This airplane flies in, it lands, it’s your generator

April 22nd, 2025

I recently mentioned Electra’s EL9 Ultra Short hybrid-electric aircraft, which purports to be a fixed-wing airplane that delivers the access of a helicopter with 100 times less noise, 70% lower cost, improved safety, and dramatically reduced emissions. The EL9 has potential for both civil and defense applications:

On the defense side, the EL9 could serve an important role in tactical last leg logistics, because it could carry cargo and then land in austere conditions or on nontraditional runway surfaces. Plus, Allen says, Electra’s aircraft can serve as a power source once on the ground.

“This airplane flies in, it lands, it’s your generator. You can charge drones from it. You can charge your communications gear,” he says. “It’s the Amazon Sprinter van for getting fuel and munitions to distributed operating bases across large ranges where you don’t have access, easy access to runways, to drop in big cargo planes.” (A growing number of Amazon’s vans are now electric, thanks to a partnership with Rivian to bring 100,000 electric delivery vehicles to roads by 2030.)

Researchers flipped the position of just two atoms in LSD’s molecular structure

April 21st, 2025

University of California, Davis, researchers have developed a new, neuroplasticity-promoting drug closely related to LSD with reduced hallucinogenic potential:

To design the drug, dubbed JRT, researchers flipped the position of just two atoms in LSD’s molecular structure. The chemical flip reduced JRT’s hallucinogenic potential while maintaining its neurotherapeutic properties, including its ability to spur neuronal growth and repair damaged neuronal connections that are often observed in the brains of those with neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative diseases.

[…]

JRT exhibited powerful neuroplastic effects and improved measures in mice relevant to the negative and cognitive symptoms of schizophrenia, without exacerbating behaviors and gene expression associated with psychosis.

[…]

Olson said that it took his team nearly five years to complete the 12-step synthesis process to produce JRT. The molecule was named after Jeremy R. Tuck, a former graduate student in Olson’s laboratory, who was the first to synthesize it and is a co-first author of the study along with Lee E. Dunlap, another former graduate student in Olson’s laboratory.

[…]

Key findings included:

  • JRT and LSD have the exact same molecular weight and overall shape, but distinct pharmacological properties.
  • JRT is very potent and highly selective for binding to serotonin receptors, specifically 5-HT2A receptors, the activation of which are key to promoting cortical neuron growth.
  • JRT promoted neuroplasticity, or growth between cellular connections in the brain, leading to a 46% increase in dendritic spine density and an 18% increase in synapse density in the prefrontal cortex.
  • JRT did not produce hallucinogenic-like behaviors that are typically seen when mice are dosed with LSD.
  • JRT did not promote gene expression associated with schizophrenia. Such gene expression is typically amplified with LSD use.
  • JRT produced robust anti-depressant effects, with it being around 100-fold more potent than ketamine, the state-of-the-art fast-acting anti-depressant.
  • JRT promoted cognitive flexibility, successfully addressing deficits in reversal learning that are associated with schizophrenia.

Russia has been able to place Ukrainian troops in untenable positions

April 20th, 2025

By combining ground troops, artillery (and drones), and glide bombs, into an “offensive triangle,” Russia has been able to place Ukrainian troops in untenable positions:

“First, the AFRF [Russian armed forces] continue to pin down Ukrainian ground forces on the line of contact with infantry and mechanized forces,” according to a study by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a British think tank.

“Second, they prevent maneuver and inflict attrition with first-person view (FPV) drones, Lancet drones, and artillery firing both high-explosive shells and scatterable mines.”

“Third, the AFRF has increased its use of UMPK glide bombs against Ukrainian forces who are holding defensive positions,” RUSI said. This “creates a competing dilemma: should the AFU [Ukrainian armed forces] hold and invest in static defensive positions to reduce attrition from FPVs and drone-enabled artillery, or retain mobility to avoid destruction from glide bomb strikes, which have the explosive yield to demolish or bury even well-prepared fortifications?”

[…]

The solution to resurrecting Russian airpower proved simple and lethal: glide bombs. By affixing its own satellite guidance system and wings to its huge Cold War stockpile of unguided “dumb bombs,” Russia created a cheap smart bomb that can dropped from up to 60 miles behind the front line.

This keeps Russian aircraft safely out of range of Ukrainian anti-aircraft missiles. While not as accurate as Western counterparts like America’s Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM), the Russian munitions are huge — up to 6,000 pounds or close to 3 metric tonnes — so that even a near miss will devastate Ukrainian entrenchments.

While some Western observers dismissed these weapons as a sign that Russia lacked the capacity to manufacture sophisticated smart bombs, no one is laughing now.

[…]

Already, Ukraine claims to have had success in jamming them, leading to a sharp decrease in accuracy. “The golden era of the ‘divine’ UMPK turned out to be short-lived,” lamented a Russian pilot on social media. Perhaps not coincidentally, the Russian advance has slowed in recent months.

Whatever he’d learned in Southeast Asia, he brought it back to L.A.

April 19th, 2025

Chaos by Tom O’Neill The most promising but frustrating of his inquiries, Tom O’Neill explains (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties), concerned an LAPD officer named William W. Herrmann:

Herrmann’s story hints at how intelligence agencies may have collaborated with police in Los Angeles.

A longtime lieutenant with the LAPD, Herrmann had an unusual background for law enforcement. He had a doctorate in psychology; he specialized in quelling insurgencies; he’d developed one of the first computer systems to track criminals and predict violent outbreaks in cities. Daryl Gates, the head of the LAPD from 1978 to 1992, hailed him as a “genius,” praising his technical aptitude in particular.

[…]

Concurrent with his time in the LAPD, he’d worked under contract for a dizzying list of American intelligence and military agencies: the air force, the Secret Service, the Treasury Department, the President’s Office of Science and Technology, the Institute for Defense Analysis, the Defense Industrial Security Clearance Office, and the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency. Most of his work for these groups remains classified.

You’d think these projects wouldn’t have left much free time, but Herrmann piled on even more work, taking leaves of absence from the LAPD to pursue side gigs with defense firms. These had opaque, generic names like Electro-Dash Optical Systems, System Development Corp., and Control Data Corp. This last, a supercomputer development firm in Minneapolis with military contracts, relied on Herrmann’s services for ten years, from 1961 to ’71—or so Herrmann told the FBI. When the Bureau went to Control Data Corp. for a background check, the company claimed that Herrmann never worked for them.

[…]

Having spent four months in 1967 training Thai police in counterinsurgency tactics, Herrmann returned to Asia in September 1968 to join the U.S. effort in South Vietnam. Documents from the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, listed him as a scientific “advisor” to the army. His responsibility was to train South Vietnamese police in “paramilitary techniques” to deploy against Viet Cong insurgents. None of the records described those techniques in any detail, but the mere mention of them was enough to make me put a few things together. The dates of Herrmann’s stint in Vietnam, his job description, his professional affiliations, and his training made it abundantly likely that he was working for a CIA project called Phoenix, one of the most controversial elements in the agency’s history.

Lyndon Johnson had secretly authorized Phoenix in 1968; it was discontinued in early ’71.

[…]

During the Senate hearings, a number of Phoenix operatives admitted to massacring civilians and making it appear that the atrocities were the work of the Viet Cong. Their hope was to “win the hearts and minds” of neutral Vietnamese citizens, compelling them to turn away from the insurgency in revulsion.

[…]

In 1968, CIA scientists at the Bien Hoa Prison outside Saigon surgically opened the skulls of three prisoners, implanted electrodes on their brains, gave them daggers, and left them alone in a room. They wanted to shock the prisoners into killing one another. When the effort failed, the prisoners were shot and their bodies burned.

According to Seymour Hersh’s 1972 book, Cover-Up, Phoenix had “committees” set up across all forty-four provinces in South Vietnam. They kept blacklists of Viet Cong fighters and had strict orders to meet weekly or monthly quotas of “neutralizations.” The whole operation relied on computerized indexes. The identity of its CIA leader never came to light—but whoever he was, he was there ostensibly as part of the Agency for International Development (AID), later revealed as a CIA front.

[…]

Whatever he’d learned in Southeast Asia, he brought it back to L.A.—his work in California bore disturbing resemblances to the techniques he’d honed as part of the Phoenix project.

[…]

Herrmann didn’t give many interviews, but when he spoke to the London Observer’s Charles Foley in May 1970, he was apparently in a voluble mood. Discussing his work for the task force, he described a program of spying and infiltration far exceeding the “studies” that the group was committed to—his words sounded as if they’d been lifted from COINTELPRO and CHAOS manuals. (Both of those operations, of course, were well under way in Los Angeles.)

Like Governor Reagan and President Johnson, Herrmann believed that California’s student dissidents were funded by foreign Communists. He told the Observer that he had a “secret plan” for “forestalling revolution in America.” The key was “to split off those bent on destroying the system from the mass of dissenters; then following classic guerilla warfare ‘theory’ to find means which will win their hearts and minds.” He called this plan, simply, “Saving America,” and it included strategies for “deeper penetration by undercover agents into dissenting groups,” such as “army agents pos[ ing] as students and news reporters.” In a turn worthy of Minority Report, he wanted to use mathematical probability models to predict when and where violence would erupt. He also called for the use of long-range electronic surveillance devices; if informants had already penetrated any “dissenting groups,” they would “secretly record speeches and conversations.”

[…]

I found a letter that Compton wrote to Herrmann on March 14, 1969, five months before the Tate–LaBianca murders, thanking him for “obtaining good advance intelligence… on subversives and militants.” The two had served together on the LAPD in the fifties, so I wasn’t surprised that they knew each other. I was surprised that Compton had written a note that all but proved that he and Herrmann were operating beyond their remit for the State of California. Neither man had any business gathering “advance intelligence” on “subversives and militants”—or on anyone else, for that matter. The DA’s office was supposed to prosecute crimes, not prevent them. And Herrmann, in his strenuous correction to the London Observer article, had stressed that his role was “nonoperational.”

The six-foot-long pilotless aircraft was disguised to look like an eagle or buzzard in flight

April 18th, 2025

Area 51 by Annie JacobsenDuring the 1970s, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), the CIA’s aviation efforts concentrated largely on pilotless aircraft, or drones:

Hank Meierdierck, the man who wrote the manual for the U-2 at Area 51, was in charge of one such CIA drone project, which began in late 1969. Code-named Aquiline, the six-foot-long pilotless aircraft was disguised to look like an eagle or buzzard in flight. It carried a small television camera in its nose and photo equipment and air-sampling sensors under its wings. Some insiders say it had been designed to test for radiation in the air as well as to gather electronic intelligence, or ELINT. But Gene Poteat, the first CIA officer ever assigned to the National Reconnaissance Office, offers a different version of events. “Spy satellites flying over the Caspian Sea delivered us images of an oddly shaped, giant, multi-engined watercraft moving around down there on the surface. No one had any idea what this thing was for, but you can be sure the Agency wanted to find out. That is what the original purpose of Aquiline was for,” Poteat reveals. “To take close-up pictures of the vehicle so we could discern what it was and what the Soviets might be thinking of using it for. Since we had no idea what it was, we made up a name for it. We called it the Caspian Sea Monster,” Poteat explains. Project Aquiline remains a classified project, but in September of 2008, BBC News magazine produced a story about a Cold War Soviet hydrofoil named Ekranoplan, which is exactly what the CIA’s Aquiline drone was designed to spy on.

At Area 51, Hank Meierdierck selected his former hunting partner Jim Freedman to assist him on the Aquiline drone program. “It flew low and was meant to follow along communication lines in foreign countries and intercept messages,” Freedman says. “I believe the plan was to launch it from a submarine while it was waiting in port.” The Aquiline team consisted of three pilots trained to remotely control the bird, with Freedman offering operational support. “Hank got the thing to fly,” Freedman recalls. Progress was slow and “it crash-landed a lot.” The program ended when the defense contractor, McDonnell Douglas, gave a bid for the job that Meierdierck felt was ninety-nine million dollars over budget. McDonnell Douglas would not budge on their bid so Hank recommended that the CIA cancel Project Aquiline, which he said they did. After the program was over, Hank Meierdierck managed to take a mock-up of the Aquiline drone home with him from the area. “He had it sitting on his bar at his house down in Las Vegas,” Freedman recalls.

[…]

Project Ornithopter involved a birdlike drone designed to blend in with nature by flapping its wings. And a third, even smaller drone was designed to look like a crow and land on windowsills in order to photograph what was going on inside CIA-targeted rooms. The tiniest drone program, orchestrated in the early 1970s, was Project Insectothopter, an insect-size aerial vehicle that looked like a dragonfly in flight. Insectothopter had an emerald green minifuselage and, like Ornithopter, flapped its wings, which were powered by a miniature engine that ran on a tiny amount of gas. Through its Office of Research and Development, or ORD, the CIA had also tried turning live birds and cats into spies. In one such program, CIA-trained pigeons flew around Washington, DC, with bird-size cameras strapped to their necks. The project failed after the extra weight tired out the pigeons and they hobbled back to headquarters on foot instead of in flight. Another CIA endeavor, Acoustic Kitty, involved putting electronic listening devices in house cats. But that project also backfired after too many cats strayed from their missions in search of food. One acoustic kitty got run over by a car.

[…]

During Jimmy Carter’s presidency, which began in 1977, CIA discretionary budgets were at an all-time low, and the CIA didn’t get very far with its drones — until late 1979, when the Agency learned about a lethal anthrax accident at a “probable biological warfare research, production and storage installation” in Sverdlovsk, Russia — the same location where Gary Powers had been taking spy photographs when his U-2 was shot down nineteen years before. As a result of the Sverdlovsk bioweapons accident, the CIA determined that as many as a hundred people had died from inhaling anthrax spores.

[…]

For twenty-five years, from 1974 to 1999, the CIA and the Air Force rarely worked together on drone projects at Area 51. This lack of cooperation was evident, and succinctly summed up in an interview Secretary of Defense Robert Gates gave Time magazine in April of 2008. Gates said that when he was running the CIA, in 1992, he discovered that “the Air Force would not co-fund with CIA a vehicle without a pilot.” That changed in the winter of 2000, when the two organizations came together to work on a new drone project at Area 51, one that would forever change the face of warfare and take both agencies toward General Henry “Hap” Arnold’s Victory Over Japan Day prediction that one day in the future, wars would be fought by aircraft without pilots sitting inside. In the year 2000, that future was now.

The project involved retrofitting a CIA reconnaissance drone, called Predator, with antitank missiles called Hellfire missiles, supplied by the army. The target would be a shadowy and obscure terrorist the CIA was considering for assassination. He lived in Afghanistan, and his name was Osama bin Laden.

Napoleon decreed that the widow of every soldier killed at Austerlitz would receive an annual pension of 200 francs for life

April 17th, 2025

Napoleon by Andrew RobertsSoon after the battle of Austerlitz, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), Napoleon decreed that the widow of every soldier killed there would receive an annual pension of 200 francs for life, with the widows of generals receiving 6,000 francs:

He also undertook to find employment for the sons of every fallen soldier, and allowed them to add ‘Napoleon’ to their baptismal names. He could afford this, and much else besides, thanks to the return of financial confidence that swept the country as government bonds leaped from 45 to 66 per cent of their face value on the news of the victory.

The Kaiser had limited authority over the land forces

April 16th, 2025

Between 1897 and 1914 Imperial Germany conducted its own geostrategic blunder of the highest order, when it unilaterally launched a naval arms race against the greatest sea power of the age in the Royal Navy:

One of the great peculiarities of the First World War, and in particular its nautical dimension, is that Germany and Great Britain, as late as the 1890’s, had no real sense that they were preparing to fight a war with each other. Well towards the end of the century, both German and British naval policy continued to view France (and to a lesser extent Russia) as the chief objects of anxiety.

[…]

In the early 1890’s, Germany’s navy was viewed fundamentally as a limited coastal defense force, designed and tasked with keeping the French and Russians away from Germany’s North Sea and Baltic coastlines, respectively.

[…]

The German Kaiser was both the head of state and the head of the armed forces, and he wielded power through his cabinets and the senior appointees within them. In practice, however, the Kaiser had limited authority over the land forces. The General Staff maintained absolute authority over war planning, and was free to appoint Chiefs of Staff to the field commanders (who were appointed by the Kaiser). The army thus had strong institutional control over both personnel and operations planning which were largely immune to the Kaiser’s direct interference.

The navy was much different, and far more subject to the Kaiser’s direct control. As a result, he tended to view it as something of a personal plaything. In wartime, the Kaiser had to personally approve naval operations, and he generally did so with great trepidation over losing “his ships.” Unlike the army, the navy had no institutional insulation from the Kaiser, and it lacked a strong central planning body akin to the army’s general staff.

[…]

Initially, there was a conventional admiralty, generally called simply the OK (for Oberkommando, or Naval High Command), which was nominally responsible for planning and combat operations. The OK was parallel to a separate office known as the RMA (for Reichsmarineamt, or Imperial Naval Office), which was responsible for the navy’s building program. Finally, there was a a Naval Cabinet which was responsible for personnel and appointments, and was directly subordinate to the Kaiser. In a sense, we can think of the Germany Navy as having its three critical functions (operations planning and command, material and shipbuilding, and personnel) split into three separate bodies which did not have direct institutional connections, and instead were separately suborned to the Kaiser.

This suggests, from the beginning, a fragmented command structure with the Kaiser at its nexus, and in the absence of a unified naval command it was inevitable that the Kaiser — mercurial, easily influenced, and largely ignorant of naval operations — should have dominated the navy as a service. Furthermore, the lack of unified command and clear lines of communication largely froze the navy out of war planning and made it a strategically autonomous service, which did not coordinate with the General Staff of the army and generally lacked a sense of how it could fit into Germany’s larger war plans.

[…]

Finally, we can add that because the German navy began as a strongly subsidiary service (relative to the army, which was always the main pillar of German strength), the navy was forced to actively promote itself to ensure its own survival and growth as a service. This made the German Navy intensely political, locked as it was in a perennial fight to get the Reichstag to appropriate money for shipbuilding. We can say, with little exaggeration, that the primary activity of the German Navy was shipbuilding, rather than war planning or tactical innovation.

This was particularly the case because the dominant figure in the prewar Imperial Navy was Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz. Undoubtedly a titanic figure, Tirpitz more than any other man was responsible for transforming the German Navy from a modest coastal defense force into a world class service capable of threatening (at least on paper) the Royal Navy.

[…]

Tirpitz was a Prussian, but in contrast to the usual Prussian pedigree he had joined the Navy as a young man, at a time when – by his own admission — it was not a particularly popular institution. He began his first serious leap towards high power in the 1880’s as the head of Germany’s torpedo program — notwithstanding his background in torpedo boats, however, he would become a staunch advocate of battleship construction and became the driving figure in the naval arms race which Germany would launch, almost unilaterally, against Great Britain.

[…]

Tirpitz was aggressive about aggrandizing power in whatever office he happened to hold at the time. During his years as chief of staff in the OK (Naval High Command), he argued that shipbuilding responsibilities should be taken away from the State Naval Secretary. Once Tirpitz was himself the State Naval Secretary, he lobbied to strip command authority from, and the ultimately dissolve, the OK. At both stops, he was skilled at manipulating the Kaiser — with whom he had an exceptional relationship — to get what he wanted, even threatening to resign on multiple occasions.

[…]

The embryo of Tirpitz’s evolving theory of naval power was his growing concern that, in some future war, the enemy might attempt to blockade German ports at long distance — that is to say, rather than conducting a close-in blockade of German harbors, the enemy fleet might loiter at strategic standoff and intercept German trade as it flowed through traffic chokepoints. It seems that at the beginning, the specific anxiety that preoccupied Tirpitz was the possibility that France might interdict German trade in the English Channel and the North Sea, at a distance beyond the fighting range of Germany’s coastal fleets.

If this were the case, then the entire German naval strategy might be obsolete. A blockade at range would compel the German fleet to come out from its own coastal areas to defeat the enemy on the open sea. This marked a conceptual shift from coastal defense to “sea control”, which necessitated in turn an entirely different sort of battlefleet prepared to fight a decisive battle far from German bases.

[…]

Nothing about the German operational sensibility at this time was remotely realistic. A draft operations plan in 1895 envisioned a blockade of French channel ports designed to draw the French fleet out for battle. This was an elementary sort of formulation which ignored the fact that the French Northern Fleet would simply wait for reinforcements from the Mediterranean, and to make the plan work (even on paper) the OK assumed that repair and resupply could be done in English ports. This latter point is important, as it emphasizes that in 1895, rather than thinking of a war with the Royal Navy, the Germans were not only still preoccupied with France but even assuming that England would be a friendly neutral.

[…]

Tirpitz was determined to build a viable and powerful fleet comprised of battleships, but to do so he needed a strategic vision that could justify such a program. Neither Russia nor France was a good fit for the Mahanian understanding of war, with its emphasis on “Sea Supremacy.” In any war against the Franco-Russian alliance, whatever the particular configuration, it was inevitable that the German Army would be the arm on which the country lived or died. A Navy designed for decisive fleet battle and sea supremacy implied, almost by definition, that the Royal Navy was an adversary. Russia and France could never be defeated by sea, therefore Tirpitz needed an adversarial standard which would require, unequivocally, a fleet of battleships.

The enemy will snuff out one life, dozens, hundreds or thousands without any qualms if this would further his aims

April 15th, 2025

Total Resistance by H. Von DachThe 1957 military manual Total Resistance is the only Swiss book to ever land on Germany’s banned books list:

“One thing is certain,” the guide states. “The enemy will show no mercy.”

“The enemy will snuff out one life, dozens, hundreds or thousands without any qualms if this would further his aims. The captured soldier will face deportation, forced labor or death. But so will the worker, the employee, the self-employed and the housewife.”

Von Dach’s proposed solution was to arm and prepare these everyday people for a guerrilla war waged from mountains and the radioactive ruins of Swiss cities.

For a lot of reasons, the Swiss military never officially adopted the manual. The 173-page guide begins with the assumption that the Swiss army no longer exists as a cohesive fighting force in the aftermath of an invasion.

Yet the book was arguably more influential outside the country. German left-wing terrorists studied it during the Red Army Faction’s heydays during the 1970s and 1980s.

The German Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young Persons banned the book — only putting it up for review in 2013.

[…]

Translations spread globally, according to the Zurich newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung. America’s Special Operations Forces read it. The book circulated in Lebanon during the country’s civil war. Vietnamese insurgents allegedly studied it during the 1960s.

But there’s not much evidence the Swiss military took the book very seriously.

[…]

There’s techniques on how to avoid patrolling helicopters and hiding incriminating documents. There’s tips for sabotaging railroads, power lines and parked aircraft. The guide has battle tactics for surrounding and overrunning isolated outposts.

There’s even illustrations on “disposing of guards without any notice” with an axe. “Obliquely between the small of the back and loin,” the book states.

Perhaps showing its age, the guide recommends keeping a reserve of horses and wagons near planned ambushes—for carrying captured supplies away.

Although unofficial, Von Dach’s book did influence Swiss military exercises well into the 1990s. Soldiers learned how to attacks tanks with grenades attached to gasoline cans—a technique similar to those found in Total Resistance.

They’re arguments that could be defused but aren’t

April 14th, 2025

Unforgiving Places by Jens LudwigTyler Cowen cites “the new and interesting” Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence, by Jens Ludwig:

An estimated 80 percent [of U.S.gun shootings] seem to instead be crimes of passion — including rage.  They’re arguments that could be defused but aren’t, then end in tragedy because someone has a gun.  Most violent crimes are the result of human behavior gone temporarily haywire, not premeditated acts for financial benefit.

I can’t be sure if his surprise is feigned or sincere.

Joe Lonsdale presents a blueprint for FDA reform

April 13th, 2025

The new FDA report from Joe Lonsdale and team is impressive, Alex Tabarrok says, as he shares a few of the recommendation which caught his eye:

In the U.S., anyone running a clinical trial must manufacture their product under full Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) regardless of stage. This adds enormous cost (often $10M+) and more importantly, as much as a year’s delay to early-stage research. Beyond the cost and time, these requirements are outright irrational: for example, the FDA often requires three months of stability testing for a drug patients will receive after two weeks. Why do we care if it’s stable after we’ve already administered it? Or take AAV manufacturing—the FDA requires both a potency assay and an infectivity assay, even though potency necessarily reflects infectivity.

This change would not be unprecedented either. By contrast, countries like Australia and China permit Phase 1 trials with non-GMP drug with no evidence of increased patient harm.

[…]

With modern AI and digital infrastructure, trials should be designed for machine-readable outputs that flow directly to FDA systems, allowing regulators to review data as it accumulates without breaking blinding. No more waiting nine months for report writing or twelve months for post-trial review. The FDA should create standard data formats (akin to GAAP in finance) and waive documentation requirements for data it already ingests. In parallel, the agency should partner with a top AI company to train an LLM on historical submissions, triaging reviewer workload so human attention is focused only where the model flags concern. The goal is simple: get to “yes” or “no” within weeks, not years.

[…]

When negative results aren’t published, companies duplicate failed efforts, investors misallocate capital, and scientists miss opportunities to refine hypotheses. Publishing all trial outcomes — positive or negative—creates a shared base of knowledge that makes drug development faster, cheaper, and more rational. Silence benefits no one except underperforming sponsors; transparency accelerates innovation.

The FDA already has the authority to do so under section 801 of the FDAAA, but failed to adopt a more expansive rule in the past when it created clinicaltrials.gov. Every trial on clincaltrials.gov should have a publication associated with it that is accessible to the public, to benefit from the sacrifices inherent in a patient participating in a clinical trial.

[…]

We need multiple competing approval frameworks within HHS and/or FDA. Agencies like the VA, Medicare, Medicaid, or the Indian Health Service should be empowered to greenlight therapies for their unique populations. Just as the DoD uses elite Special Operations teams to pioneer new capabilities, HHS should create high-agency “SWAT teams” that experiment with novel approval models, monitor outcomes in real time using consumer tech like wearables and remote diagnostics, and publish findings transparently. Let the best frameworks rise through internal competition—not by decree, but by results.

CHAOS was born of Lyndon Johnson’s neurosis

April 12th, 2025

Chaos by Tom O’NeillThe Church Committee looked into one of the most notorious COINTELPRO actions in L.A., Tom O’Neill explains (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties), the framing of Gerard “Geronimo” Pratt, a Black Panther and a decorated Vietnam vet:

Pratt would be imprisoned for twenty-seven years for a murder the FBI knew he didn’t commit. He was in Oakland at the time of the crime, four hundred miles away, at a Black Panther house that the Bureau had wiretapped. It had transcripts of a call he’d made to the Panther headquarters in Los Angeles just hours before the murder. Still, Bureau agents enlisted a federal informant to lie on the stand about Pratt’s involvement. Even before the frame-up, FBI gunmen had attempted to kill Pratt by shooting at him through the window of his apartment; he survived only because a spine injury he’d sustained in the war made it more comfortable to sleep on the floor.

Pratt was serving a life sentence when the Church Committee released its landmark findings, confirming what he’d long suspected: LASO and the LAPD were complicit in the COINTELPRO operation. The committee quoted a report that the FBI’s Los Angeles outpost had sent to Hoover himself, advising that “the Los Angeles [Field] Office [of the FBI] is furnishing on a daily basis information to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office Intelligence Division and the Los Angeles Police Department Intelligence and Criminal Conspiracy Divisions concerning the activities of black nationalist groups in the anticipation that such information might lead to the arrest of the militants.” By the Church Committee’s estimation, this meant that Los Angeles law enforcement was guilty of obstructing justice and hindering prosecution.

In August 1967, the same month Hoover launched COINTELPRO, CIA director Richard Helms inaugurated the agency’s domestic surveillance program, CHAOS, which also infiltrated “subversive” groups and “neutralized” them:

CHAOS was born of Lyndon Johnson’s neurosis. In the summer of ’67, the president was convinced that the divided, disorderly America he led couldn’t possibly be the product of his own policies. Foreign agents, and presumably foreign money, must be to blame. He ordered the CIA to prove that the nation’s dissidents, and especially its antiwar movement, had their origins abroad.

Richard Helms complied without hesitation. In the six years that followed, the CIA tracked thousands of Americans, insulating its information gathering so thoroughly that even those at the top of its counterintelligence division were clueless about its domestic surveillance. CHAOS kept tabs on three hundred thousand people, more than seven thousand of them American citizens. The agency shared information with the FBI, the White House, and the Justice Department. At its peak, CHAOS had fifty-two dedicated agents, most of whom served to infiltrate antiwar groups, like their counterparts in the FBI. Undercover, they hoped to identify Russian instigators, although they never found any. With the Interdivision Intelligence Unit (IDIU), a new branch of the Justice Department outfitted with sophisticated computerized databases, they collaborated on a list of more than ten thousand names, all thought to be dangerous activists; the IDIU produced regular reports on these people, hoping to predict their activities.

The journalist Seymour Hersh got wind of CHAOS late in 1974. He told James Jesus Angleton, the head of CIA counterintelligence, and William Colby, the director of the CIA, that he had a story “bigger than My Lai” about CIA domestic activities. Colby was forced to admit that Hersh’s findings were accurate, and Angleton resigned from the agency. The story broke on December 22, on the front page of the New York Times: “Huge CIA Operation Reported in U.S. Against Anti-War Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years.”

The Church Committee probed the CIA’s illegal activities, as did a separate government investigation, the Rockefeller Commission—but neither was able to penetrate the agency’s veil of secrecy. Since the CIA has no right to operate on American soil, the program should have brought even more censure than COINTELPRO; instead, it drew only a muted response. CIA leadership stonewalled at every opportunity. Even if they hadn’t, investigators were crippled by the dearth of information. When Richard Helms had disbanded CHAOS before leaving office in 1973, he ordered the destruction of every file pertaining to it, and since the seventies, almost nothing has come out. The operation hardly left a footprint.

[…]

In a memoir, former CIA director Colby later claimed that President Gerald Ford fired him for refusing to help Rockefeller sabotage his own investigation. According to Colby, CHAOS was so highly classified that even he, the director of the CIA, didn’t have access to it. “I found it impossible to do much about whatever was wrong with [CHAOS],” he wrote. “Its super-secrecy and extreme compartmentalization kept me very much on its periphery.”

It would be another four years before the public had any idea the F-117 Nighthawk existed

April 11th, 2025

Area 51 by Annie Jacobsen With 267 combat missions under his belt, 44 in Korea and 213 in Vietnam, Robert M. Bond was a highly decorated Air Force pilot and vice commander of Air Force Systems Command at Andrews Air Force Base, in Maryland, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), which made him a VIP when he visited the F-117 program at Area 51 in March, 1984:

But in addition to being impressed by the F-117 Nighthawk, General Bond was equally fascinated by the MiG program, which was still going on at Area 51. In the fifteen years since the CIA had gotten its hands on Munir Redfa’s MiG-21, the Agency and the Air Force had acquired a fleet of Soviet-made aircraft including an MiG-15, an MiG-17, and, most recently, the supersonic MiG-23. Barnes says, “We called it the Flogger. It was a very fast plane, almost Mach 3. But it was squirrelly. Hard to fly. It could kill you if you weren’t well trained.”

On a visit to Area 51 the following month, General Bond requested to fly the MiG-23. “There was some debate about whether the general should be allowed to fly,” Barnes explains. “Every hour in a Soviet airplane was precious. We did not have spare parts. We could not afford unnecessary wear and tear. Usually a pilot would train for at least two weeks before flying a MiG. Instead, General Bond got a briefing while sitting inside the plane with an instructor pilot saying, ‘Do this, do that.’” In other words, instead of undergoing two weeks of training, General Bond pulled rank.

General Bond’s death opened the possible exposure of five secret programs and facilities, including the MiG program, the F-117 program, Area 51, Area 52, and the nuclear reactor explosions at Jackass Flats. Unlike the deaths of CIA pilots flying out of Area 51, which could be concealed as generic training accidents, the death of a general required detailed explanation. If the press asked too many questions, it could trigger a federal investigation. One program had to come out of the dark to keep the others hidden. The Pentagon made the decision to out the MiG. Quietly, Fred Hoffman, a military writer with the Associated Press, was “leaked” information that Bond had in fact died at the controls of a Soviet MiG-23. The emphasis was put on how the Pentagon was able to obtain Soviet-bloc aircraft and weaponry from allies in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. “The government has always been reluctant to discuss such acquisitions for fear of embarrassing the friendly donors, but the spotlight was turned anew on the subject after a three-star Air Force general was killed April 26 in a Nevada plane crash that was quickly cloaked in secrecy,” Hoffman wrote, adding “sources who spoke on condition they remain anonymous have indicated the MiG-23, the most advanced Soviet warplane ever to fall permanently into U.S. hands, was supplied to this country by Egypt.”

[…]

It would be another four years before the public had any idea the F-117 Nighthawk existed. In November of 1988, a grainy image of the arrowhead-shaped, futuristic-looking craft was released to an awestruck public despite the fact that variations of the F-117 had been flying at Area 51 and Area 52 for eleven years.

Recent excavations turned up only a dozen corpses and a couple of guns

April 10th, 2025

Napoleon by Andrew RobertsAndrew Roberts dispels a myth (in Napoleon: A Life) about the Battle of Austerlitz:

Buxhöwden’s Russian force was split in two and fled east of the frozen lakes and across them, whereupon Napoleon had his gunners open fire on the ice. This incident led to the myth that thousands of Russians drowned as the ice cracked, though recent excavations of the reclaimed land at Lake Satschan turned up only a dozen corpses and a couple of guns.

The modern world, for better or worse, springs from Europe

April 9th, 2025

Prisoners of Geography by Tim MarshallThe modern world, for better or worse, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), springs from Europe:

This western outpost of the great Eurasian landmass gave birth to the Enlightenment, which led to the Industrial Revolution, which has resulted in what we now see around us every day.

[…]

The climate, fed by the Gulf Stream, blessed the region with the right amount of rainfall to cultivate crops on a large scale, and the right type of soil for them to flourish in. This allowed for population growth in an area in which, for most, work was possible year-round, even in the height of summer. Winter actually adds a bonus, with temperatures warm enough to work in but cold enough to kill off many of the germs, which to this day plague huge parts of the rest of the world.

[…]

Western Europe has no real deserts, the frozen wastes are confined to a few areas in the far north, and earthquakes, volcanoes, and massive flooding are rare. The rivers are long, flat, navigable, and made for trade. As they empty into a variety of seas and oceans, they flow into coastlines that are—west, north, and south—abundant in natural harbors.

[…]

The various tribes of the Iberian Peninsula, for example, prevented from expanding north into France by the presence of the Pyrenees, gradually came together, over thousands of years, to form Spain and Portugal—and even Spain is not an entirely united country, with Catalonia increasingly vocal about wanting its independence. France has also been formed by natural barriers, framed as it is by the Pyrenees, the Alps, the Rhine, and the Atlantic Ocean.

Europe’s major rivers do not meet (unless you count the Sava, which drains into the Danube in Belgrade). This partly explains why there are so many countries in what is a relatively small space. Because they do not connect, most of the rivers act, at some point, as boundaries, and each is a sphere of economic influence in its own right; this gave rise to at least one major urban development on the banks of each river, some of which in turn became capital cities.

Europe’s second longest river, the Danube (1,771 miles), is a case in point. It rises in Germany’s Black Forest and flows south on its way to the Black Sea. In all, the Danube basin affects eighteen countries and forms natural borders along the way, including those of Slovakia and Hungary, Croatia and Serbia, Serbia and Romania, and Romania and Bulgaria. More than two thousand years ago it was one of the borders of the Roman Empire, which in turn helped it to become one of the great trading routes of medieval times and gave rise to the present capital cities of Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest, and Belgrade. It also formed the natural border of two subsequent empires, the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman.

[…]

The countries of northern Europe have been richer than those of the south for several centuries. The north industrialized earlier than the south and so has been more economically successful. As many of the northern countries comprise the heartland of Western Europe, their trade links were easier to maintain, and one wealthy neighbor could trade with another—whereas the Spanish, for example, either had to cross the Pyrenees to trade, or look to the limited markets of Portugal and North Africa.

[…]

There are also unprovable theories that the domination of Catholicism in the south has held it back, whereas the Protestant work ethic propelled the northern countries to greater heights. Each time I visit the Bavarian city of Munich, I reflect on this theory, and while driving past the gleaming temples of the headquarters of BMW, Allianz, and Siemens I have cause to doubt it. In Germany, 34 percent of the population is Catholic, and Bavaria itself is predominantly Catholic, yet their religious predilections do not appear to have influenced either their progress or their insistence that Greeks work harder and pay more taxes.

[…]

France is the only European country to be both a northern and southern power. It contains the largest expanse of fertile land in Western Europe, and many of its rivers connect with one another; one flows west all the way to the Atlantic (the Seine), another south to the Mediterranean (the Rhône). These factors, together with France’s relative flatness, were suitable for the unification of regions, and—especially from the time of Napoleon—centralization of power.

[…]

The south of Italy, for example, is still well behind the north in terms of development, and although it has been a unified state (including Venice and Rome) since 1871, the strains of the rift between north and south are greater now than they have been since before the Second World War. The heavy industry, tourism, and financial centers of the north have long meant a higher standard of living there, leading to the formation of political parties agitating for cutting state subsidies to the south, or even breaking away from it.

Spain is also struggling, and has always struggled because of its geography. Its narrow coastal plains have poor soil, and access to markets is hindered internally by its short rivers and the Meseta Central, a highland plateau surrounded by mountain ranges, some of which cut through it. Trade with Western Europe is further hampered by the Pyrenees, and any markets to its south on the other side of the Mediterranean are in developing countries with limited income. It was left behind after the Second World War, as under the Franco dictatorship it was politically frozen out of much of modern Europe. Franco died in 1975 and the newly democratic Spain joined the EU in 1986. By the 1990s, it had begun to catch up with the rest of Western Europe, but its inherent geographical and financial weaknesses continue to hold it back and have intensified the problems of overspending and loose central fiscal control. It has been among the countries hit worst by the 2008 economic crisis.

[…]

Much of the Greek coastline comprises steep cliffs and there are few coastal plains for agriculture. Inland are more steep cliffs, rivers that will not allow transportation, and few wide, fertile valleys. What agricultural land there is is of high quality; the problem is that there is too little of it to allow Greece to become a major agricultural exporter, or to develop more than a handful of major urban areas containing highly educated, highly skilled, and technologically advanced populations. Its situation is further exacerbated by its location, with Athens positioned at the tip of a peninsula, almost cut off from land trade with Europe. It is reliant on the Aegean Sea for access to maritime trade in the region—but across that sea lies Turkey, a large potential enemy.

[…]

It didn’t take long for people in Germany to point out that they were working until sixty-five but paying taxes that were going to Greece so that people could retire at fifty-five. They then asked “Why?” And the answer, “In sickness and in health,” was unsatisfactory.

[…]

The trauma of two world wars, followed by seven decades of peace and then the collapse of the Soviet Union persuaded many people that Western Europe was a “post-conflict” region.

[…]

The corridor of the North European Plain is at its narrowest between Poland’s Baltic coast in the north and the beginning of the Carpathian Mountains in the south. This is where, from a Russian military perspective, the best defensive line could be placed or, from an attacker’s viewpoint, the place at which its forces would be squeezed together before breaking out toward Russia.

The Poles have seen it both ways, as armies have swept east and west across it, frequently changing borders. If you take The Times Atlas of European History and flick through the pages quickly as if it were a flip book, you see Poland emerge circa 1000 CE, then continually change shape, disappear, and reappear until assuming its present form in the late twentieth century.

[…]

In 1999, Poland joined NATO, extending the Alliance’s reach four hundred miles closer to Moscow. By then, several other former Warsaw Pact countries were also members of the Alliance, and in 1999 Moscow watched helplessly as NATO went to war with its ally, Serbia. In the 1990s, Russia was in no position to push back, but after the chaos of the Yeltsin years, Putin stepped in on the front foot and came out swinging.

[…]

Denmark is already a NATO member, and the recent resurgence of Russia has caused a debate in Sweden over whether it is time to abandon the neutrality of two centuries and join the Alliance. In 2013, Russian jets staged a mock bombing run on Sweden in the middle of the night. The Swedish defense system appears to have been asleep, failing to scramble any jets, and it was the Danish air force that took to the skies to shepherd the Russians away. Despite that, the majority of Swedes remain against NATO membership, but the debate is ongoing, informed by Moscow’s statement that it would be forced to “respond” if either Sweden or Finland were to join the Alliance.

[…]

What is now the EU was set up so that France and Germany could hug each other so tightly in a loving embrace that neither would be able to get an arm free with which to punch the other. It has worked brilliantly and created a huge geographical space now encompassing the biggest economy in the world.

[…]

The Germans were involved in the machinations that overthrew Ukraine’s President Yanukovych in 2014 and they were sharply critical of Russia’s subsequent annexation of Crimea. However, mindful of the gas pipelines, Berlin was noticeably more restrained in its criticism and support for sanctions than, for example, the UK, which is far less reliant on Russian energy.

[…]

Geographically, the Brits are in a good place. Good farmland, decent rivers, excellent access to the seas and their fish stocks, close enough to the European continent to trade, and yet protected by dint of being an island race—there have been times when the UK gave thanks for its geography as wars and revolutions swept over its neighbors.

[…]

There is a theory that the relative security of the UK over the past few hundred years is why it has experienced more freedom and less despotism than the countries across the channel. The theory goes that there were fewer requirements for “strong men” or dictators, which, starting with the Magna Carta (1215) and then the Provisions of Oxford (1258), led to forms of democracy years ahead of other countries.

[…]

Its location still grants it certain strategic advantages, one of which is the GIUK gap. This is a choke point in the world’s sea-lanes—it is hardly as important as the Strait of Hormuz or the Strait of Malacca, but it has traditionally given the UK an advantage in the North Atlantic.

[…]

The GIUK is one of many reasons why London flew into a panic in 2014 when, briefly, the vote on Scottish independence looked as if it might result in a yes. The loss of power in the North Sea and North Atlantic would have been a strategic blow to and a massive dent in the prestige of whatever was left of the UK.

[…]

Prejudice against immigrants always rises during times of economic recession such as recently suffered in Europe, and the effects have been seen across the continent and have resulted in the rise of right-wing political parties, all of which militate against pan-nationalism and thus weaken the fabric of the EU. A stark example came in early 2016 when for the first time in half a century, Sweden began checking the documents of travelers from Denmark. This was a direct response to the waves of refugees and migrants flowing into northern Europe from the wider Middle East and the ISIS attacks on Paris in December 2015. The idea of the EU’s “Schengen Area,” a border-free area composed of twenty-six countries, has taken some heavy blows with different countries, at different times, reintroducing border controls on the grounds of security.

“All-Ukrainian” FPV drones?

April 8th, 2025

Last month, Ukrainian makers Vyriy Drone performed an official handover of the first batch of 1,000 “all-Ukrainian” FPV drones:

It is important to note that some of the electronic chips in that make up devices may in fact come from China or other countries. But these are simple building blocks, commodity products which can be sourced from the U.S. and Japan. They are very different to specialist end products for drones like flight controllers.

[…]

“Initially, there was a generally accepted opinion that China could not be beaten on price,” Ukrainian analyst Serhii Flash wrote on his Telegram channel. “Never. But competition, time, volumes, optimization of business processes work wonders.”

Flash shares a graph showing how the prices of various locally made components including motors, frames and propellers have dropped an average of around 50% over the last two years.

Frames and propellers are relatively easy to make without a major investment in production machinery. Other components are more challenging. In 2024 we reported on how Ukrainian makers Wild Hornets were making their own flight controllers on a robotic assembly line, and later set up a similar process to make their own drone batteries.

Specialist companies have gone further. Thermal imagers are a particular challenge, and FPV makers have spent considerable time and effort finding Chinese suppliers who meet their requirements for cost and capability. In other countries, the defence sector makes it own high-end thermal imagers and price is not a factor. Drone makers are on a tighter budget. A $2,000 military imager is not a viable proposition for a $400 FPV,

In October 2024 Ukrainian start-up Odd Systems announced that they were producing locally-made thermal imagers. These are comparable to Chinese 256×192 pixel imagers, but about 20% cheaper at $250. Odd Systems say they when they can make their Kurbas-256 in volume the unit price will drop even further.

Importantly the Kurbas-256 is designed for FPVs rather than general industrial use. The developers talked to users about their combat experience with commercial Chinese thermal imaging cameras and modified their design accordingly. For example, some Chinese cameras suffer from condensation forming inside them, making them unusable, so Kurbas cameras come in a sealed unit sealed to prevent condensation.

“We studied the experience and considered the wishes of FPV operators. We have created a Ukrainian product with full control of hardware and low-level software,” the company told Militaryni.

For example, the operator can adjust the output of the Kurbas-256 in flight, changing contrast for a clearer image depending on conditions. Also, most thermal cameras have automatic calibration which sometimes freezes the image for several seconds. This is not an issue for most applications but disastrous on a drone, so Odd Systems’ cameras do not have this ‘feature’.