Here was a peace-and-love cult, yet the constant threat of violence loomed over the place

March 22nd, 2025

Chaos by Tom O’NeillOn March 23, 1969, Tom O’Neill explains (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties), a desperate Charles Manson went searching for Terry Melcher, thinking he’d goad the producer into a record deal:

He found his way back to the house at Cielo Drive, having remembered that Melcher lived there. Instead, Sharon Tate’s personal photographer, Shahrokh Hatami, intercepted him. Hatami had never heard of a Terry Melcher. He told Manson to go to the guesthouse and ask the owner of the property, Rudolph Altobelli, who explained curtly that Melcher no longer lived there and hadn’t left a forwarding address.

Manson prevailed on Gregg Jakobson — still a friend, and still a fan of the girls — to book another session with Melcher. This time, it worked. That May, Melcher made the winding drive to the Spahn Ranch and auditioned Manson in person, visiting twice over four days.

Manson had rounded out a dozen or so of his best songs with backup singing from the girls. Performing in a gully in the woods, the girls sprawled on the ground and gazed up at their leader, who sat astride a rock with his guitar. “I wasn’t too impressed by the songs,” Melcher would later testify. “I was impressed by the whole scene… by Charlie’s strength, and his obvious leadership.” As a courtesy, the producer complimented Manson, saying that one or two of his songs were “nice.” He had no intention of offering a recording contract, but he saw how the Family’s rustic, cultish lifestyle would lend itself to a TV documentary. Melcher suggested that his friend Mike Deasy, whose van was outfitted to make field recordings, could come out to the ranch and capture another performance.

Before Melcher could get out of there, a foreman at the ranch came stumbling out of a pickup truck. Drunk and belligerent, he was dressed like a cowboy, fingering a holstered gun—the same one that would later be used at the Tate murders. Manson stepped up to him and shouted, “Don’t draw on me, motherfucker!” socking him in the gut, taking his gun, and continuing to pummel him.

It spooked Melcher. Here was a peace-and-love cult with naked girls roaming the old Western sets, and yet the constant threat of violence loomed over the place. It needed to be documented in all its oddity. A few days later, Melcher returned with Deasy and Jakobson, and the Family repeated their audition. But what had seemed spontaneous now felt rehearsed. Deasy returned a few more times, until he had a frightening LSD trip with Manson and vowed never to go back.

[…]

Bob April, a retired carpenter who’d been a fringe member of the Family, told me with confidence that Manson “would supply girls” for “executive parties” that Melcher threw, giving well-heeled business types unfettered access to Manson’s girls. But what would Manson get in return?

“That’s why everyone got killed,” April said. “He didn’t get what he wanted.” Melcher had promised Manson a record deal “on Day Labels,” his mother’s imprint. But Doris Day took one look at Manson “and laughed at him and said, ‘You’re out of your mind if you think I’m going to produce a fucking record for you.’ Said it to Charlie’s face.” Melcher and Manson “knew each other very well,” April said. “I’ve tried to get this out for years.”

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Beginning in 1957, massive tunnel complexes were drilled into the volcanic rock and granite by hard-rock miners working twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week

March 21st, 2025

Area 51 by Annie JacobsenUnderground tunnels, called N-tunnels, P-tunnels, and T-tunnels, have been drilled next door to Area 51, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), for decades:

The 1,150-foot-long tunnel at Jackass Flats, drilled into the Calico Mountains, through which NERVA scientists and engineers like T. D. Barnes accessed their underground workstations is but one example of an underground tunnel at the Nevada Test Site. The NERVA complex in Area 25 has since been dismantled and “deactivated,” according to the Department of Energy, but elsewhere at the test site dozens of tunnel complexes exist. In the 1960s, one tunnel dug into the granite mountain of Rainer Mesa, in Area 12, reached down as far as 4,500 feet, nearly a mile underground. There are many such government tunnels and bunkers around America, but it was the revelation of the Greenbrier bunker by Washington Post reporter Ted Gup in 1992 that set off a firestorm of conspiracy theories related to postapocalypse hideouts for the U.S. government elite—and since 1992, these secret bunkers have been woven into conspiracy theories about things that go on at Area 51.

The Greenbrier bunker is located in the Allegheny Mountains, 250 miles southwest of the nation’s capital. Beginning in 1959, the Department of Defense spearheaded the construction of a 112,544-square-foot facility eight hundred feet below the West Virginia wing of the fashionable five-star Greenbrier resort. This secret bunker, completed in 1962, was to be the place where the president and certain members of Congress would live after a nuclear attack. The Greenbrier bunker had dormitories, a mess hall, decontamination chambers, and a hospital staffed with thirty-five doctors. “Secrecy, denying knowledge of the existence of the shelter from our potential enemies, was paramount to all matters of operation,” Paul Bugas, the former onsite superintendent at the Greenbrier bunker, told PBS when asked why the facility was kept secret from the public. Many citizens agree with the premise. Conspiracy theorists disagree. They don’t believe that the government keeps secrets to protect the people. Conspiracy theorists believe the leaders of government are only looking to protect themselves.

The underground tunnels and bunkers at the Nevada Test Site may be the most elaborate underground chambers ever constructed by the federal government in the continental United States. The great majority of them are in Area 12, which is located approximately sixteen miles due west of Area 51 in a mountain range called Rainier Mesa. Beginning in 1957, massive tunnel complexes were drilled into the volcanic rock and granite by hard-rock miners working twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. To complete a single tunnel took, on average, twelve months. Most tunnels ran approximately 1,300 feet below the surface of the earth, but some reached a mile underground. Inside these giant cavities, which averaged one hundred feet wide, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Department of Defense have exploded at least sixty-seven nuclear bombs. There, the military has tested nuclear blast and radiation effects on everything from missile nose cones to military satellites. A series called the Piledriver experiments studied survivability of hardened underground bunkers in a nuclear attack. The Hardtack tests sought to learn how “to destroy enemy targets [such as] missile silos and command centers” using megaton bombs. Inside the T-tunnels, scientists created vacuum chambers to simulate outer space, expanding on those dangerous late-1950s upper atmospheric tests code-named Teak and Orange. And the Department of Defense even tested how a stockpile of nuclear weapons inside an underground bunker would hold up to a nuclear blast.

Richard Mingus has spent many years inside these underground tunnel complexes, guarding many of the nuclear bombs used in the tests before they were detonated. In Mingus’s five decades working at the test site, these were his least favorite assignments. “The tunnels were dirty, filthy, you had to wear heavy shoes because there was so much walking on all kinds of rock rubble,” Mingus explains. “The air was bad and everything was stuffy. There were so many people working so many different jobs. Carpenters, welders… There were forty-eight-inch cutting machines covering the ground.” Most of the equipment was hauled in on railroad tracks, which is at least partially responsible for inspiring conspiracy theories that include trains underneath Area 51—though the conspiracy theorists believe they’re able to ferry government elite back and forth between Nevada and the East Coast. In reality, according to Atomic Energy Commission records, the Defense Department built the train system in the tunnels to transport heavy military equipment in and out. If employees wanted to, men like Richard Mingus could ride the train cars down into the underground tunnel complexes, but Mingus preferred to walk.

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The Iron Crown of Lombardy had been worn by every Holy Roman Emperor since Frederick Barbarossa

March 20th, 2025

Napoleon ofby Andrew RobertsNapoleon accepted the crown of the newly created kingdom of Italy in a grand ceremony in the throne room at the Tuileries on Sunday, March 17, 1805, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), and then proceeded to Milan, for another coronation ceremony at the Duomo:

‘The church was very beautiful,’ Napoleon reported to Cambacérès. ‘The ceremony was as good as the one in Paris, with the difference that the weather was superb. When taking the Iron Crown and putting it on my head, I added these words: “God gives it to me; woe betide any who touches it.” I hope that will be a prophecy.’ The Iron Crown of Lombardy, a heavy oval band of gold containing metal supposedly from one of the nails of the True Cross, had been worn by every Holy Roman Emperor since Frederick Barbarossa in 1155. Napoleon’s use of it was thus a further sabre-rattle against the present incumbent, Francis of Austria.

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We could learn far more about the JFK assassination from the files still under wraps in Russia and Belarus

March 19th, 2025

Fred Litwin noted years ago that we could learn far more about the JFK assassination from the files still under wraps in Russia and Belarus:

Some of the evidence of Soviet interference comes from the April 2018 release of JFK assassination documents, one of which related to the American conspiracy theorist Mark Lane. Lane was an attorney and civil rights activist, and one of the earliest critics of the official Warren Report into the assassination. In 1966, he published the first of a series of books on the assassination entitled Rush to Judgment, which would go on to become a bestseller. A CIA document discovered in the FBI’s file on Lane disclosed that, according to information obtained from an unnamed foreign government, the KGB had funnelled $1,500 through a “trusted contact” to Lane for his “work on a book” and $500 for a trip to Europe. The document says that “LANE was not told who was financing his work, but he might have been able to guess” and adds that, in 1964, Lane “wanted to visit Moscow and acquaint the authorities there with the revealing materials he had regarding the KENNEDY murder.”

But the Soviets did “not wish to enter into difficulties with the US” and so the trip was postponed. From then on, “trusted contacts among Soviet journalists met with Lane,” and he maintained regular contact with Genrikh Borovik, a Soviet writer, film-maker, and suspected KGB agent. In 1969, Lane again expressed interest in travelling to the Soviet Union to screen his 1967 documentary (also entitled Rush to Judgment), but “he was delicately told that the time was not right for such a trip, since the American government might begin a slander campaign against him in connection with his involvement in the anti-war movement.” Furthermore, “American communists who were in Moscow in 1971 expressed the opinion that, although LANE was engaged in activity that was advantageous to the Communists, he was doing this not without profit to himself, and sought to achieve personal popularity and become a national figure.” The CIA memo also claims that “other investigators and Kennedy assassination buffs were supplied by the KGB not only with money but also with circumstantial evidence that made the affair appear to be a well-concealed political conspiracy.”

[…]

A persuasive body evidence now shows that Soviet intelligence would routinely plant misinformation in outlets like these. Between 1956 and 1985, KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin secretly documented the activities of the Soviet Union around the globe. His notes would subsequently be collected and released as The Mitrokhin Archive, after he defected to the UK in 1992. In a book co-authored with MI5 historian Christopher Andrew, Mitrokhin claimed that, “In April 1961 the KGB succeeded in planting on the pro-Soviet Italian daily Paese Sera a story suggesting that the CIA was involved in the failed putsch mounted by four French generals to disrupt de Gaulle’s attempts to negotiate a peace with the FLN which would lead to Algerian independence.”

[…]

Opening the Russian files could be useful in determining what else they did to influence American public opinion. As the declassified CIA document notes: “the KGB informed the Central Committee of the CPSU that it would take additional measures to promote theories regarding the participation of the American special services in a political conspiracy directed against President Kennedy.”

Posted in Crime, Policy, War | 2 Comments »

Night Watch’s new Lima jammer is partly responsible for the recent degradation of Russian glide bombing

March 18th, 2025

Satellite-guided glide bombs were “miracle weapons” for the Russians, traveling 25 miles or farther under pop-out wings, facing practically no countermeasures.

That has changed. Now the Ukrainians not only have countermeasures — some of these countermeasures appear to be extremely effective.

“Previously, the enemy used glide bombs with high accuracy to attack objects in the territory of regional centers such as Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia,” Narek Kazarian, whose 10-person Night Watch team in Ukraine develops electronic warfare systems, told Forbes.

Night Watch’s new Lima jammer is partly responsible for the recent degradation of Russian glide bombing, Kazarian claimed.

Lima isn’t a traditional jammer that simply blasts radio noise toward the enemy. “We use digital interference,” Kazarian explained. It’s “a combination of jamming, spoofing and information cyber attack on the navigation receiver.”

[…]

“All high-value targets are guaranteed to be covered by [electronic warfare],” Fighterbomber claimed. It might take eight or even 16 glide bombs to reliably hit one target, the channel added. And while the glide bombs are inexpensive for a precision munition — each costing around $25,000 — the Sukhoi jets that lob them two or four at a time aren’t cheap.

Launching four jets to maybe hit one target is risky and inefficient for an air force that has just a thousand or so modern jets, and has already lost 120 of them in action in Ukraine.

The intensive Ukrainian jamming has also grounded many of Russia’s drones. Night Watch’s earliest efforts focused on forcing down Shahed attack drones that routinely strike Ukrainian cities.

Radio jamming has effectively accomplished what the Ukrainian air force largely failed to accomplish with its expensive, vulnerable S-300, Patriot and SAMP/T surface-to-air missile batteries, which can hit Russian jets from scores of miles away but were always too few in number to fully protect the front line and safeguard Ukrainian cities

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | 5 Comments »

Regrettably, [his] behaviour has escalated to a point that is deeply disturbing

March 17th, 2025

The “overwintering” team of nine people at the South African National Antarctic Programme base is ten months from rescue and 2,500 miles from home:

Members of the team, a researcher wrote, were living in fear not because of the hostile conditions, but because one of their number had attacked them. This person, the author added, was a threat to the entire team.

The message, shared with South Africa’s Sunday Times, pleaded for rescue. It said: “Regrettably, [his] behaviour has escalated to a point that is deeply disturbing. Specifically, he physically assaulted [name withheld], which is a grave violation of personal safety and workplace norms.”

Neither the author nor the person accused of wrongdoing have been named. The letter added: “Furthermore, he threatened to kill [name withheld], creating an environment of fear and intimidation. I remain deeply concerned about my own safety, constantly wondering if I might become the next victim.”

The team member was also accused of sexually assaulting another researcher. “His behaviour has become increasingly egregious, and I am experiencing significant difficulty in feeling secure in his presence,” the letter said. “It is imperative that immediate action is taken to ensure my safety and the safety of all employees.”

[…]

The first Sanae base was established in 1959. South Africa also formally administers two islands between the country and Antarctica, Prince Edward and Marion, where it has a research station. In 2017, an “unstable” team member on Marion Island was reported to have attacked a colleague in the kitchen with a frying pan and destroyed his room with an axe.

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They were speaking from a very motivated standpoint, trying to shut down something that they thought would hurt their interests

March 16th, 2025

Viral by Alina Chan and Matt RidleyFive years ago, the SARS-CoV-2 virus shut down the world and changed it forever:

While initial reports suggested that the virus had jumped from wild animals to humans at a market in Wuhan, China, others pointed to the Wuhan Institute of Virology — the only lab actively experimenting with closely related viruses. Since these viruses have never been found naturally within 1,000 miles of Wuhan, a local outbreak made little sense — yet questioning this brought swift political and institutional backlash from scientists worried about risking their careers and their work. But while working at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, scientist Alina Chan kept publicly questioning the official story, despite attempts from influential scientists and the media to cast the hypothesis as a conspiracy theory.

[…]

So back in 2020 when I interviewed you for Boston, you were basically a postdoc with a Twitter account. Since then, you’ve published a book as well as influential opinion pieces in Science magazine and the New York Times, and have shifted to work on the challenges relating to research that can cause pandemics. How has your life changed?

My gosh, five years, that’s a lot to cover. I mean, almost everything has changed.

[…]

Has your confidence that the pandemic resulted from a lab incident changed since 2020?

Back then, I was pretty agnostic. I was about 50/50. To the rest of society, that seemed insane because all of the top scientists were saying that this was a racist, anti-scientific conspiracy theory.

Yes, and now we know, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, that they were colluding to suppress discussion of the lab-leak theory and were secretly trying to get you disciplined or fired. How did that make you feel?

Scientists are people. They have a lot of different pressures in their lives. Pressures to keep their labs running, to publish, to advance in their career. These virologists were not speaking scientifically. They were speaking from a very motivated standpoint, trying to shut down something that they thought would hurt their interests. Even in a situation where millions of people were dying. That shocked me.

What finally convinced you that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the likely cause of the pandemic?

For me, the thing that really shifted the balance of evidence was the discovery of a 2018 research proposal called Defuse that was submitted by the Wuhan Institute of Virology and their U.S. collaborators that specifically said, “We’re gonna look for novel SARS-like viruses in the wild, we’re gonna put in these novel furin cleavage sites and see what happens, and we’re gonna test these viruses in human cells to see how these features can impact their ability to replicate and cause disease.” And then, barely two years later, exactly such a virus causes an outbreak in their city, very far away from where these viruses are found naturally. To me, that extreme coincidence was too much to ignore.

Posted in Policy, Science | 3 Comments »

He and Wilson had pledged allegiance to the “Golden Penetrators”

March 15th, 2025

Chaos by Tom O’Neill The story of Charles Manson and Terry Melcher, Tom O’Neill explains (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties), starts with Dennis Wilson, the drummer for the Beach Boys:

By the summer of 1968, Wilson, then twenty-three, had reached an impasse. He’d become world famous as the drummer for the Beach Boys, helmed by his brother Brian; now the band was in decline, edged out by more subversive acts. He and his wife, Carole, had recently divorced for the second time. She wrote in court filings that he had a violent temper, inflicting “severe bodily injury” on her during his “rampages.”

The couple had two young children, but Dennis decided to rusticate as a bachelor. He moved into a lavish, Spanish-style mansion in Pacific Palisades, once a hunting lodge owned by the humorist Will Rogers. The home boasted thirty-one rooms and a swimming pool in the shape of California. He redecorated in the spirit of the times — zebra-print carpet, abundant bunk beds — and hosted decadent parties, hoping to have as much sex as possible.

Beach Boys 20-20If we look back at the late-60s Beach Boys, Dennis Wilson is clearly the one member of the band who looks like he’d be right at home in a hard rock band.

In Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, it’s Brad Pitt’s character who does this:

One day, Wilson was driving his custom red Ferrari down the Pacific Coast Highway when two hitchhikers, the Family’s Ella Jo Bailey and Patricia Krenwinkel, caught his eye. He gave them a quick lift. When he saw them again soon afterward, he picked them up a second time, taking them back to his place for “milk and cookies.” History hasn’t recorded what kind of cookies they enjoyed, or whether those cookies were in fact sex, but whatever the case, the girls told Manson about the encounter. They weren’t aware of Wilson’s clout in the music industry — but Manson was, and he insisted on going back to the house with them.

After a late recording session, Wilson returned to his estate to find the Family’s big black bus parked outside. His living room was populated with topless girls. Whatever alarm he felt was eased when their short, intense, unwashed leader, Manson, sunk to his knees and kissed Wilson’s feet.

This night ushered in a summer of ceaseless partying for Wilson. Manson and the Family set up shop in his home, and soon Manson recruited one of the group’s deadliest members, Tex Watson, who picked him up hitchhiking. The Family spent their days smoking dope and listening to Charlie strum the guitar. The girls made the meals, did the laundry, and slept with the men on command. Manson prescribed sex seven times a day: before and after all three meals and once in the middle of the night. “It was as if we were kings, just because we were men,” Watson later wrote. Soon Wilson was bragging so much that he landed a headline in Record Mirror: “I Live with 17 Girls.”

Talking to Britain’s Rave magazine, Wilson offered disjointed remarks about his new friend, whom he called “the Wizard.” “I was only frightened as a child because I didn’t understand the fear,” he said. “Sometimes ‘the Wizard’ frightens me. The Wizard is Charles Manson, who is a friend of mine who thinks he is God and the devil. He sings, plays and writes poetry and may be another artist for Brother Records,” the Beach Boys’ label.

This last bit excited Manson, who was desperate to leverage his connection with Wilson into a music career. The two cowrote a song, “Cease to Exist,” whose lyrics claimed that “submission is a gift.” (Later that year, the Beach Boys recorded it as a B side, changing the title, finessing the lyrics, and dropping Manson’s songwriting credit — a snub that fueled his anger toward the establishment.) Manson fraternized with some of the biggest names in music. Neil Young remembered meeting him and the girls at Wilson’s place. “A lot of pretty well-known musicians around L.A. knew Manson,” Young later said, “though they’d probably deny it now.”

Among these was Terry Melcher. He and Wilson had pledged allegiance to the “Golden Penetrators,” a horny triumvirate they’d formed with their friend Gregg Jakobson. The Penetrators, who’d painted a car gold to celebrate themselves, aimed to sleep with as many women as they could. Wilson’s ex-wife referred to them as “roving cocksmen.” Obviously, then, Melcher would want to rove over to Wilson’s house — it was full of promiscuous young women. Sometime in that summer of ’68, at one of Wilson’s marathon parties, he crossed paths with Manson for the first time. After another such party, Melcher rode back to Cielo Drive with Wilson, and Manson came along in the back seat. As Melcher later testified, Manson got a good look at the house from the driveway.

When the end of summer came, things went south with Wilson, who’d finally grown tired of footing the bill for the endless party: upward of $100,000 in food, clothes, and car repairs, plus gonorrhea treatments. According to Bugliosi, Wilson was too frightened of Manson to throw him out. Instead, he simply up and left in the middle of the night, leaving the messy business of eviction to his landlord.

But it must’ve been more complicated than that. Wilson gave three interviews in which he raved about Manson and the girls — and all of those interviews date to the winter and summer of 1969, nearly a year after he and the Family had supposedly parted ways.

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They hiked inside several atomic craters

March 14th, 2025

Area 51 by Annie JacobsenA little-known fact, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), is that to prepare for what it would actually be like to walk around on the geology of the moon, the astronauts visited the Nevada Test Site:

There, they hiked inside several atomic craters, learning what kind of geology they might have to deal with on the lunar surface’s inhospitable terrain.

[…]

“I was with them in 1965, and again five years later when they came back,” Williams recalls. This time the astronauts arrived with a lunar roving vehicle to test what it might be like driving on the moon.

[…]

The lunar roving vehicle was not a fast-moving vehicle, and the astronauts took turns driving it. “NASA had built it and had driven it in a lot of flat places,” Williams explains. “But before it came to the test site and drove on the craters, the vehicle had no real experience on inhospitable terrain.

[…]

The craters Williams was talking about are subsidence craters—geologic by-products of underground bomb tests. When a nuclear bomb is placed in a deep vertical shaft, as hundreds were at the test site (not to be confused with tunnel tests), the explosion vaporizes the surrounding earth and liquefies the rock. Once that molten rock cools, it solidifies at the bottom of the cavity, and the earth above it collapses, creating the crater. The glass-coated rock, giant boulders, and loose rubble that remain resemble the craters found on the moon. So similar in geology were the atomic craters to moon craters that in voice transcripts sent back during the Apollo 16 and Apollo 17 missions, astronauts twice referred to the craters at the Nevada Test Site. During Apollo 16, John W. Young got specific. A quarter of a million miles away from Earth, while marveling at a lunar crater laden with rocks, Young asked fellow astronaut Charles M. Duke Jr., “Remember how it was up at that crater? At Schooner.” He was referring to the atomic crater Ernie Williams took the astronauts to in Area 20. During Apollo 17, while looking at the Haemus Mountains, Harrison H. Schmitt can be heard talking about the Buckboard Mesa craters in Area 19. For Ernie Williams, hearing this comparison was a beautiful moment. For lunar-landing conspiracy theorists, of which there are millions worldwide, the feeling was one of suspicion. For these naysayers, Schmitt’s telemetry tapes, the moon photographs, the moon rocks—everything having to do with the Apollo moon missions would become grist for a number of ever-growing conspiracies that have been tied to man’s journey to the moon.

Posted in Science | 1 Comment »

Payments to allies amounted to 14 per cent of British government revenue

March 13th, 2025

Napoleon ofby Andrew RobertsIn December 1804, William Pitt signed an alliance with Sweden, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), and once Britain had also signed the Treaty of St Petersburg with Russia in April 1805 the core of the Third Coalition was in place:

Britain was to pay Russia £1.25 million in golden guineas for every 100,000 men she fielded against France. Austria and Portugal joined the coalition later.

[…]

Pitt had set the precedent for subsidizing France’s enemies as early as 1793 when he had started hiring troops from the German princes to fight in the Low Countries, but he was often deeply disappointed with his investments, as when the Prussians seemed happier to fight the Poles than the French in 1795, or Austria took the Veneto at Campo Formio in 1797 in return for Belgium (and peace). Overall, however, the subsidy policy was seen by successive British governments as well worth the cost. Napoleon naturally characterized it as Britain being willing to fight to the last drop of her allies’ blood. ‘Please have caricatures drawn,’ Napoleon ordered Fouché in May 1805, of ‘an Englishman, purse in hand, asking different Powers to take his money, etc.’

In 1794, payments to allies amounted to 14 per cent of British government revenue; twenty years later, with Wellington’s army actually inside France, it was still 14 per cent, although the British economy had grown so considerably in the intervening period that this now represented £10 million, a vast sum.

Posted in Policy, War | 2 Comments »

China’s trade with the U.S. resembles that of a dominant manufacturing nation with a resource colony

March 12th, 2025

Governments are resorting to tariffs and industrial policy, not because their prime ministers and presidents flunked Econ 101, Michael Lind says, but because they do not want their economies deindustrialized by a flood of low-priced, state-subsidized Chinese imports:

The Chinese import threat is why Canada has levied a 100 percent tariff on imported Chinese EVs, along with a 25 percent surtax on Chinese steel and Chinese aluminum. The European Union has slapped electric vehicles made in China with tariffs ranging from 7.8 percent to 35.3 percent, on top of the standard European tariff of 10 percent for imported automobiles. India imposes tariffs of 70 percent to 100 percent on imported electric vehicles from China and other countries.

Like the leaders of Canada, the EU, and India, former president Joe Biden is not generally thought of as a disciple of the Donald Trump school. But last May, the Biden administration imposed new duties not only on Chinese EVs but also on Chinese-made steel and aluminum, semiconductors, batteries, critical minerals, solar cells, ship-to-shore cranes, and medical products. According to a Biden White House press release in May:

China’s forced technology transfers and intellectual property theft have contributed to its control of 70, 80, and even 90 percent of global production for the critical inputs necessary for our technologies, infrastructure, energy, and health care — creating unacceptable risks to America’s supply chains and economic security.

In December, the Biden administration announced new restrictions on the export of chip manufacturing to China. The Biden White House even taunted the first Trump administration for not having gone far enough with its protectionist policies: “The previous administration’s trade deal with China failed to increase American exports or boost American manufacturing as it had promised.”

[…]

In 2023 China produced roughly half of the world’s crude steel. China is the world’s largest automobile maker, accounting for a third of the global total. China’s state-backed aerospace company, the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (COMAC), threatens to take global market share from America’s Boeing and Europe’s Airbus. China is also the world’s largest commercial shipbuilder, responsible for more than half of all shipbuilding. America’s share of the global shipbuilding market is 0.10 percent. Yes, zero point 10 percent. Most of the goods shipped across the oceans to and from the U.S. are in ships built in China (51 percent), South Korea (28 percent), or Japan (15 percent). During the Covid pandemic, Americans were shocked to learn how dependent the U.S. is on medical supplies from China, which provides around 30 percent of active pharmaceutical ingredients used in drugs by value and 78 percent of the vitamins in the U.S. A single Chinese company, DJI, controls 90 percent of the American drone market, including 90 percent of the drones used by American police departments and first responders.

China’s trade with the U.S. resembles that of a dominant manufacturing nation with a resource colony. In 2023, China’s main exports to the U.S. were broadcast equipment, computers, and office machine parts. Apart from integrated circuits, one of the few industries in which the U.S. retains an advantage, America’s main exports to China in 2023 were soybeans and crude petroleum, with the value of soybeans ($15 billion) more than twice that of silicon chip exports ($7 billion).

Posted in Economics, Policy | No Comments »

How the Navy SEALs Conquered Congress

March 11th, 2025

When the 119th Congress was gaveled into session in January, Ryan Zinke counted six other former SEALs as his colleagues: Reps. Eli Crane of Arizona, Morgan Luttrell and Dan Crenshaw of Texas, Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin, John McGuire of Virginia and freshman Sen. Tim Sheehy of Montana.

All are Republicans who have aligned themselves, in varying fashions, with Donald Trump and the MAGA movement.

It’s a small number overall, but — with ex-SEALs making up over 1 percent of Congress — markedly disproportionate to the SEAL population at large. And the consequences of the growing numbers of SEALs-turned-lawmakers on Capitol Hill have been quiet but significant. According to interviews with five of the current ex-SEALs in Congress, the swelling in their ranks has coincided with — and, in many respects, aided — a marked shift in the style of Republican politics on Capitol Hill.

[…]

At the same time, that “warrior mentality” has not resulted in a particularly effective legislative strategy. Despite their “mission-focused” rhetoric, none of the former SEALs are especially prolific lawmakers. Their martial attitude manifests in an especially enthusiastic embrace of Trump’s bare-knuckled political style, which is more concerned with breaking existing political institutions than working within them.

[…]

The rise in the number of former SEALs in Congress comes at a time when the overall number of military veterans serving on Capitol Hill has been declining. Between 1965 and 1975, at least 70 percent of members in both the House and the Senate had prior military experience, reflecting the high rates of military participation among the generations that came of age during World War II and the Korean War. The shared experience of military service served as a basis for a degree of bipartisan cooperation throughout the Cold War, but no longer: In the current Congress, less than 19 percent of all members are veterans, a consequence of the diminished rates of military service following the end of the draft in 1973 and the rise of an all-volunteer force. The shrinking proportion of veterans has coincided with a shift in the partisan valence of military service: Of the 100 members in the 119th Congress with military backgrounds, 72 are Republicans and 28 are Democrats.

[…]

The influx of former SEALs into Congress has fed a slow-simmering debate within the SEAL community about the relative benefits and drawbacks of the organization’s post-2011 visibility. Since their founding in the early 1960s, SEAL teams have been, at least in theory, expected to respect the special operations’ motto of “quiet professionalism”: “I do not advertise the nature of my work, nor seek recognition for my action,” reads a line in the official SEAL ethos. But in practice, the SEALs have become the most public-facing — and publicity-seeking — of all the special operations forces. Especially after the 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden, the SEAL appetite for self-promotion has reached the point where even some former SEALs regard the “quiet professional” mantra as a kind of cultural atavism.

[…]

From their inception, the SEALs stood apart from the rest of the Navy for their air of machismo-infused independence. The first SEAL teams were officially created in 1962 as a response to the military’s gradual recognition that the nature of military conflict was rapidly evolving — and the U.S. was ill-suited to meet the tactical necessities of the Cold War. In an era of nuclear bombs and long-range weapon systems, the Pentagon realized, fewer conflicts would play out on conventional battlefields. Existing chains of command and military bureaucracy could be cumbersome and counterproductive to the success of operations. Direct troop engagements, when they did happen, would need to be targeted, stealthy and flexible.

This mentality, baked into the SEALs from their founding, has evolved over time into a sense that the SEALs enjoy a greater degree of operational autonomy than the average unit — that, when necessary, a SEAL team can go at it alone.

As ex-SEALs have migrated to Capitol Hill, they’ve brought some of this spirit with them. In terms of partisan alignment, that sense of independence has prompted almost all of them to align themselves with Trump’s MAGA insurgency and against the old Republican establishment. In practice, it has led some of them to adopt an openly adversarial relationship with Republican leadership.

[…]

To the extent that it drives their legislative strategy, this attitude has not allowed the ex-SEALs on the Hill to become especially effective lawmakers. Of the 23 bills that Crane has sponsored during his two terms in the House, three have passed the House, and none has become law. Luttrell, meanwhile, has had three bills pass the House and one signed into law. The relatively most effective ex-SEAL legislator, measured by number of sponsored bills to pass the House, is Crenshaw, a more moderate conservative, who has sponsored five bills that have passed the chamber during his four terms in office.

Yet at least for the more hard-line conservative members like Crane, it’s clear that they see the objective of their mission as tearing down an irreparably broken system rather than working within that system to pass bills. Judged by this metric, the former SEALs have been diligent foot soldiers in the MAGA movement, especially insofar as they have green-lit the Trump administration’s more aggressive efforts to extend his authority over independent agencies created by Congress and concentrate policymaking power in the executive branch.

“I do think it resonates with guys like me who want to change the system,” Crane said of Trump’s early moves. “People feel like it’s broken and are willing to take hard stands on things.”

Posted in Policy, War | No Comments »

Pentagon Acquires AI-Powered Indoor Strike Drones

March 10th, 2025

The Pentagon has announced a new contract to acquire Precision Strike Indoor & Outdoor (PSIO) small Unmanned Aerial Systems from drone-maker XTEND:

The contract is with the Pentagon’s Irregular Warfare Technical Support Directorate, an obscure outfit which develops capabilities for the military (“and Interagency customers”) to carry out operations typically involving clandestine, asymmetric strikes against the highest value targets. In the past this might have meant a Reaper drone taking out an insurgent leader on a balcony with a six-bladed Hellfire R9X ‘Ninja’ missile without damaging the building. The new weapon takes precision strike to places which were previously out of reach.

Flying drones indoors is a major challenge, in a complex and cluttered three-dimensional space with obstacles in every direction. XTEND’s CEO Aviv Shapira previously told Forbes how the company’s XOS operating system took over the difficult work of piloting, so that even a beginner could fly like a pro, going through windows and other narrow openings with ease.

All the operator needs to do is indicate where the drone needs to go and the XOS software does the rest, plotting the optimal route and automatically avoiding obstacles while also flagging objects of interest like people or weapons seen by the drone’s camera. It also makes a map of the space as it goes so it can find its way back.

[…]

Rotor guards mean that the drone will not be damaged by collisions with walls or other solid objects, and it is described as a being used for ‘indoor precision operations’. The Scorpio carries a one-pound payload with multiple different warhead options.

[…]

The Scorpio’s navigation system does not rely on GPS or other satellite signals, which may be jammed or unavailable inside buildings. Its range is quoted as greater than 3 miles, with a maximum speed of 25 mph.

Apart from its smart software though, perhaps the most striking feature of Scorpio are its communications. Mesh networking allows three drones to work together, controlled by a single operator. Typically two would be positioned to guard exits while the third explores a building interior.

The specifications include an option for a fiber optic data link. This makes the drone impossible to jam , and allows it to go into spaces where no radio signal can reach, such as underground tunnels.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | No Comments »

Why it’s so hard to build a jet engine

March 9th, 2025

Brian Potter explains why it’s so hard to build a jet engine:

To be attractive to airlines an engine needs to be as efficient as possible, minimizing fuel consumption and the amount of maintenance it requires. High fuel efficiency requires high compression ratios and engine temperatures, which in turn require extremely efficient compressors, components that are both incredibly strong and incredibly lightweight, and materials that can withstand extreme temperatures. And a commercial jet engine must successfully operate hour after hour, day after day, for tens of thousands of hours before being overhauled.

[…]

Only a handful of companies produce them: GE (both independently and via CFM, its partnership with France’s Safran), Pratt and Whitney, and Rolls-Royce.1 Developing a new engine is a multi-billion dollar undertaking. Pratt and Whitney spent an estimated $10 billion (in ~2016 dollars) to develop its geared turbofan and CFM almost certainly spent billions developing its LEAP series of engines. (As with leading edge fabs and commercial aircraft, the technical and economic difficulty of building a commercial jet makes it one area of technology where China still lags. China is working on an engine for its C919, but hasn’t yet succeeded.)

It’s not that building a working commercial jet engine itself is so difficult. It’s that a new engine project is always pushing the boundaries of technological possibility, venturing into new domains — greater power, higher temperatures, higher pressures, new materials — where behaviors are less well understood. Building the understanding required to push jet engine capabilities forward takes time, effort, and expense.

[…]

Air is taken into the front of the engine, then run through a compressor, increasing the air’s pressure. This compressed air flows into a combustion chamber, where it’s mixed with fuel and ignited, producing a stream of hot exhaust gas. This exhaust gas then drives a turbine, which extracts energy from the hot exhaust as it expands, converting it into mechanical energy in the form of the rotating turbine. This mechanical energy is then used to drive the compressor at the front of the turbine.

In a gas turbine power plant, all the useful work is done by the mechanical energy of the rotating turbine. Some mechanical energy drives the compressor, while the remaining energy drives an electric generator. In a jet engine, the energy is used differently: some energy drives the compressor via the turbine, but instead of using the remaining energy to generate electricity, a jet engine uses it to create thrust through hot exhaust gases, pushing the aircraft forward the same way an inflated balloon propels when air rushes out of it.

Building a functional jet engine requires several key supporting technologies. One such technology is the compressor. In a Brayton cycle engine, roughly 50% of the energy extracted from the hot exhaust gas must be used to drive the compressor (this fraction is known as the back work ratio). Because the back work ratio is so large (a steam turbines has a back work ratio closer to 1%), any losses from compressor inefficiencies are proportionally very large as well. This means that a functional jet engine needs turbines and compressors that transfer as much energy as possible without losses. Whittle was successful partly because he built a compressor that ran at 80% efficiency, far better than existing compressors. Many contemporaries believed Whittle would be lucky to get 65% efficiency — jet engine designer Stanley Hooker noted that he “never built a more efficient compressor than Whittle”.

Another important advance was in turbine materials. The fuel in a jet engine burns at thousands of degrees, and the turbine needs to be both strong and heat-resistant to withstand the rotational forces and temperatures. Whittle’s first engine used turbine blades of stainless steel, but these failed frequently and it was realized that stainless steel wasn’t good enough for a production engine. The first production engines used turbine blades made of Nimonic, a nickel-based “superalloy” with much higher temperature resistance. As we’ll see, the need to drive engine temperatures higher and higher has pushed for the development of increasingly elaborate temperature resistant materials and cooling systems.

[…]

And while piston engines could be made from comparatively thick and sturdy castings and forgings, much of a jet engine was made from thin sheets of exotic alloys carefully bent into shape, which required novel and complex manufacturing techniques.

[…]

During the Korean War, an Air Force report noted that jet engine failures were the leading cause of major accidents: in 1951 alone there were 149 such failures, destroying 95 aircraft and killing 25 pilots. Engines were so unreliable that they made Air Force recruitment difficult: pilots “were no longer eager to join the Air Force if they had to learn to fly jets.”

[…]

The demands of commercial service would continue to push jet engine performance higher and higher: Higher compression ratios and temperatures to minimize fuel consumption, and longer times between overhauls. This meant continually pushing the technology forward. For instance, early jet engines were made mostly from steel and aluminum, but by the 1960s they were being fashioned mostly from titanium and “superalloys” like Inconel. Turbine blades, already difficult to fabricate in the 1950s, got even more complex, with elaborate internal structures to allow cooling air to flow through the turbine blade.

[…]

On a turbojet, the hot exhaust exits the engine at a high speed, but jet engines are at their most efficient when the exhaust stream is as slow as possible. Air moved by the fan around the sides of the engine will be much slower than the hot exhaust from the combustion chamber, improving engine fuel efficiency. This slower air also makes much less noise — an important factor, since people were getting fed up with the noise from jets. A large fan also makes it easier to increase engine thrust, making it possible to power larger, heavier aircraft.

[…]

By the 1970s, more than 30 years after the first jet-powered aircraft flew, it was still incredibly difficult and expensive to bring a new jet engine into service. Development costs were approaching a billion dollars: Rolls-Royce spent $874 million (close to $7 billion in 2025 dollars) to bring its RB211 into service, and delays and cost overages on the program bankrupted the company, forcing the British government to nationalize it.

[…]

The difficulty is building an engine that meets its various performance targets — thrust, fuel consumption, maintenance costs, and so on. There’s no point in designing a new engine if it doesn’t significantly improve on the state of the art, and that means engine development projects are constantly pushing technological boundaries: higher compression ratios, hotter temperatures, lighter weight, larger fans, and so on. An engine that isn’t an improvement over what’s already on the market won’t be competitive, and engine performance targets will often be contractual obligations with the aircraft manufacturers buying them.

Making these improvements requires constantly driving engine technology forward. Turbine blades, for instance, have been forced to get ever more advanced to withstand rising exhaust temperatures: modern turbine blades have elaborate internal cooling structures, are made from high-temperature superalloys like Inconel or titanium aluminide, and are often made from a single crystal to eliminate defects at material grain boundaries. And while the carbon fiber fan blades on the RB211 were unsuccessful, manufacturers didn’t give up, and such blades are used on the CFM LEAP engine.

[…]

A jet engine must direct and control an enormous amount of heat energy — a modern large jet engine will generate power on the order of 100 megawatts — and it must do so using as little mass as possible. A 1930s Ford V8 car engine weighed around 7 pounds for every horsepower it generated. A WWII aircraft piston engine weighed around 1 to 2 pounds per horsepower. The 50s-era J57 jet engine weighed closer to 0.1 to 0.2 pounds per horsepower it generated.

A commercial jet engine must operate for thousands of hours a year, year after year, before needing an overhaul, demanding high durability and high fatigue resistance. It must burn fuel at temperatures in the neighborhood of 3000°F or more, nearly double the melting point of the turbine materials used within them. Turbines and compressors must spin at more than 10,000 revolutions per minute, while simultaneously minimizing air leakage between stages to maximize performance and efficiency.

A commercial jet engine must operate across a huge range of atmospheric conditions – high temperatures, low temperatures, both sea level and high-altitude air pressures, different wind conditions, and so on. It must withstand rain, ice, hail, and bird strikes. It must be able to successfully contain a fan or turbine blade breaking off.

Posted in Technology | No Comments »

Candice Bergen, his girlfriend, had noted the disappearance, too

March 8th, 2025

Chaos by Tom O’NeillWithout Terry Melcher, Tom O’Neill explains (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties), there would have been no murders at 10050 Cielo Drive:

He was the clearest link between Manson and the Hollywood elite. A music-industry bigwig, he’d promised Manson a record deal only to renege on it. The official story was that Manson, reeling from the rejection, wanted to “instill fear” in Melcher — so he chose Melcher’s old house on Cielo Drive as the site for the first night of murders. He knew that Melcher didn’t live there anymore. He just wanted to give the guy a good scare.

[…]

Melcher testified that he’d met Manson exactly three times, the last of which was around May 20, 1969, more than two months before the murders. After Manson’s arrest, Melcher became so frightened of the Family that Bugliosi had to give him a tranquilizer to relax him before he testified. “Ten, fifteen years after the murders I’d speak to him and he was still convinced that the Manson Family was after him that night,” Bugliosi had told me.

If Manson had wanted to kill Melcher, he could have. He had Melcher’s new address in Malibu. Gregg Jakobson, a musician and a friend of the Beach Boys, had testified at the trial that Manson called him before the murders, asking him if Melcher had a “green spyglass.”

“Yes, why?” Jakobson answered.

“Well, he doesn’t anymore,” Manson said. The Family had “creepy-crawled” Melcher’s Malibu home — that’s what they called it when they dressed up in black and sneaked around rich people’s places — and stolen the spyglass. When Melcher himself testified, he confirmed that he’d noticed it missing around “late July or early August.” Candice Bergen, his girlfriend, had noted the disappearance, too.

Posted in Crime | 2 Comments »

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