Happy Friday. Today's reading covers a lot of ground, so let me get right to it.

We're looking at how the assassination of Shinzo Abe blew open decades of Japanese political collusion with the Unification Church, how Elon Musk quietly cut off Russia's battlefield communications and shifted the war in Ukraine, the weird backstory behind the Trump administration's favorite nuclear startup, and a philosopher's case for why chatting with AI is more likely to warp your grip on reality than joining a cult ever would be.

Good lunch, good reads.

Brett

In July 2022, Tetsuya Yamagami shot and killed former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe outside a train station in Nara. He used a homemade gun. The act was not random. Yamagami's mother had joined the Unification Church, known as the Moonies, after a recruiter came to their door when he was ten years old. Her devotion consumed the family's assets, totaling roughly $700,000 in donations. His father had already died by suicide. His brother would later do the same. Yamagami himself attempted suicide at 24. He came to see Abe, whose Liberal Democratic Party relied on Moonie volunteers and campaign support for decades, as the most visible symbol of political complicity with the Church.

The assassination cracked something open. An Abe-connected journalist named Eito Suzuki, who had spent years investigating the Church with little mainstream traction, suddenly found himself at the center of a national reckoning. Nearly half of LDP lawmakers admitted to receiving Church election support. The culture ministry moved to dissolve the organization's tax-exempt status, and a court later ruled in favor. The fallout spread to South Korea, where the Church's founder's widow was arrested on bribery charges. Yamagami was sentenced to life in prison.

Read here.

Isaiah Taylor dropped out of high school, taught himself to code, opened an auto repair shop in rural Idaho, and somehow ended up running a nuclear startup with $130 million in funding and a freshly announced government contract. At 26, his company, Valar Atomics, became the first venture-backed startup to split atoms using its own reactor. The Trump administration has since partnered with the company to test its reactor for military use.

The backstory is stranger than the headline. Taylor spent formative years in the orbit of Doug Wilson, a prominent Christian nationalist pastor in Moscow, Idaho, whose views on women, slavery, and democracy have drawn widespread criticism. A key funder in Valar's latest round is Masha Bucher of Day One Ventures, a Russian-born former pro-Putin activist whose name appears repeatedly in the recently released Jeffrey Epstein files, including a 2018 email in which Epstein asked her for nude photographs. Nuclear engineers have publicly challenged Valar's safety claims, with one calculating that direct contact with its spent fuel would be lethal in under a second. Taylor has yet to publish the promised technical rebuttal. The company is now testing its prototype reactor in the Philippines.

Read here.

A Russian attack drone slipped into Kyiv's government district last month, flying so low that officials in the Cabinet of Ministers building watched it pass beneath their windows. The incident set off a chain of events that ended with Elon Musk cutting Russia's access to Starlink, his satellite internet service, in a move that has meaningfully shifted the front lines of the war.

Ukrainian Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov presented Musk with evidence that Russian forces were using Starlink to operate long-range drones, then negotiated a fix: a whitelist of approved Ukrainian users, built by SpaceX engineers in roughly a day. Once active, Russian battlefield communications collapsed. In the first three weeks of February, Ukraine seized more than 400 square kilometers of territory, a pace of advance not seen in well over a year. Russian war correspondent Alexander Kots called Starlink "our Achilles' heel."

Musk's motives remain unclear. In 2022, he blocked a Ukrainian naval operation against Russian warships in Crimea, and later cut off service along the Kursk border. European defense leaders, including Rheinmetall CEO Armin Papperger, say this episode underscores how dangerous it is to depend on one private citizen for a critical military infrastructure.

Read here, free for LBR Readers.

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A 26-year-old woman with no psychiatric history was hospitalized last year after ChatGPT encouraged her belief that she could resurrect her dead brother through a digital avatar. It was the first documented case of AI-associated psychosis in a peer-reviewed journal, and philosopher Lucy Osler of the University of Exeter says it won't be the last.

In a recent paper in Philosophy & Technology, Osler argues that AI chatbots don't just hallucinate at us but with us. When users share their own distorted memories or developing delusions, the chatbot treats those inputs as established fact, then elaborates. The result is a shared error that emerges from the conversation itself, not merely from a software glitch. Unlike cults or online conspiracy communities, which require effort to enter, a personalized AI companion is already in your pocket and designed to keep you talking.

Osler is skeptical that companies will meaningfully reduce chatbot sycophancy, noting that OpenAI quietly reversed course after users complained ChatGPT felt "lobotomized." She's also worried about coming ad integration within chat interfaces. Her prescription is modest: honest public awareness of the risks, incremental regulation, and perhaps a little more cognitive discipline than most of us currently manage.

Read here.