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

Sunday, March 16th, 2025

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

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

[…]

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in Policy, Science | 3 Comments »

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

Saturday, March 15th, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in Crime, Media | No Comments »

They hiked inside several atomic craters

Friday, March 14th, 2025

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

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

[…]

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

[…]

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

[…]

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

Posted in Science | 1 Comment »

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

Thursday, March 13th, 2025

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

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

[…]

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

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

Posted in Policy, War | 2 Comments »

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

Wednesday, March 12th, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

Posted in Economics, Policy | No Comments »

How the Navy SEALs Conquered Congress

Tuesday, March 11th, 2025

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

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

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

[…]

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

[…]

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

[…]

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

[…]

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

Posted in Policy, War | No Comments »

Pentagon Acquires AI-Powered Indoor Strike Drones

Monday, March 10th, 2025

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

[…]

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

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

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

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | No Comments »

Why it’s so hard to build a jet engine

Sunday, March 9th, 2025

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

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

[…]

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

[…]

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

[…]

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

[…]

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

[…]

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

[…]

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

Posted in Technology | No Comments »

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

Saturday, March 8th, 2025

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

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

[…]

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

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

“Yes, why?” Jakobson answered.

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

Posted in Crime | 2 Comments »

A sensationalized leak would disturb the public in unforeseeable ways

Friday, March 7th, 2025

Area 51 by Annie JacobsenNORAD analysts had been tracking Cosmos 954 since it launched, on September 18, 1977, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), but after three months, the movements of the spy satellite were causing NORAD ever-increasing alarm:

The Russian satellite had been designed to track U.S. submarines running deep beneath the surface of the sea, and what NORAD knew about the satellite was that it was forty-six feet long and weighed 4.4 tons. To get that much payload into orbit required phenomenal power, most likely nuclear.

She misunderstood. The Kosmos 954 required the phenomenal power of a small nuclear reactor (containing 50 kg of uranium) for its naval reconnaissance radar, and the heavy satellite required a powerful booster to get into orbit:

Because a return signal from an ordinary target illuminated by a radar transmitter diminishes as the inverse of the fourth power of the distance, for the surveillance radar to work effectively, US-A satellites had to be placed in low Earth orbit. Had they used large solar panels for power, the orbit would have rapidly decayed due to drag through the upper atmosphere. Further, the satellite would have been useless in the shadow of Earth. Hence the majority of the satellites carried type BES-5 nuclear reactors fueled by uranium-235.

Why was NORAD alarmed?

In December of 1977, analysts determined that the Russian satellite was slipping out of orbit, dropping closer and closer to Earth on each ninety-minute rotation of the globe. Calculations indicated that unless the Russians could get control of their satellite, Cosmos would, in all probability, reenter the atmosphere and crash somewhere in North America within a month.

President Carter’s national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski pressed Moscow for information about what exactly was on board the crashing satellite. The Russians told Brzezinski that Cosmos 954 carried 110 pounds of highly enriched uranium 235.

[…]

According to a secret CIA report declassified in 1997, a decision was made not to inform the public. Trying to predict the public’s reaction to a nuclear satellite crash was like “playing night baseball with the lights out,” wrote CIA analyst Gus Weiss, because “the outcome of [Cosmos] 954 would be akin to determining the winner of a train wreck.” The CIA knew exactly what would happen, and that was that “the satellite was coming down carrying a live reactor.” The CIA also believed that “a sensationalized leak would disturb the public in unforeseeable ways.” This information has never been made public before.

[…]

“The satellite was still pretty high up, there was no radioactive danger until it actually hit the ground. But imagine the panic if people, or say a mayor of a city, started calling for cities to evacuate based on where they thought the satellite was going to crash down on the next ninety-minute rotation?” Mingus says the feeling at the command center was that if that were to happen, it would be panic like in The War of the Worlds.

When Cosmos 954 finally crashed, it hit the earth across a large swath of ice in the middle of the frozen Canadian tundra, one thousand miles north of Montana on Great Slave Lake. At McCarran Airport a fleet of unmarked NEST vans—meant to look like bakery vans but really loaded with banks of gamma-and neutron-detection equipment inside—drove into the belly of a giant C-130 transport plane and prepared to head north. NEST personnel included the usual players in the nuclear military-industrial complex: scientists and engineers from Los Alamos, Livermore, Sandia, and EG& G. Troy Wade was the lead federal official dispatched to the crash site. Looking back, he explains, “It was the radioactive fuel we were most concerned about. If a piece comes down that weighs a ton, you can’t predict how far and wide the debris, including all that fuel, will go.”

[…]

After several long months, 90 percent of the debris from Cosmos 954 had been recovered. In the postaccident analysis, officials at NORAD determined that if the satellite had made one last orbit before crashing, its trajectory would have put it down somewhere on America’s East Coast.

Posted in Policy, Technology, War | 1 Comment »

These eagles will always be your rallying point

Thursday, March 6th, 2025

Napoleon by Andrew RobertsA few days after Napoleon’s coronation, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), the army’s colonels descended on Paris to receive eagle standards from the Emperor in a ceremony on the Champ de Mars:

‘Soldiers!’ he told them, ‘here are your colours! These eagles will always be your rallying point … Do you swear to lay down your lives in their defence?’

‘We swear!’ they ceremoniously replied in unison.

Cast out of six pieces of bronze welded together and then gilded, the eagles each measured 8 inches from eartip to talons, 9 ½ inches between wingtips, and weighed 3 ½ pounds.*

They were mounted on a blue oaken staff with the regimental colours and the role of eagle-bearer was much prized, although with the customary irreverence of soldiers the standards were soon nicknamed ‘cuckoos’.

Posted in Policy, War | 1 Comment »

These missives don’t spend taxpayer dollars directly, but they’re masterful at prying them loose from state and local coffers

Wednesday, March 5th, 2025

Good luck finding the smoking gun, Robert Pondiscio says to anyone hunting for waste in the US Education Department:

The agency’s roughly $240 billion annual haul isn’t a slush fund for whimsical bureaucrats — it’s mostly a conveyor belt, dutifully delivering dollars to programs Congress has already blessed.

Title I’s $18 billion for poor kids? Mandated. IDEA’s $15 billion for special education? Same deal. Pell Grants topping $30 billion? That’s the Higher Education Act, not some rogue educrat’s hobbyhorse.

He calls our attention to the Department’s “Dear Colleague” letters to schools and districts:

These missives don’t spend taxpayer dollars directly, but they’re masterful at prying them loose from state and local coffers.

Thinly veiled as “guidance,” they’re closer to a shakedown: Comply with our enlightened vision or risk a civil rights probe that could cost you your federal funding.

And when that vision skews ideological — as it often did during the Obama and Biden years — the result is a cascade of spending and disruption that leaves educators scrambling and taxpayers poorer.

All without a single line-item to point to in the federal ledger, much less any measurable benefit to students.

Take the April 2011 Title IX letter on sexual violence. A noble aim — protecting students from harassment — morphed into a bureaucratic sledgehammer.

Schools and colleges were told to adopt a lower “preponderance of evidence” standard for adjudicating cases of alleged campus rape and sexual assault, and to sidestep legal protections like cross-examination of witnesses and accusers.

The result was an explosion in the number of Title IX coordinators hired, each earning $150,000 a year or more. The cost of compliance rose by at least $2 million per year at some universities.

Multiply that across thousands of institutions, and you’re staring at hundreds of millions yearly — state and local dollars, mind you, not Uncle Sam’s — until the letter’s 2017 rescission.

[…]

The Biden administration similarly sought to warp Title IX to its liking. Its 2021 executive order decreed “gender identity” would come under Title IX’s umbrella.

The Education Department dutifully followed up with a “Notice of Interpretation” a few weeks later, nudging schools to toe the line — and shoulder the cost — or risk their federal funds.

Then there was the January 2014 discipline letter, a joint production with the Justice Department that tackled racial disparities in K-12 school suspensions.

[…]

Districts suddenly wary of “disparate impact” on racial minorities embraced trendy fixes like restorative justice, or simply stopped disciplining unruly kids altogether.

Teachers got implicit bias training costing $2,000 to $10,000 per session, with no guarantee that it works; facilitators were hired or redirected, and new data systems tracked every classroom time-out by race.

A conservative estimate of the cost of compliance would be $100 million to $200 million over several years, mostly in urban school districts desperate to avoid a civil rights investigation.

Posted in Education, Policy | 4 Comments »

When it comes to comics in America, there is the Big One

Tuesday, March 4th, 2025

Amulet by Kazu KibuishiWhen it comes to comics in America, forget the Big Two:

Dab Pilkey’s Dog Man: The Scarlet Shedder released in March sold just under 1.3 million copies, the best selling children’s book of the year. Dog Man and, to a lesser extent, Cat Kid dominated, with two Dog Man releases in 2024 topping sales, with the backlist filling much of the rest of it. But also a strong presence for the Amulet, Baby-Sitters Club and Wings Of Fire graphic novels, with Five Nights at Freddy’s and Smile making it in. And every single one published by Scholastic/Graphix, at this stage establishing them as the biggest publisher of print comics in the world. Forget the Big Two, when it comes to comics in America there is the Big One.

Posted in Business, Media | No Comments »

The stack wasn’t very aerodynamic

Monday, March 3rd, 2025

A Ukrainian Unmanned Systems Forces official recently explained that fiber-optic FPVs are already in their third generation, after just a few months:

Any FPV drone has three critical components in addition to its basic airframe, motors and propellers: a warhead, a battery and a voluminous container for a spool of thin fiber-optic cable that might be 13 miles long.

The very first generation of Ukrainian FPV drone stacked each element — the warhead, battery and spool — on top of each other in an awkward pile. It should go without saying that the stack wasn’t very aerodynamic. “We oppose three-story drones as they have low energy efficiency,” the USF official admitted.

The next two drone generations combined elements. One stuffed the warhead inside the spool. The other stuffed the battery inside the spool. Both of these combos are more aerodynamic than the triple-stack drone, but the battery-inside version is more modular: it’s easier to swap in different warhead types, such as shaped-charge warheads optimized for penetrating vehicle armor.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | No Comments »

Before their return, just 850 cameras were in place in the capital

Sunday, March 2nd, 2025

The Taliban’s police force in Kabul, Afghanistan now has a network of 90,000 CCTV cameras:

Before their return, just 850 cameras were in place in the capital, according to a spokesman for the security forces that were driven from power.

[…]

The surveillance system the BBC is shown in Kabul features the option to track people by facial recognition. On the corner of one screen images pop up with each face categorised by age range, gender, and whether or not they have a beard or a face mask.

“On clear days, we can zoom in on individuals [who are] kilometres away,” says Zadran, highlighting a camera positioned up high that focuses on a busy traffic junction.

The Taliban even monitor their own personnel. At a checkpoint, as soldiers popped open the trunk of a car for inspection, the operators focused their lenses, zooming in to scrutinise the contents within.

The interior ministry says the cameras have “significantly contributed to enhancing safety, curbing crime rates, and swiftly apprehending offenders”. It adds the introduction of CCTV and motorcycle controls have led to a 30% decrease in crime rates between 2023 and 2024 but it is not possible to independently verify these figures.

[…]

The cameras appear to be Chinese-made. The control room monitors and branding on the feeds the BBC saw carried the name Dahua, a Chinese government-linked company. Earlier reports that the Taliban were in talks with China’s Huawei Technologies to buy cameras were denied by the company. Taliban officials refused to answer BBC questions about where they sourced the equipment.
Some of the cost of installing the new network is falling on ordinary Afghans who are being monitored by the system.
In a house in central Kabul the BBC spoke to Shella*, who was asked to pay for some of the cameras installed on the streets near her home.
“They demanded thousands of afghanis from every household,” she says. It’s a large amount in a country where those women who have jobs may earn only around 5,000 afghanis ($68; £54) a month.

Posted in Crime, Policy, Technology | 5 Comments »

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