Every time a Russian television network or pro-Kremlin newspaper reaches a new low, it was once commonplace among independent thinkers to say that the Western media giants never allowed themselves such mistakes. Throughout Russian journalism’s post-Soviet history, faith in CNN as a kind of celestial constellation has been an essential factor. The archetype has been necessary as a model to strive toward or turn away from, and it will remain a key element in Russian journalism’s coordinate system.

There’s a thoroughly naive misperception that the people working for propaganda outlets are all hard-nose cynics ready to say that black is white just so they can make their mortgage payments. In fact, anyone who’s talked with just one of these people knows that any cynicism that might guide them is something entirely different: it’s not “I lie because of my mortgage,” but “I say what serves the state’s interests because that’s how it works everywhere — we serve Russia, CNN serves the U.S., and the BBC is itself a state organization.”

Hearing this kind of talk, Russians from the independent media of course always laughed, but time has shown that the ones who said “it’s like this everywhere” were right. At the very least, over the past year and a half, the Western press with its highest standards has gifted us too many outrageous stories to ignore.

It made me smarter and more handsome than my brother Mark [laughs]. With the twin study, particularly, there was a bunch of experiments that were genetic-based. And there are these things called telomeres, which are the ends of our chromosomes, and the length and quality of them are indications of our physical age. The hypothesis was that with me being in space, and the radiation, and the microgravity, maybe the stress of living there for a long period of time, my telomeres would get shorter and basically older compared to Mark’s. What they found is that mine got better. So physically I got a little younger than he is, and then once I got back they kind of went back to their normal, preflight condition.

So when the CO2 is at our normal low levels on the space station, it’s 10 times what it is on Earth. ...The Russians say that it should be high because it helps protect you from radiation

True to the racist views of the day, Fitzhugh did believe that blacks were “weak, ignorant and dependent” on the superior class of whites, but his racism was part of a class analysis common to socialists. In other words, the benefits that he believed blacks gained from slavery should also be applied to poor, less capable whites.

Socialism proposes to do away with free competition; to afford protection and support at all times to the laboring class; to bring about, at least, a qualified community or property, and to associate labor. All these purposes, slavery fully and perfectly attains.