁹

Fusar-Poli and colleagues confirmed the pattern in a 2013 meta-analysis of longitudinal MRI studies.³⁰ The 2009 Navari and Dazzan review reported that both older and newer antipsychotics produce gross changes in brain volume in selected regions.³¹ In monkey studies, haloperidol and olanzapine produced substantial reductions in both grey and white matter, and reduced glial cell numbers.³²

Andreasen’s original interpretation was that the shrinkage reflected the disease. The follow-up data forced her to concede the drug was the cause.

Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America (2010)

8. Tardive dyskinesia is permanent

Tardive dyskinesia is a drug-induced movement disorder produced by antipsychotics. It can affect any voluntary muscle: face, tongue, neck, torso, extremities, diaphragm, vocal cords. The condition presents as involuntary jerky movements, slower writhing movements, painful spasms, or restlessness the patient cannot control. The mechanism is understood. Antipsychotics block dopamine receptors in a brain region called the basal ganglia. Over time the brain compensates by growing more of those receptors. When the drug dose is reduced, or when the extra receptors eventually outnumber the block, the excess drives the involuntary movements.

The prevalence is not marginal. DSM-IV-TR sets the annual incidence at 3 to 5 percent per year in young adults and 25 to 30 percent per year in older patients.³³ These are cumulative rates. A young adult after three years of exposure has a 9 to 15 percent risk. An older patient after three years has a 75 to 90 percent risk. Prevalence in outpatient clinics runs above 40 percent. In long-term facilities, above 50 percent.³⁴ There is no established treatment. Most cases are permanent.

The condition often extends beyond motor symptoms. Gualtieri and Barnhill observed that “in virtually every clinical survey that has addressed the question, it is found that TD patients, compared to non-TD patients, have more in the way of dementia.”³⁵ Breggin has called this tardive dementia. Tardive akathisia and tardive psychosis have also been documented, representing further permanent damage to the higher brain function of patients whose brains were supposed to be helped.

The condition is frequently masked by the drug that caused it. Increasing the dose suppresses the visible movements while the underlying damage progresses. Reducing the dose brings the movements out, which the prescriber may interpret as evidence that the patient still needs the medication. The patient’s brain, already damaged, is offered more of what damaged it.

The neurological literature has documented tardive dyskinesia for over five decades. It is required disclosure on antipsychotic labels. It is not routinely disclosed at the point of prescription.

Toxic Psychiatry

9. ECT causes documented brain damage

Electroconvulsive therapy applies electrical current to the head sufficient to produce a grand mal seizure. In modern practice, the patient is anesthetized and given a muscle relaxant to prevent the visible convulsion. The electrical dose is often increased to compensate for the seizure threshold raised by the anesthesia. Multiple treatments are given, typically 8 to 16 per course, sometimes more.

Autopsy studies dating to the 1940s documented brain necrosis in patients who died following ECT.³⁶ Animal studies documented brain damage. The brain’s response to ECT is an acute organic brain syndrome, medically indistinguishable from severe head injury. In neurological terms, multiple continuous seizures without full recovery of consciousness constitute status epilepticus, a medical emergency defined by its risk of permanent brain damage.

The memory loss is documented in every serious study that has looked for it. Larry Squire and Pamela Slater reported an average of 27 months of retrograde amnesia surrounding treatment.³⁷ Freeman and Kendell, using face-to-face interviews conducted by the treating doctors themselves (a design that biased strongly against reporting), found that 74 percent of patients reported memory impairment and 30 percent said their memory function was permanently affected.³⁸ Squire and Slater’s own longer follow-up found that 55 percent of patients felt they had not regained normal memory function over the years.

Gøtzsche summarizes the current literature: with strict definitions of memory loss, 29 to 55 percent of patients are affected. With looser criteria, 51 to 79 percent.³⁹ Death rates from ECT, according to a systematic review by John Read and colleagues, run at approximately 1 per 1,000 treatment courses, ten times higher than the American Psychiatric Association’s stated figure.⁴⁰

The efficacy evidence is thinner than the harms evidence. The 1985 NIMH Consensus Conference on ECT accepted the finding that no controlled study showed benefit beyond four weeks. The four-week window corresponds to the acute organic brain syndrome, during which severe brain dysfunction produces the euphoria or apathy interpreted as improvement.⁴¹ Once the brain begins to recover, the depression returns. If the patient is given more ECT, the brain damage accumulates. If the patient is not given more ECT, the profession points to the returning depression as evidence the disease was chronic.

The APA’s 1990 task force report on ECT omitted essentially the entire literature documenting memory loss and brain damage.⁴² The literature it omitted included the work of Squire, Slater, Janis, Friedberg, Breggin, and even the APA’s own previous 1978 report, which contained more information on memory loss than the 1990 update. In psychiatry, science sometimes runs backward.

What Happens When You Try to Leave

At some point the patient decides they no longer want to be on the drug. The system was not built to help them leave.

10. SSRI discontinuation can last years

The FDA-approved labels describe “discontinuation syndrome.” Patients and doctors alike were told the symptoms would last a few weeks and resolve. The systematic review by Davies and Read, published in 2019, established that this was false. Withdrawal symptoms are more common than reported, more severe than reported, and last far longer than reported. In one survey of 580 patients, 16 percent reported withdrawal symptoms lasting over three years.⁴³

If you are currently taking an SSRI or SNRI, do not stop it abruptly. Withdrawal reactions can include severe agitation, akathisia, suicidal ideation, and violence. Item 12 addresses the resources for safe tapering.

The Dutch tapering-strip program run by Peter Groot and Jim van Os has documented the shape of the problem. Of 895 patients on antidepressants, 62 percent had previously tried to withdraw without success. Using hyperbolic dose-reduction strips, 71 percent were able to withdraw within a median of 56 days.⁴⁴ Venlafaxine required 90 percent of patients to start at the lowest available dose and taper over three months. Some patients required more than six months. Dutch insurers refused to reimburse extended tapering because “there is no evidence in the literature” for its necessity, a circular defense against the very treatment the literature was documenting.

The withdrawal is routinely misinterpreted as return of the underlying illness. The patient is told they were unwise to stop and needs to remain on the drug indefinitely. Breggin’s term for this pattern is medication spellbinding. The drug produces effects the patient attributes to the disease.

11. Long-term outcomes are worse with the drugs than without them

The 1997 British study of a large inner-city primary care facility followed 95 never-medicated depressed patients and 53 drug-treated ones. Symptom reduction at six months: 62 percent for the never-medicated, 33 percent for the drug-treated.⁴⁵ A World Health Organization study of 640 depressed patients found that medicated patients had worse general health and were more likely to still be mentally ill at one year.⁴⁶ A Canadian five-year study of 9,508 depressed patients: 19 weeks of depression per year for the medicated, 11 for the unmedicated.⁴⁷ An NIMH study of 547 patients: medicated patients were three times more likely to lose their principal social role and nearly seven times more likely to become incapacitated at six years.⁴⁸

Rif El-Mallakh reported that 40 percent of patients on antidepressants end up in a chronically depressed “treatment resistant” state.⁴⁹ Giovanni Fava documented that drug changes induced by antidepressants “may propel the illness to a more malignant and treatment unresponsive course.”⁵⁰

The pattern extends to antipsychotics. Martin Harrow’s 15-year follow-up of first-episode psychosis patients found that those not on antipsychotics had significantly better outcomes and were far more likely to be in recovery.⁵¹ Lex Wunderink’s 7-year Dutch trial randomized first-episode psychosis patients to maintenance antipsychotics or dose reduction and discontinuation. The reduction group had double the recovery rate.⁵² Bockoven had documented in 1975 that rehospitalization rates rose after the introduction of antipsychotics and that medicated patients were more socially dependent than those treated in the pre-drug era.⁵³

The pattern is consistent across drug classes and across decades. Longer exposure produces worse outcomes. The drugs sensitize the brain and convert episodic distress into chronic dysfunction. The profession’s response has been to rewrite the natural history of the conditions to match the drug-damaged outcomes. The 1999 American Psychiatric Publishing Textbook of Psychiatry declared that older studies showing depression was self-limiting had been “disproved.” Depression became “a highly recurrent and pernicious disorder.”⁵⁴ The drugs had made it so.

12. Tapering protocols do not exist in most medical schools

The prescriber who put the patient on the drug is typically not trained in how to help them come off it. Withdrawal is not covered in the standard psychiatric curriculum. The tapering approach with the strongest evidence base is hyperbolic dose reduction, developed by Mark Horowitz and Joanna Moncrieff and published in Lancet Psychiatry in 2019.⁵⁵ The approach requires micro-dose reductions of a few percent at a time, made possible by liquid formulations or compounded tapering strips. Standard tablets do not come in the small doses required.

Peter Gøtzsche’s team spent two years trying to publish a Cochrane review protocol on antidepressant withdrawal support. The Cochrane depression group, chaired by Rachel Churchill, raised objections through 12,044 words of feedback across 86 numbered points, then rejected the protocol.⁵⁶ Cochrane refused to publish a review on how to help patients safely withdraw from a class of drugs prescribed to hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Gøtzsche’s PhD student Anders Sørensen mentored 30 consecutive patients through withdrawal in his unpaid spare time and documented the results, because it was the only way to do the work.

The insurance system compounds the problem. Dutch national health insurance refuses to reimburse extended tapering on the grounds of insufficient evidence, though the evidence exists and the insurers know it does. American insurers do not cover compounded formulations. The tapering strips developed at the Amsterdam pharmacy (taperingstrip.org) are available to prescribers in any country, but the patient must find a prescriber willing to order them, which many will not.

The knowledge exists. The Ashton Manual for benzodiazepine withdrawal has been public since 2002.⁵⁷ The Horowitz-Moncrieff hyperbolic tapering literature is in peer-reviewed journals. Mad in America hosts a withdrawal community with thousands of patients’ documented experiences. Breggin’s Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal was published in 2013.

None of it is on the psychiatric residency reading list. The doctor who wrote the prescription is, in most cases, not the doctor who can help the patient stop taking it. The patient is on their own.

What This Does Not Mean

The most common defense of the current prescribing paradigm is that the drugs help some patients, and that essays like this one endanger those patients by encouraging them to stop.

Some patients do report subjective benefit on these drugs. That is not disputed. What is not established is that this benefit exceeds placebo by a clinically meaningful margin, or that it survives the long-term outcomes documented in Item 11.

The safety caveats throughout this essay, and the resources listed below, exist precisely because abrupt cessation is dangerous. Nothing here recommends abrupt cessation. What is recommended is informed choice, which requires the twelve findings to be visible before the prescription is written or renewed. A patient who wishes to continue after seeing the twelve findings has made a different decision from a patient who was never shown them.

Resources

For patients currently on psychiatric drugs who wish to withdraw, resources exist outside the mainstream medical system. The Ashton Manual (benzo.org.uk/manual/) remains the standard reference for benzodiazepine tapering. The Horowitz-Moncrieff papers on hyperbolic tapering in Lancet Psychiatry (2019) provide the scientific basis for SSRI withdrawal. Mad in America (madinamerica.com) hosts an active community of patients who have withdrawn or are withdrawing. The Amsterdam tapering strip program (taperingstrip.org) makes hyperbolic dose reduction physically possible for antidepressants that do not come in the required small doses. Breggin’s Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal (2013) provides detailed clinical protocols. None of the above require permission from the prescribing physician. All require time and typically a support person. None should be attempted abruptly.

Closing

The twelve findings above are documented. They are not concealed by conspiracy. They sit in FDA labels, peer-reviewed journals, systematic reviews, and the admissions of senior figures within the profession. What conceals them is training.

Psychiatric residency does not require reading Whitaker or Breggin or Gøtzsche. It does not require examining the primary trial data on the drugs the resident will spend a career prescribing. It requires reading the textbooks the profession publishes about itself, the same textbooks that praised electroconvulsive therapy while omitting the memory-loss literature and that continue to cite the STAR*D 67 percent figure. The continuing medical education the practicing psychiatrist attends is funded largely by the pharmaceutical industry, whose interest in the twelve findings is that they should not surface. The drug representatives who visit the office once a month are the primary source of pharmacological information for many prescribers.

The doctor across from the patient in the fifteen-minute consultation is often not withholding information out of malice. The doctor does not have it. What was left out of the training reproduces itself in every consultation the doctor conducts for the rest of the career.

The training explains the local silence. It does not explain how the whole enterprise reached the point where twelve findings of this severity could accumulate without institutional response. That answer comes from someone who ran the enterprise.

Thomas Insel directed the National Institute of Mental Health from 2002 to 2015. He controlled the American federal research budget for psychiatry for thirteen years. He was, in that period, the single most powerful figure in American psychiatric science.

Reflecting on his tenure after leaving the position, he made the following observation, widely reported and repeated in the years since:

I spent 13 years at NIMH really pushing on the neuroscience and genetics of mental disorders. And when I look back on that I realize that while I think I succeeded at getting lots of really cool papers published by cool scientists at fairly large costs, I think $20 billion, I don’t think we moved the needle in reducing suicide, reducing hospitalizations, improving recovery for the tens of millions of people who have mental illness.⁵⁸

Twenty billion dollars over thirteen years, and the head of the enterprise said it moved nothing on suicide, hospitalization, or recovery.

That is not the assessment of a critic. That is the man who ran the enterprise, describing the enterprise, from inside it. Insel went on to write a book defending psychiatric drugs, so the admission cannot be attributed to conversion or apostasy. He continues to believe in the paradigm. He just concedes it produced nothing.

The twelve items above sit inside that enterprise. What the psychiatrist was trained not to tell the patient is what the man who ran it for thirteen years, on his own accounting, could not deny.

How to Explain It to a Six-Year-Old

Imagine a garage that has been fixing cars for many years. Every car that leaves the garage has a bumper sticker that says FIXED.

One day someone counts. Out of every hundred cars leaving the garage, only three actually work. Ninety-seven do not.

The garage keeps operating. The mechanics keep putting on the FIXED stickers. The owner keeps telling everyone the garage fixes seven cars out of every ten.

When someone points out that the real number is three out of a hundred, the owner says yes, he knows the real number is three. He does not correct the seven-out-of-ten claim. He does not put up a new sign. He keeps the stickers.

The people bringing in their cars do not know about the three. They see the FIXED sticker and they drive off. Some of the cars catch fire on the highway. Some of the brakes fail. Some of the cars will not start again once they are turned off.

When people bring the broken cars back, the garage says the problem is not with the fix. The problem is with the car.

That is the garage. The cars are patients. The stickers are prescriptions. The garage is a whole profession.

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