If war comes to Taiwan, the most critical and at-risk roles may not wear body armor or carry rifles

May 20th, 2025

The Department of Defense is now squarely focused on China, Thomas Shugart explains, with deterring or defeating a potential invasion of Taiwan as its top operational priority:

The Pentagon’s strategy is likely grounded in denial—aiming to prevent the PLA from achieving its objectives in the first place, rather than simply responding after the fact. Reflecting this shift, the U.S. Army is undergoing a major transformation, moving away from some traditional maneuver formations and toward long-range fires, autonomous systems, and electronic warfare.

[…]

A war over Taiwan, if it comes, will not resemble the last one the United States fought. It will not be won by the kinds of small-unit, ground-centric operations that defined the Global War on Terror. It will be decided—perhaps before the first shot is fired—by which side can sense more, strike faster, and impose greater disruption. More specifically, it will be decided in the air, at sea, in space, and across the electromagnetic spectrum. “Trigger-pullers” of either side may ultimately finish the war on the ground, but its outcome will have been largely decided—and in some cases predetermined—by “button-pushers” who control information, aircraft, ships, submarines, drones, and precision fires.

[…]

Two decades of GWOT reinforced the picture of a soldier (or sailor) in camouflage with a rifle and night vision, operating in villages or mountains. In fact, for years now even U.S. Navy uniforms have come to reflect that idea. But in a Taiwan scenario, the key variables will be control of the air and sea by air and naval units, supported by long range strike, resilient ISR, reliable satellite access, and spectrum control. Ground troops will still fight with courage, skill—and if necessary, sacrifice. Yet if China achieves air and maritime dominance, its landing force will be able to reinforce at will from China’s near-inexhaustible number of ground troops—and Taiwan’s ground forces, no matter how motivated, will eventually be overrun. Conversely, if the PLA loses control of the air and sea, its invasion force will be stranded, exposed, and defeated. Likewise, no matter how well-trained, well-equipped, or numerous U.S. ground forces might be, if China secures air and naval superiority in the early phases of the conflict, those forces will never reach the battlefield: reinforcement and resupply at scale across the Pacific will be impossible in a contested or denied maritime environment. Strategic access hinges on winning the air and sea fight first. Again, the outcome will have been decided at sea and in the air.

We have seen this pattern before. In the early months of World War II, U.S. and Filipino forces in the Philippines fought with determination and courage. But despite their best efforts, they were ultimately forced to surrender—not for lack of grit or leadership, but because sea and air control around the Philippines had been lost to Japan. Cut off from reinforcement and resupply, these troops were eventually subjected to the Bataan Death March, one of the war’s most infamous atrocities. Their defeat was not the result of tactical failure at the unit level, but of larger operational conditions set by loss of control of the surrounding maritime and air domains. It would take the United States years of sustained naval and air campaigning to fight its way back across the Pacific and reverse the strategic tide.

Similarly, on Guadalcanal the fight on land was intense and costly, but it was control of the surrounding sea and air that determined the result. In fact, more American sailors died in the waters around Guadalcanal than Marines and soldiers died on the island. The same war offers a reminder that the most dangerous roles were often off the traditional battlefield. RAF Bomber Command suffered a 44% fatality rate. U.S. submariners lost 22% of their force—one of the highest fatality rates in the U.S. military during World War II and more than ten times the average for the rest of the Navy. If war comes to Taiwan, the most critical and at-risk roles may not wear body armor or carry rifles, but instead fly aircraft and crew ships, manage satellites, operate kill chains, or maintain resilient communications.

The PLA understands this dynamic. In 2024, it announced a sweeping reorganization that created three new co-equal forces: the Aerospace Force, the Cyberspace Force, and the Information Support Force.

[…]

The United States must demonstrate that even a well-planned first strike will not ensure Chinese success. This requires hardened, distributed networks, prepositioned capabilities, and personnel trained to operate through disruption.

This is a solution for slow-firing but powerful ranged weapons

May 19th, 2025

Bret Devereaux explains why archers didn’t volley fire:

You know the scene: the general readies his archers, he orders them to ‘draw!’ and then holds up his hand with that ‘wait for it’ gesture and then shouts ‘loose!’ (or worse yet, ‘fire!’) and all of the archers release at once, producing a giant cloud of arrows. And then those arrows hit the enemy, with whole ranks collapsing and wounded soldiers falling over everywhere.

[…]

Archers didn’t engage in coordinated all-at-once shooting (called ‘volley fire’), they did not shoot in volleys because there wouldn’t be any point to do so. Indeed, part of the reason there was such confusion over what a general is supposed to shout instead of ‘fire!’ is that historical tactical manuals don’t generally have commands for coordinated bow shooting because armies didn’t do coordinated bow shooting. Instead, archers generated a ‘hail’ or ‘rain’ (those are the typical metaphors) of arrows as each archer shot in their own best time.

More to the point, they could not shoot in volleys. And even if they had shot in volleys, those volleys wouldn’t produce anything like the impact we regularly see in film or TV.

[…]

We want to start by understanding what volley fire is and what it is for. Put simply, ‘volley fire’ is the tactic of having a whole bunch of soldiers with ranged weapons (typically guns) fire in coordinated groups: sometimes with the entire unit all firing at once or with specific sub-components of the unit firing in coordinated fashion, as with the ‘counter-march.’ In both cases, the problem that volley fire is trying to overcome is slow weapon reload times: this is a solution for slow-firing but powerful ranged weapons.

[…]

Volley fire can cover for the slow reload rate of guns or crossbows in two ways. The first are volley fire drills designed to ensure a continuous curtain of fire; the most famous of these is the ‘counter-march,’ a drill where arquebuses or muskets are deployed several ranks deep (as many as six). The front rank fires a volley (that is, they all fire together) and then rush to the back of their file to begin reloading, allowing the next rank to fire, and so on. By the time the last rank has fired, the whole formation has moved backwards slightly (thus ‘counter’ march) and the first rank has finished reloading and is ready to fire. The problem this is solving is the danger of an enemy, especially cavalry, crossing the entire effective range of the weapon in the long gap between shots.

[…]

The other classic use is volley-and-charge. Because firearms are very lethal but slow to reload, it could be very effective to march in close order right up to an enemy, dump a single volley by the entire unit into them to cause mass casualties and confusion and then immediately charge with pikes or bayonets to try to capitalize on the enemy being demoralized and confused.

[…]

Crucially, note that volley-and-charge works because it compresses a lot of lethality into a very short time, which I suspect is why we don’t see it with bows or crossbows (but do see it with javelins, which may have shorter range and far fewer projectiles, but seem to have had higher lethality per projectile). As we’re going to see in a moment, the lethality of bows or crossbows against armored, shielded infantry – even in close order – was pretty low at any given moment and needed to add up over an extended period of shooting.

[…]

But as you’ve hopefully noted, these tactics are built around firearms with their long reload times: good soldiers might be able to reload a matchlock musket in 20-30 seconds or so. But traditional bows do not have this limitation: a good archer can put six or more arrows into the air in a minute (although doing so will exhaust the archer quite quickly), so there simply isn’t some large 30-second fire gap to cover over with these tactics. As a result volley fire doesn’t offer any advantages for traditional bow-users.

[…]

Of course the other reason we can be reasonably sure that ancient or medieval armies using traditional bows did not engage in volley fire is that they couldn’t. You will note in those movie scenes, that the commander invariably gives the order to ‘draw’ and then waits for the right moment before shouting ‘release!’ (or worse yet ‘fire!’). The thing is: how much energy does it take to hold that bow at ready? The key question here is the bow’s ‘draw’ or ‘pullback’ which is generally expressed in the pounds of force necessary to draw and hold the bow at full draw. Most prop bows have extremely low pulls to enable actors to manipulate them very easily; if you look closely, you can often see this because the bowstrings are under such little tension that they visibly sway and wobble as the bow is moved. This also helps a film production because it means that an arrow coming off of such a bow isn’t going to be moving all that fast and so is a lot less dangerous and easier to make ‘safe.’

[…]

Which neatly answers why no one had their archers hold their bows at draw to synchronize fire: you’d exhaust your archers very quickly. Instead, war bow firing techniques tend to emphasize getting the arrow off of the string as quickly as possible: the bow is leveled on the target as the string is drawn and released basically immediately.

[…]

Maybe two-third to three quarters of our arrows just miss entirely, hitting the ground, shot long over the whole formation and so on. Of the remainder, another three-quarters at least (probably an even higher proportion, to be honest) are striking shields. Of the remainder, we might suppose another three-quarters or so are striking helmets or other fairly solid armor like greaves: these hurt, but probably won’t kill or disable. Of the remainder, a portion – probably a small portion, because of those big shields – are being defeated by body armor that they could, under ideal circumstances, defeat. And of the remainder that actually penetrate a human on the other side, maybe another two-thirds are doing so in the arms, feet or lower legs, many of them with glancing hits: painful, but not immediately fatal and in some cases potentially not even disabling.

After all of those filters, we’re down to an estimated arrow lethality rate hovering 0.5-1%, meaning each arrow shot has something like a 1-in-100 or 1-in-200 chance to kill or disable an enemy.

I’ve discussed the physics of medieval archery before, by the way.

The three deadliest weapons in the world today

May 18th, 2025

The deadliest weapon in American history, Kulak notes, is the handgun, because more Americans have been killed in ordinary criminal homicides than all the wars America has fought:

Applying the logic which we have already seen, that outside of the most war-ravaged countries ordinary homicide, gang wars, feuds, and clasdestine actions are VASTLY more likely to kill people than high intensity warfare, you quickly notice a trend.

The three deadliest weapons in the world today in terms of body-count (your likelihood to be killed by them) varies between

  • Handguns in the New World where guns are plentiful but open carry of rifles is not the norm
  • Auto and semiautomatic (and previously bolt-action) rifles in the third world of Africa and failed parts of the Middle-East where it is perfectly acceptable for gangs to walk about with AK-47s in their arms
  • Knives and bladed weapons in Gun restrictionist jurisdictions (Europe), Asia, Prisons, etc.

If you die a violent death, dear reader, whether in the killing fields of darkest Africa, darkest Detroit, the trenches of forever war or the smuggling tunnels of Mexico, to an enemy you’ve never spoken a word to or to a spouse you said just one word too many to, it will almost certainly be to one of these 3. Even in the age of FPV Drones, IEDs, cluster munitions, and thermobaric rocket artillery, a super-majority of the time the person who decides you need to die will be within 2-200 meters of you, see you with their bare eye or possibly a simple optic, and decide in sight of your face to end your life with the tool they have at hand: knife, handgun, or rifle.

And it’s very hard to tell which of the three actually leads the pack globally.

In the US where guns are widely available knife homicides are only about 10–15% of what firearm homicides are, In the UK this is reversed, and firearm related murders are 10% of knife murders.

Smith hoped to learn why some people, but not others, became psychotically violent on amphetamines

May 17th, 2025

Chaos by Tom O’NeillRoger Smith, the academic who became Charles Manson’s parole officer, may have had ulterior motives, Tom O’Neill explains (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties), when he told Manson to move to Haight-Ashbury:

As part of his criminology research, he’d been tapped to lead a study on amphetamines and their role in the violent behavior of Haight-Ashbury hippies. The National Institute of Mental Health funded this study, as they had the San Francisco Project. In 1976, a FOIA request forced NIMH to acknowledge that it had allowed itself to be used by the CIA as a funding front in the sixties.

Smith hoped to learn why some people, but not others, became psychotically violent on amphetamines—and to see if this violence could be controlled. The goals of the Amphetamine Research Project (ARP), as he dubbed it, were to “illuminate three major areas” of the “speed scene” in the Haight: the “individual” experience, the “collective or group experience,” and the “way in which violence is generated within the speed marketplace.” Smith studied hippie collectives by observing them in their daily routines, and he enjoined his researchers to participate, too. He later recalled that when he was appointed to lead the study, “[ I] took off my gray-flannel suit and my wing-tip shoes and grew a moustache. Soon the kids on Haight Street were calling me the Friendly Fed and asking me to help them with the law.”

There’s no indication that his technique proved useful—because there’s not much indication that the ARP ever happened at all. Smith never published his research. Two papers about the ARP were scheduled to appear in the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, but they never materialized. The closest thing to a record of the ARP is Smith’s unpublished dissertation, submitted to Berkeley a month before the Manson murders. Even this, however, contains no actual “participation-observation” data—it is mainly secondhand anecdotes and statistical analysis.

[…]

To ensure success, Smith argued, researchers had to protect their subjects from criminal prosecution, concealing their activities from the police and granting them anonymity in all reports. The ARP, then, had something resembling police immunity baked into its very mission.

Smith ran the ARP out of the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic (HAFMC), which had just opened the previous summer. Soon, he was spending so much time there that he made a proposition to his only parole client: instead of meeting with Manson in downtown San Francisco, where Smith had an office, why not just meet at the clinic? It was more convenient for both of them, and anyway, by that time Manson and “his girls” had started to contract sexually transmitted diseases; the clinic could treat those for free.

Soon Manson became a mainstay at the HAFMC. Between visiting Smith and receiving medical care, there were some weeks when he appeared at the clinic every day. He became a familiar presence to a number of the doctors there, including several who, like Smith, had received federal funds to research drug use among hippies.

Smith got the ARP off the ground at the same time he was supervising Manson for the San Francisco Project. It was during this overlap that the record of Manson’s parole supervision was either spotty, nonexistent, or later expunged. This funny, scruffy little visitor to the clinic, always with his retinue of girls, was taking a ton of drugs and forming the Family. By the time he and his followers turned up in that ditch by the side of the Pacific Coast Highway in April 1968, the girls had traded the flowers in their hair for steel knives, sheathed in leather and strapped to their thighs beneath long flowing dresses.

Brutal honesty lets us affirm that the correlation between what is good and what sounds good is quite low

May 16th, 2025

When Bryan Caplan‘s twin sons were about ten, they loved a videogame called Tropico, which makes you the caudillo of a Caribbean island, its sovereign ruler and economic czar:

As you play, you face constant criticism from the island’s political factions. If you displease too many of your subjects, you fall from power and lose the game. Game after game, the most vocal critics of my twins’ regimes were the Communists. Which led to a memorable conversation.

“Dad, I’m really confused about the Communists in Tropico.”

“How so?”

“Well, you’re always telling us how terrible the Communists are.”

Guilty as charged. My wife and her parents were refugees from Communist Romania. Reading books about mass murder and slave labor under the likes of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao is one of my long-time hobbies. I’ve written several academic pieces about the economics and politics of Communism, including an encyclopedia article. And it is in my character to share my knowledge with the next generation.

True to form, I responded, “Yes, ‘terrible’ is right.”

“In the game, though, the requests of the Communists always sound so good: grow more food for the hungry; build better housing for the poor; give everyone free health care. What’s wrong with all that?”

Hearing this thoughtful question put a big smile on my face. I was so proud of my progeny. And an answer was already in my head. “Sons,” I began, “in life, there are many things that sound good but are bad – and many things that sound bad but are good. Suppose someone says, ‘The government should just give everybody whatever they need.’ How does that sound?”

“Good!”

That’s from the introduction to his upcoming book, Unbeatable: The Brutally Honest Case for Free Markets, which makes one central claim:

My central claim is that free-market economics should be rebuilt on the foundation of psychologists’ notion of Social Desirability Bias (SDB). Once you take SDB seriously, you realize that most alleged “market failures” are actually market successes, and most alleged “government successes” are actually government failures.

[…]

To repeat, the lessons of Social Desirability Bias are twofold. First: When you spend your own time and money, actions speak louder than words. Second, when you spend other people’s time and money, words speak louder than actions. Now consider: If everyone spends only their own time and their own money, what do we call it? Among other things, “the free market.” What about when people spend other people’s time and money? Among other things, “government.”

[…]

What exactly does brutal honesty buy us? To start, brutal honesty lets us affirm that the correlation between what is good and what sounds good is quite low. So low, in fact, that we can justifiably praise free markets because they give business incentives to do good stuff that sounds bad and criticize governments because they give politicians incentives to do bad stuff that sounds good. “Good stuff that sounds bad” like: downsizing superfluous workers, hiring tens of millions of low-skilled foreigners, deliberately infecting volunteers with Covid to speed up drug testing, greatly curtailing end-of-life medical care, and leveling historic neighborhoods in San Francisco to build new skyscrapers. “Bad stuff that sounds good” like: free roads, free parking, free college, free health care, licensing medical workers, regulating prescription drugs, requiring building permits, banning recreational drugs, sanctioning employers who hire illegal immigrants, and ensuring a dignified retirement for every American.

Nobody must ever come in during the night

May 15th, 2025

Napoleon by Andrew RobertsNapoleon gave his brother Joseph, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), for not getting assassinated in Naples:

Your valets, your cooks, the guards that sleep in your apartment, the people who wake you up in the night to bring you despatches, have to be French. Nobody must ever come in during the night, except for your aide-de-camp who must sleep in a room preceding yours. Your door must be locked from the inside and you should unlock it only if you have recognized your aide-de-camp’s voice: he should only knock on your door after having locked the one of the room he sleeps in to make sure nobody has followed him and that he is alone. These precautions are important; they’re not a nuisance and as a result they generate confidence, apart from the fact that they can save your life.

Water wars are considered to be among the imminent conflicts this century

May 14th, 2025

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall Ethiopia is sometimes called Africa’s water tower, due to its high elevation, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), and has more than twenty dams fed by the rainfall in its highlands:

In 2011, Addis Ababa announced a joint project with China to build a massive hydroelectric project on the Blue Nile near the Sudanese border called the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, scheduled to be finished by 2020. The dam will be used to create electricity, and the flow to Egypt should continue; but in theory the dam could also hold a year’s worth of water, and completion of the project would give Ethiopia the potential to hold the water for its own use, thus drastically reducing the flow into Egypt.

As things stand, Egypt has a more powerful military, but that is slowly changing, and Ethiopia, a country of 96 million people, is a growing power. Cairo knows this, and also that, once the dam is built, destroying it would create a flooding catastrophe in both Ethiopia and Sudan. However, at the moment it does not have a casus belli to strike before completion, and despite the fact that a cabinet minister was recently caught on microphone recommending bombing, the next few years are more likely to see intense negotiations, with Egypt wanting cast-iron guarantees that the flow will never be stopped. Water wars are considered to be among the imminent conflicts this century, and this is one to watch.

Investing in education is individually rational, but collectively destructive

May 13th, 2025

Case Against Education by Bryan CaplanArctotherium summarizes Bryan Caplan’s Case Against Education and notes that the chief implication of the signaling model of education is that investing in education is individually rational, but collectively destructive:

Goodhart’s Law states that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Whenever there is a signal for desirable traits, prospective signalers can focus on either (1) improving those traits or (2) optimizing for the signal itself, making it a worse signal of the underlying traits (i.e., “Goodharting”). Educational attainment has been a target for a very long time, so it’s not surprising that it has been aggressively gamed.

[…]

If you’ve ever spent time tutoring, attended a college admissions prep course, gone to a selective institution like Stuyvesant High School, or done STEM at a selective college, you might have noticed a glaring omission in all of the articles linked in the introduction. Not one of them mentions Asian immigration—except in the context of Asians being harmed by affirmative action at elite colleges.

Stereotypes suggest that Asian immigrants put much more effort into Goodharting education (and other zero-sum status signals) than other groups in the United States. Don’t take my word for it: Yale Law professor Amy Chua wrote an entire book about how she and other Chinese immigrants aggressively (some might say abusively) parented their daughters to maximise status.

[…]

This grind culture is found in first- and second-generation immigrants, and I would expect it to dissipate by the third generation. (Sample sizes are too small to check, but Jews had a similar reputation in mid-20th century America and don’t any more). Pro-immigration conservatives often use this focus on education status-signaling as evidence of immigrant moral superiority, but it is in fact destructive and wasteful.

[…]

Korean private tutoring schools or “hagwons” are infamous. About 78% of Koreans between first and twelfth grade attended a hagwon in 2022, as did 83% of five-year-olds in 2017, and about 95% of Koreans do at some point in their student lives. The average hagwon student attends for 7.2 hours a week, in addition to regular studies and homework, and as a consequence the average South Korean student works 13 hours a day. South Korea spends three times the OECD average on private schooling as a percentage of GDP, the highest in the world. These thousands of hours of studying are all to get high scores on the CSAT, the standardized test that determines most college admissions in South Korea. Government regulations and crackdowns to try to stop South Korean parents from spending so much time and money on wasteful zero-sum signaling have thus far failed.

[…]

About 73% of junior high schoolers in Taiwan attend some form of cram school, for an average of 6.24 hours per week. About 70% of Singaporean students do the same. China is much poorer than South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore, and therefore has far fewer resources to spend on costly signaling. Yet the Chinese education industry grew at 11.3% per year between 2019 and 2023. This provoked a massive government crackdown in 2023–24 that banned people from offering classes in English, Chinese, or mathematics for profit. As with South Korea, demand is so high that the ban led to an explosion in underground quasi-legal tutoring. Note that China also relies primarily on standardized tests for college admissions.

China and India are both infamous for cheating—to the point that there have been riots by students in both countries when students were prevented from cheating by investigators. (China now threatens students with jail time for cheating.) International Asian SAT takers are also notorious for cheating, with common methods including impersonation14, purchasing tests from insiders at College Board, buying questions and answers from test takers in other time zones, and smuggling in vocabulary lists. The persistence of traits would suggest that this doesn’t stop when they enter the US, and indeed anecdotes from teachers suggest that recent Asian immigrants are dramatically overrepresented in cheating rings.

[…]

The SAT score gaps between every major race in the United States have been roughly constant since the late 1970s (Native Americans have small samples), with all trending up and down together in line with test changes, external factors such as the COVID lockdown, the rise of the test prep industry, and other things that might affect scores—with one glaring exception. Asian-Americans have gone from testing approximately equal to whites to breaking away from the pack like Secretariat at Belmont, to the point that they are now about 100 points ahead on average.

[…]

A remarkable 25% of Asians in Michigan (which forces all high schoolers to take the SAT and hence is more representative than other states) scored between 1400 and 1600 versus 4% of white students.

That burning feeling is real

May 12th, 2025

The first scientist to draw the connection between exercise and lactic acid was Jöns Jacob Berzelius, Alex Hutchinson explains, the Swedish chemist who devised the modern system of chemical notation (H2O, etc.):

Sometime around 1807, he noticed that the chopped-up muscles of dead deer contained lactic acid, a substance that had only recently been discovered in soured milk. Crucially, the muscles of stags that had been hunted to death contained higher levels of lactic acid, while deer from a slaughterhouse who had their limbs immobilized in a splint before their death had lower levels, suggesting that the acid was generated by physical exertion.

A century later, physiologists at the University of Cambridge used electric stimulation to make frogs’ legs twitch until they reached exhaustion, and observed high lactic acid levels. The levels were even higher if they performed the experiment in a chamber without oxygen, and lower if they provided extra oxygen. That finding helped establish the prevailing twentieth-century view: your muscles need oxygen to generate energy aerobically; if they can’t get enough oxygen, they switch to generating energy anaerobically, which produces lactic acid as a toxic byproduct that eventually shuts your muscles down.

Athletes going lactic feel the burn and typically back off a bit:

In interviews with athletes who’ve begun using baking soda, a common theme is that they’re able to push harder for longer before feeling that burn in their legs, which in turn enables them to race faster.

One theory about the feeling of going lactic is that you’re literally starving your brain of oxygen. If you push hard enough, it’s not just your muscles that go more acidic; your whole bloodstream follows. Thanks to a phenomenon called the Bohr effect, rising acidity reduces the ability of your red blood cells to ferry oxygen from your lungs to the rest of your body, including your brain. In one study, all-out rowing caused oxygen saturation to drop from 97.5 to 89.0 percent, which is a big drop—big enough, perhaps, to slow you down and contribute to the out-of-body feeling at the end of hard races.

We also have nerve sensors that keep the brain informed about the metabolic status of the muscles. These group III/IV afferents, as they’re known, keep tabs on the real-time levels of molecules like lactate and hydrogen ions. If you block these nerves with spinal injections of fentanyl, exercise feels great—too great, in fact, because you’ll lose all sense of pacing, go out too hard, then hit the wall.

The most telling finding about the lactic burn, in my view, was a 2013 study where they injected various molecules into the thumbs of volunteers in an attempt to reproduce that familiar feeling. Injecting lactate didn’t do it. Neither did injecting hydrogen ions, or ATP, a fuel molecule whose levels are also elevated during hard exercise. Injecting them in pairs didn’t do it either. But injecting all three at the levels you’d experience during moderate exercise produced a sensation of fatigue in their thumbs, even though they weren’t moving them. And injecting higher levels turned fatigue into pain.

That’s a distinction I try to keep in mind in the late stages of hard workouts, and at the crux of races. That burning feeling is real, and it’s associated with lactate and acidity and muscular fuel levels. But it’s just a feeling.

The drone uses real-time views from a downward-facing optical camera, comparing them against stored satellite images, to determine its position

May 11th, 2025

Now in its third generation, KrattWorks’ Ghost Dragon ISR quadcopter has come a long way since 2022:

Its original command-and-control-band radio was quickly replaced with a smart frequency-hopping system that constantly scans the available spectrum, looking for bands that aren’t jammed. It allows operators to switch among six radio-frequency bands to maintain control and also send back video even in the face of hostile jamming.

The drone’s dual-band satellite-navigation receiver can switch among the four main satellite positioning services: GPS, Galileo, China’s BeiDou, and Russia’s GLONASS. It’s been augmented with a spoof-proof algorithm that compares the satellite-navigation input with data from onboard sensors. The system provides protection against sophisticated spoofing attacks that attempt to trick drones into self-destruction by persuading them they’re flying at a much higher altitude than they actually are.

At the heart of the quadcopter’s matte grey body is a machine-vision-enabled computer running a 1-gigahertz Arm processor that provides the Ghost Dragon with its latest superpower: the ability to navigate autonomously, without access to any global navigation satellite system (GNSS). To do that, the computer runs a neural network that, like an old-fashioned traveler, compares views of landmarks with positions on a map to determine its position. More precisely, the drone uses real-time views from a downward-facing optical camera, comparing them against stored satellite images, to determine its position.

[…]

Russia took an unexpected step starting in early 2024, deploying hard-wired drones fitted with spools of optical fiber. Like a twisted variation on a child’s kite, the lethal UAVs can venture 20 or more kilometers away from the controller, the hair-thin fiber floating behind them, providing an unjammable connection.

“Right now, there is no protection against fiber-optic drones,” Vadym Burukin, cofounder of the Ukrainian drone startup Huless, tells IEEE Spectrum. “The Russians scaled this solution pretty fast, and now they are saturating the battle front with these drones. It’s a huge problem for Ukraine.”

[…]

This past July, kamikaze drones equipped with an autonomous navigation system from U.S. supplier Auterion destroyed a column of Russian tanks fitted with jamming devices.

[…]

But purchasing Western equipment is, in the long term, not affordable for Ukraine, a country with a per capita GDP of US $5,760—much lower than the European average of $38,270. Fortunately, Ukraine can tap its engineering workforce, which is among the largest in Europe. Before the war, Ukraine was a go-to place for Western companies looking to set up IT- and software-development centers. Many of these workers have since joined Ukraine’s DIY military-technician (“miltech”) development movement.

He arrived there an ex-con and left a confident, long-haired cult leader

May 10th, 2025

Chaos by Tom O’NeillFrom the late spring of 1967 to June 1968, Manson lived in Haight-Ashbury, Tom O’Neill explains (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties), the hotbed of the counterculture:

Given how often Manson is characterized as a curdled hippie—a perversion of the principles of free love—you’d think his year in the Haight would attract more attention. It was the crucible in which his identity was forged. He arrived there an ex-con and left a confident, long-haired cult leader. It was in the Haight that he began to use LSD. He learned how to attract weak, susceptible people, and how to use drugs to keep them under his thumb. And he internalized the psychological methods that would make his followers do anything for him. This would’ve been all but impossible without Roger Smith.

The two came together in a roundabout way. Manson had been released from Terminal Island prison in Los Angeles County on March 21, 1967. He’d served seven and a half years for forging a government check. When he stepped out that day, he was thirty-two, and he’d spent nearly half his life in prisons and juvenile detention centers. As Bugliosi would marvel in Helter Skelter, prison supervisors had largely assessed Manson as nonviolent. Though he’d faced juvenile convictions of armed robbery and homosexual rape, and had beaten his wife, these didn’t add up, in the eyes of the state, to a “sustained history of violence.” Nor, as Bugliosi noted, did they fit the profile of a mass murderer in 1969.

Another peculiarity: all of Manson’s prison time was at the federal level. Bugliosi found this startling. “Probably ninety-nine out of one-hundred criminals never see the inside of a federal court,” he noted. Manson had been described as “criminally sophisticated,” but had he been convicted at the state level, he would’ve faced a fraction of the time behind bars—maybe less than five years, versus seventeen.

Within days of his release, Manson violated his parole. Unless he had explicit permission, he was supposed to stay put; he was forbidden from leaving Los Angeles under penalty of automatic repatriation to prison. But practically immediately, he headed to Berkeley, California.

Years earlier, Manson had had his parole revoked just for failing to report to his supervisor. Now, for some reason, the police bureaucracy of an entirely different city welcomed him with open arms. When he called up the San Francisco Federal Parole Office to announce himself, they simply filed some routine paperwork transferring him to the supervision of Roger Smith, an officer and a student at UC Berkeley’s School of Criminology.

[…]

The Haight had introduced him to Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein’s provocative 1961 sci-fi novel. Manson was obsessed with the book. He carried a worn copy with him at all times, and though he was barely literate, he seemed to grasp the nuances of its dense narrative and its invented language.

There’s no saying who might have read the book to him or told him about it, but in its hero, Valentine Michael, Manson recognized himself, so much so that he named his first child after him. Roger Smith got a nickname from Manson, too: “Jubal Harshaw,” the most important character in the hero’s life, his lawyer, teacher, protector, and spiritual guide on Earth.

The plot of Stranger in a Strange Land has eerie parallels to Manson’s rise, so much so that, after the murders, fans of the novel went out of their way to disavow Manson’s connection to it. Valentine Michael, a human raised on Mars, is endowed with hypnotic powers. He descends to Earth to foster a new and perfect race. Guarded by Jubal, he assembles a “nest” with about twenty others, almost all women, whom he initiates through sex. He demands that his followers surrender their egos to him in a spirit of total submission. They worship the innocence of children and yearn to exist in a state of such pure consciousness that they can communicate telepathically. The group sleeps and eats together; one of their most sacred rituals is the act of “sharing water,” which takes on vaguely druggy undertones. In Valentine Michael’s philosophy, there is no death, only “discorporation”; killing people saves their souls, giving them a second chance through reincarnation. The group begins to discorporate their enemies with impunity. In time, Valentine Michael draws strength from the “nest” and, like Christ, saves the world.

After the Family was caught, Time magazine picked up on the bizarre parallels between Stranger in a Strange Land and Manson’s own “nest.” In January 1970, it ran a piece called “A Martian Model?” arguing that Manson had “no powers of invention at all… He may have murdered by the book.”

[…]

Manson had been assigned to him as a part of the so-called San Francisco Project, an experimental parole program funded by the National Institute of Mental Health that monitored the rehabilitative progress of newly released felons. When Manson arrived in the Bay Area in March 1967, he was attached to the program—and to Roger Smith.

Manson’s participation in the San Francisco Project has never been reported. In part, it explains why the two men had developed such a powerful bond—because Smith spent much more time with Manson than the average parole officer would. The project studied the relationship between federal parolees and their supervisors; researchers wanted to know how varying degrees of oversight affected recidivism rates. The six participating parole officers, all of whom had advanced degrees in criminology, were assigned one of three caseloads: “normal,” averaging about one hundred clients; “ideal,” numbering forty clients; or “intensive,” twenty clients.

Roger Smith fell into the middle group. He met with his clients once a week, per project guidelines. But at some point, his “ideal” caseload became even more intense than his colleagues’ “intensives.” By the end of ’67, he’d winnowed his set of parolees from forty down to just one: Manson.

I was shocked that Manson had become Smith’s one and only client, but I could never figure out why. Hoping to learn more, I interviewed Smith’s research assistant from that time, Gail Sadalla. Although Smith had assured me that he’d never met Manson before becoming his parole officer, Sadalla had a different recollection. Smith told her in 1968 that Manson became his charge because he’d already been his probation officer years earlier—in the early sixties, at the Joliet Federal Prison in Illinois. Admittedly, this seemed all but impossible. Manson had never been in the Illinois parole system, and he’d only been incarcerated in the state for a few days in 1956. But Sadalla was convinced that the two had met previously. When I told her that her former boss had no memory of meeting Manson before March 1967, she was stunned.

“He didn’t remember that?” she asked. “I’m surprised… It was always my understanding. That’s why there was this connection.”

[…]

As a doctoral student at the Berkeley School of Criminology, Roger Smith studied the link between drug use and violent behavior in Oakland gang members. In April 1967, the study had seen enough success to merit a press conference. As the New York Times reported, Smith and his colleagues had found that a gang’s drug use, rather than “mellowing them out,” more often triggered violent behavior. The students wanted to distinguish between gang members who fell into violence because of inherent sociopathic tendencies and those who became sociopathic because of drugs.

Smith conducted research through his own “immersion.” He and the other researchers created “outposts” in the Oakland slums, hanging around at community centers and churches, befriending gang members under less-than-transparent circumstances. They embraced a “participant-observer” approach to social research, which Smith would further incorporate into his methods in the years to come.

By 1967, Smith was regarded as an expert on gangs, collective behavior, violence, and drugs. Manson, his one and only parole supervisee, would go on to control the collective behavior of a gang through violence and drugs.

Smith described himself to me as a “rock-ribbed Republican”—he never struck me as someone with much tolerance for the counterculture. And yet it was his idea, he admitted, to send Manson to live in the Haight. He hoped that Manson could “soak up” some of the “vibes” of the peace and love movement exploding in the district that summer. Maybe it would allay some of Manson’s hostility.

[…]

It was a concerted, grassroots effort to reject middle-class morality. But where some saw earthshaking radicalism, others saw only Dionysian excess. George Harrison, of Manson’s life-defining band, the Beatles, stopped by the Haight that summer and came away unimpressed: “The summer of love was just a bunch of spotty kids on drugs,” he said. A press release for the Human Be-In, a sprawling gathering a few months before Manson came to town, gives a sense of the era’s transformative rhetoric: “A new nation has grown inside the robot flesh of the old… Hang your fear at the door and join the future. If you do not believe, please wipe your eyes and see.”

When Manson went to wipe his eyes and see, he wasted no time adopting the folkways and postures of the flower children. Once he landed in the Haight, he dropped acid on a daily basis. It took just one trip to foment the most abrupt change that Roger Smith had ever witnessed in one of his charges. Manson “seemed to accept the world” after LSD, Smith wrote. Seemingly overnight, he transformed himself into an archetypal hippie, his worldview suddenly inflected with spiritualism. He grew out his hair and played guitar in the street, panhandling and scrounging for food. Although only in his early thirties, he presented himself as a father figure, attracting young, down-and-out men and women as they embarked on the spiritual quest that had led them to the Haight.

[…]

It would be surprising if Smith didn’t know that his ward was breaking the law—a lot. But he had only praise for his sole client. “Mr. Manson has made excellent progress,” he wrote in one of several reports he made to the head parole office in Washington, D.C. “He appears to be in better shape personally than he has been in a long time.”

Smith wrote those words on July 31, 1967. At the time, Manson was sitting in a jail cell. A few days earlier, in Ukiah, he’d been convicted of interfering with a police officer in the line of duty—a felony. He’d been trying to prevent the arrest of Ruth Ann Moorehouse, aka Ouisch, one of his newly recruited underage girls. Though the charge was reduced to a misdemeanor, Manson was given a thirty-day suspended sentence and three years’ probation.

]…]

Instead of being sent back to prison, Manson, who’d been out for only four months then, was back on the streets again in a few days.

That incident continued the distressing pattern of amnesty that Roger Smith could never explain. In part, Smith benefited, and continues to benefit, from a veil of secrecy. Manson’s complete parole file has never been released. It wasn’t even permitted into evidence during the trial. During the death-penalty phase, the defense’s Irving Kanarek had subpoenaed the file, hoping he could use some part of it to argue for his client’s life. Not only did the United States Attorney General, John Mitchell, refuse to release it, he dispatched David Anderson, an official from the Justice Department, to aid Bugliosi in his effort to quash the subpoena.

[…]

The fifty-five parole documents turned over to me (later sixty-nine, after exhaustive FOIA appeals) by the federal Parole Commission represent only a sliver of Manson’s total file, which was described as “four inches thick” at his trial. Still, those pages have enough raw data to show that during Manson’s first fourteen months of freedom in San Francisco—months during which he attracted the followers that became the Family—he was given virtual immunity from parole revocation by Roger Smith. Under Smith’s supervision, Manson was repeatedly arrested and even convicted without ever being sent back to prison. It was up to Smith to revoke Manson’s parole—it was ultimately his decision. But he never even reported any of his client’s violations to his supervisors.

In interviews with me, Smith claimed not to have known about Manson’s conviction in Ukiah, even though it had occurred under his watch. In fact, in the same July 1967 letter that should have mentioned Manson’s conviction—the letter that lauded his “excellent progress”—Smith requested permission for Manson to travel to Mexico, where he would’ve been totally unsupervised, for a gig with a hotel band. (Smith failed to note the fact that Manson had been arrested in Mexico in 1959, resulting in his deportation to the United States and the revocation of his federal probation.)

“Manson is not to leave the Northern District of California,” the parole board responded, noting that Manson’s “history does not mention any employment as musician,” and that his record was “lengthy and serious.”

And yet, two weeks later, Smith tried again—he really wanted to send Manson to Mexico. He told the parole board that Manson had been offered a second job there by “a general distributor for the Perma-Guard Corporation of Phoenix Arizona named Mr. Dean Moorehouse,” who wanted Manson to survey “the market for insecticides, soil additives and mineral food supplements.” Smith neglected to mention that Moorehouse was on probation—regulations barred associations between parolees and probationers—and one of Manson’s newest recruits, the father of the fifteen-year-old whose arrest Manson had tried to prevent three weeks earlier.

The parole board rejected this second request, too. Interestingly, at the same time Smith made these requests, he’d launched a criminological study of Mexican drug trafficking for the federal government. He’d attempted to send Manson to Mazatlán, which was the main port city of Sinaloa, the drug trafficking capital of Central America in the 1960s.

[…]

After those two Mexico requests, Smith generated only two more documents regarding Manson for another five months. Both were simple form letters authorizing Manson to travel to Florida to meet with “recording agents.”

Those interested me for several reasons. First, they violated Smith’s orders from Washington—he was to forbid Manson from leaving the Northern District of California under any circumstances. Second, Smith had postdated them, suggesting that he wrote them after Manson had already left town, safeguarding him from another potential violation. And third, there’s no sign that Manson and the Family ever actually went to Florida. If they went anywhere, the only available evidence suggests, it was to Mexico.

Smith’s letters are from November 1967. On the very day that Susan Atkins’s probation officers were frantically trying to prevent her from traveling, she, Manson, and the others were pulling out of San Francisco in their big yellow bus with permission from Roger Smith.

Manson was required to send postcards to Smith; there’s no record that he did. Later, probation reports noted that Atkins and Mary Brunner had said they spent quite a bit of time in Mexico with Manson that winter. Otherwise, their whereabouts for November and December 1967 are entirely unaccounted for.

[…]

I knew there had to be more papers from Smith’s time as Manson’s parole officer. Remember, under oath at the trial, Barrett had described Manson’s parole file as “about four inches thick.” I asked the Parole Commission spokesperson, Pamela A. Posch, how it could have been reduced to what I’d been told was only 138 pages, and why I could see only 69 of these, extensively redacted. The Bureau of Prisons “apparently did not retain all of the parole documents pertaining to Mr. Manson,” Posch wrote, conceding that this was unusual. The bureau had a policy to preserve the files of “notorious felons” for history’s sake. Manson was about as notorious as a felon could be.

[…]

In April 1968, Smith’s carelessness blew up in his face when, yet again, Manson was arrested. And there was no covering it up this time—too many papers had gotten the story. When Smith’s colleagues at the parole office read about it, they flipped out and tried to do what Smith hadn’t: send Manson back to prison.

The headline in the Los Angeles Times read, “Wayward Bus Stuck in Ditch: Deputy Finds Nude Hippies Asleep in Weeds.” Other papers picked up the news, too. Their articles were the first to describe what the world would soon know as the Manson Family.

The Times staff writer Charles Hillinger described an Oxnard deputy on a late-night patrol who stumbled on a broken-down bus in a ditch by the Pacific Coast Highway. When he saw the bodies scattered in the weeds—nine women, five men—he thought they were dead. Then he realized they were only sleeping. After running a check on the bus’s tags, he learned it had been reported stolen from Haight-Ashbury. Waking the group, he told them to get dressed and wait for the county bus he’d ordered, which would take them all to jail. Before they left, one of the women (later identified as Mary Brunner) said, “Wait, my baby’s on the bus.” She went back to pick up her child, then only a week old. He was sick, with grime and open sores all over his body.

The article identified the “self-proclaimed leader of the band of wanderers” as Charles Manson, adding that he was booked on suspicion of grand theft. Brunner was charged with endangering the life of a child. She was later convicted and received two years’ probation.

Within several days, the chief of the San Francisco probation office, Albert Wahl, was alerted to an article about the arrest in the Oakland Tribune: “14 Nude Hippies Found Beside Wayward Bus.” Of course, one of those hippies was a parolee under his office’s supervision.

Almost any above ground facility is vulnerable to attack and destruction by precision guided weapons

May 9th, 2025

Area 51 by Annie JacobsenIn the 1980s, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51) the military worked to develop the bunker buster, a nuclear weapon designed to fire deep into Earth’s surface, hit underground targets, and detonate belowground:

Weapons designer Sandia was brought on board. It was called the W61 Earth Penetrator, and testing took place at Area 52 in 1988. The idea was to launch the earth-penetrator weapon from forty thousand feet above but after many tests (minus the nuclear warhead), it became clear that a nuclear bomb would have little or no impact on granite, which is the rock of choice in which to build sensitive sites underground. After President Clinton ended all U.S. nuclear testing in 1993 (the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1996 and signed by five of the then seven or eight nuclear-capable countries), the idea of developing an earth-penetrating nuclear weapon lost its steam. But the building of underground facilities by foreign governments continued to plague war planners, so along came a nonnuclear space-based weapons project called Rods from God. That weapons project involved slender metal rods, twenty to thirty feet long and one foot in diameter, that could be launched from a satellite in space, enter the atmosphere travelling at 36,000 feet per second, and hit a precise target on Earth. T. D. Barnes says “that’s enough force to take out Iran’s nuclear facility, or anything like it, in one or two strikes.” The Federation of American Scientists reported that a number of similar “long-rod penetration” programs are believed to currently exist.

After the Gulf War, DARPA hired a secretive group called the JASON scholars (a favored target in conspiracy-theorist circles) and its parent company, MITRE Corporation, to report on the status of underground facilities, which in government nomenclature are referred to as UGFs.

[…]

What this means is that the F-117 stealth bomber showed foreign governments “that almost any above ground facility is vulnerable to attack and destruction by precision guided weapons.” For DARPA, this meant it was time to develop a new nuclear bunker buster—Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban-Treaty or not.

[…]

In 2002, with America again at war, the administration of George W. Bush revived the development of the nuclear bunker-buster weapon, now calling it the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator. In April of the same year, the Department of Defense entered into discussions with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to begin preliminary design work on the new nuclear weapon. By fiscal year 2003, the Stockpile Services Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator line item received $ 14.5 million; in 2004 another $ 7.5 million; and in 2005 yet another $ 27.5 million. In 2006, the Senate dropped the line item. Either the program was canceled or it got a new name and entered into the black world—perhaps at Area 51 and Area 52.

Religion is a kind of vaccination

May 8th, 2025

Napoleon by Andrew RobertsNapoleon insisted, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), that priests charge no more than 6 francs for conducting the funerals of the poor:

‘We ought not to deprive the poor merely because they are poor of that which consoles their poverty,’ Napoleon said. ‘Religion is a kind of vaccination, which, by satisfying our natural love for the marvellous, keeps us out of the hands of charlatans and conjurors. The priests are better than the Cagliostros, the Kants, and all the visionaries of Germany.’

I’m reminded of the famous misattributed G.K. Chesterton quote: “When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing — they believe in anything.“

Egypt is the Nile, and the Nile is Egypt

May 7th, 2025

Prisoners of Geography by Tim MarshallThe Nile, the longest river in the world (4,160 miles), Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), affects ten countries considered to be in the proximity of its basin — Burundi, the DRC, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, and Egypt:

As long ago as the fifth century BCE, the historian Herodotus said: “Egypt is the Nile, and the Nile is Egypt.” It is still true, and so a threat to the supply to Egypt’s seven-hundred-mile-long, fully navigable section of the Nile is for Cairo a concern—one over which it would be prepared to go to war.

Without the Nile, there would be no one there. It may be a huge country, but the vast majority of its 84 million population lives within a few miles of the Nile. Measured by the area in which people dwell, Egypt is one of the most densely populated countries in the world.

Egypt was, arguably, a nation state when most Europeans were living in mud huts, but it was never more than a regional power. It is protected by deserts on three sides and might have become a great power in the Mediterranean region but for one problem. There are hardly any trees in Egypt, and for most of history, if you didn’t have trees you couldn’t build a great navy with which to project your power. There has always been an Egyptian navy—it used to import cedar from Lebanon to build ships at huge expense—but it has never been a blue-water navy.

Modern Egypt now has the most powerful armed forces of all the Arab states, thanks to American military aid; but it remains contained by deserts, the sea, and its peace treaty with Israel. It will remain in the news as it struggles to cope with feeding 84 million people a day while battling an Islamist insurgency, especially in the Sinai, and guarding the Suez Canal, through which passes 8 percent of the world’s entire trade every day. Some 2.5 percent of the world’s oil passes this way daily; closing the canal would add about fifteen days’ transit time to Europe and ten to the United States, with concurrent costs.

Drone mining puts mines exactly where they are needed

May 6th, 2025

Drones have transformed mine warfare in Ukraine:

Mines were buried underground for concealment, unless the minefield was laid in a hurry when they might be simply placed on the surface. This made them easier to avoid but kept thew deterrent effect.

The US developed scatterable mines during the Vietnam conflict in the 1960s. These are a fraction the size of traditional mines, with a magnetic sensor triggered by a vehicle passing over them. Scatterable mines were dropped by aircraft or helicopters, and later by special artillery rounds and rockets. This enabled commanders to create minefields behind enemy lines to block or channel movement or simply to cause casualties. The USSR soon fielded their own versions.

[…]

The TM-62 is powerful enough to destroy a tank track or blow off a wheel and immobilize it or destroy lighter vehicles.

Ukraine’s ‘Baba Yaga’ multicopter bombers started dropping modified TM-62s as bombs. Then the operators experimented with laying TM-62s as mines. They could be placed on the trails left by tracked vehicles, or on roads miles behind enemy lines, giving a very high chance of a hit.

Any vehicle immobilized by a mine will be spotted by the reconnaissance drones, and bombers and FPVs dispatched to finish it off before it can be recovered.

[…]

Last summer Ukraine’s elite Birds of Magyar drone unit started placing mines on roads behinds enemy lines at night. Russian military social media lit up with warnings and reports of casualties. A Russian map showed that every segment of the 72-kilometre road network around Krynky had been mined. Logistics vehicles taking supplies to the front were being destroyed at an unprecedented rate.

[…]

The miner’s preferred weapon was the ten-pound PTM-3, which is significantly bigger than the PTM-1S but has a far more effective design. Rather than simply relying on blast, this is a shaped charge weapon, Each of the four sides of the PTM-3 is a linear shaped charge which will, when detonated, cut through almost anything immediately above it, neatly severing a tank tread or severely damaging a soft vehicle.

The mines were placed at night, making them difficult to spot from vehicles driving at high speed without lights because of the threat of drone attacks.

[…]

To make demining more challenging, the Ukrainians also produce wooden replica PPTMs which look just like the real thing. These are likely much lighter so can be mixed in with real mines.

[…]

Scatter mining is inefficient because it distributes a few mines over a large area. Drone mining puts mines exactly where they are needed and can be used to block an opponent’s advance or retreat, or cut their supply lines. Drones may quickly ring any static opponent with mines, penning them in.