The ideal candidate can go from street to fully certified in about 4 years

February 26th, 2025

Tracing Woodgrains recounts the full story of the FAA’s hiring scandal:

Then, on New Year’s Eve, 2013, while students and professors alike were out for winter break, the FAA abruptly sent an announcement to the presidents of the CTI [collegiate training initiative] schools. The announcement came, without warning, as an email from one Mr. Joseph Teixeira, the organization’s vice president for safety and technical training. “The FAA completed a barrier analysis of the ATC occupation pursuant to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s (EEOC) Management Directive 715,” the email read, then went on to spell out some changes:

First, every past aptitude test applicants had taken was voided. Andrew Brigida’s perfect score was meaningless.

Second, every applicant would be required to take and pass an unspecified “biographical questionnaire” to have a shot at entering the profession.

Third, existing CTI students were left with no advantage in the hiring process, which would be equally open to all off-the-street applicants—their degrees rendered useless for the one specialized job they had trained for.

[…]

As the hiring wave approached, some of Reilly’s friends in the program encouraged her to join the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees (NBCFAE), telling her it would help improve her chances of being hired. She signed up as the February wave started. Soon, though, she became uneasy with what the organization was doing, particularly after she and the rest of the group got a voice message from FAA employee Shelton Snow:

“I know each of you are eager very eager to apply for this job vacancy announcement and trust after tonight you will be able to do so….there is some valuable pieces of information that I have taken a screen shot of and I am going to send that to you via email. Trust and believe it will be something you will appreciate to the utmost. Keep in mind we are trying to maximize your opportunities…I am going to send it out to each of you and as you progress through the stages refer to those images so you will know which icons you should select…I am about 99 point 99 percent sure that it is exactly how you need to answer each question in order to get through the first phase.”2

The biographical questionnaire Snow referred to as the “first phase” was an unsupervised questionnaire candidates were expected to take at home. You can take a replica copy here. Questions were chosen and weighted bizarrely, with candidates able to answer “A” to all but one question to get through. Some of the most heavily weighted questions were “The high school subject in which I received my lowest grades was:” (correct answer: science, worth 15 points) and “The college subject in which I received my lowest grades was:” (correct answer: history, for another 15 points).

Reilly, Brigida, and thousands of others found themselves faced with the questionnaire, clicking through a bizarre sequence of questions that would determine whether they could enter the profession they’d been working towards. Faced with the opportunity to cheat, Reilly did not. It cost her a shot at becoming an air traffic controller. Like 85% of their fellow CTI students, Brigida and Reilly found themselves faced with a red exclamation point and a dismissal notice: “Based upon your responses to the Biographical Assessment, we have determined that you are NOT eligible for this position.”

[…]

Throughout the ‘90s and ‘00s, the FAA faced pressure to diversify its field of air traffic controllers, historically a profession that has been primarily white men, notably from the NBCFAE. In the early 2000s, this pressure focused on the newly developed air traffic control qualification test, the AT-SAT, which the NBCFAE hired Dr. Outtz to critique from an adverse impact standpoint. As originally scored, the test was intended to pass 60% of applicants, but predictions suggested only 3% of black applicants would pass. In response, the FAA reweighted the scoring to make the test easier to pass, reducing its correlation with job performance as they did so. In its final form, some 95% of applicants passed the test.

This was a bit of a shell game. In practice, they divided it into a “well qualified” band (with scores between 85 and 100 on the test, met by around 60% of applicants) and a “qualified” band (with scores between 70 and 84), and drew some 87% of selections from that “well qualified” band. Large racial disparities remained in the “well qualified” band. As a result, facing continued pressure, the FAA began to investigate ways to deprioritize the test.

Why not ditch it altogether? Simple: the test worked. It had “strong predictive validity,” outperforming “most other strategies in predicting mean performance,” and it was low cost and low time commitment. On average, people who performed better on the test actually did perform better as air traffic controllers, and this was never really in dispute.

[…]

The NBCFAE continued to pressure the FAA to diversify, with its members meeting with the DOT, FAA, Congressional Black Caucus, and others to push for increased diversity among ATCs. After years of fiddling with the research and years of pressure from the NBCFAE, the FAA landed on a strategy: by using a multistage process starting with non-cognitive factors, they could strike “an acceptable balance between minority hiring and expected performance”—a process they said would carry a “relatively small” performance loss. They openly discussed this tension in meetings, pointing to “a trade-off between diversity (adverse impact) and predicted job performance/outcomes,” asking, “How much of a change in job performance is acceptable to achieve what diversity goals?”

[…]

An active air traffic controller reached out to me at the end of January last year, talking about his frustration that so many qualified individuals were eliminated from entering training, contributing to a dire staffing shortage. His facility was operating at less than 75%, with controllers fatigued from working 6-day weeks. As he explained it, training can take 1.5 to 2.5 years at larger facilities, with washout rates from 30-60%, and when we spoke upper level facilities were only accepting transfers from lower level facilities, adding years to preparation time. Every issue compounds and adds to the problem over time, and the FAA’s 2013 changes set staffing back years. The FAA, he said, simply is not bringing in enough people to match the number leaving, with some air traffic controllers believing the agency is failing on purpose to find an excuse to privatize them.

A controller who worked for 25 years and retired in 2015 spoke with me last January as well. He had been offered a position at Oklahoma City to instruct new students. Per him, the ideal candidate can go from street to fully certified in about 4 years, while some trainees during his last few years had been training for 6-8 years. He alleged a pattern where some students were trained for years longer than others, rarely washed out, and were quietly checked out and promoted away from direct air traffic control positions into management.

Another retired controller and supervisor who formerly worked at the Chicago ARTCC echoed his story, claiming the FAA would regularly change the “best qualified list,” with those responsible for promotions changing requirements depending on who they wanted to promote. He was never told to certify an inadequate trainee, he said, but “the pressure was mounting.”

Posted in Policy | No Comments »

The US VC industry is causally responsible for the rise of one-fifth of the current largest 300 US public companies

February 25th, 2025

Will Gornall and Ilya A. Strebulaev examine The Economic Impact of Venture Capital:

Venture capital-backed companies account for 41% of total US market capitalization and 62% of US public companies’ R&D spending. Among public companies founded within the last fifty years, VC-backed companies account for half in number, three quarters by value, and more than 92% of R&D spending and patent value. The US did not spawn top public companies at a higher rate than other large, developed countries prior to 1970s ERISA reforms, but produced twice as many after it. Using those reforms as a natural experiment suggests that the US VC industry is causally responsible for the rise of one-fifth of the current largest 300 US public companies and that three-quarters of the largest US VC-backed companies would not have existed or achieved their current scale without an active VC industry.

Posted in Business, Economics, Policy | No Comments »

Despite severe economic stagnation, Japan is still a desirable place to live and work

February 24th, 2025

For more than three decades, Maxwell Tabarrok notes, Japan has endured near complete economic stagnation:

But despite severe economic stagnation, Japan is still a desirable place to live and work. The major costs of living, like housing, energy, and transportation are not particularly expensive compared to other highly-developed countries. Infrastructure in Japan is clean, functional, and regularly expanded. There is very little crime or disorder, and almost zero open drug use or homelessness. Compared to a peer country like Britain, whose economic stagnation over the past 30 years has been less severe, Japan seems to enjoy a higher quality of life.

[…]

Japan’s zoning code is set at the national level and therefore tends to be much less restrictive than the local zoning codes found in the West. Its national system lays out just 12 inclusive zones, which means the permitted building types carry over as you move up the categories, allowing mixed-use development by default. This compares favorably to zoning codes in the US which often have multiple dozens of exclusive land use categories. Even the most restrictive category in Japan’s system, shown in the top left (below), allows people to run small shops and offices out of their homes. There are floor-area-ratio limits and setbacks, but they are modest, and there is no distinction between single and multi-family housing units within these limits.

For environmental permitting, Japan mostly relies on explicit standards for environmental impact, rather than a lengthy permitting process where applicants must write detailed reports about possible alternatives and mitigation measures under threat of lawsuit, as in the US. Japan does have a copy-cat National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) procedural environmental law that was enacted in 1997, but it has two important differences that prevent its evolution into the procedural morass seen in other countries.

First is explicit numerical standards for which projects must go through the impact statement process, rather than the hand-waving ambiguities of NEPA. These standards generally only include large infrastructure projects like a port extension exceeding 300 hectares. Some residential projects are covered, but only those which exceed 75 hectares in area. Only 854 environmental impact assessments have been started in Japan since the act passed, and there have been zero for residential construction projects.

Second, the completed environmental assessments are harder to sue over than in Western countries. Plaintiffs need to have a personal and legally protected injury to have standing, rather than a generalized concern for the environment as in the US. Plus, the greater specificity of when the law applies and a court that has a much more deferential attitude towards agency determinations means the lawsuits are harder to win.

Permissive national zoning and an absence of environmental proceduralism leads to Japan having the highest rate of housing construction and the lowest home price to income ratio in the OECD.

[…]

Japan’s social order is incredibly valuable. The annual cost of crime in the United States is around $5 trillion dollars which is 18% of GDP. Higher crime rates would threaten the high-density urbanism which makes Japanese cities so affordable and desirable.

Posted in Economics, Policy, Urbanism | 4 Comments »

The medieval house might have been built to specifications approved by a rodent council

February 23rd, 2025

Dozens of rodents carry plague, Ed West notes, but it would only become deadly to humans when Yersinia pestis infected the flea of the black rat (Rattus rattus):

Black rats are sedentary homebodies and don’t like to move more than 200 metres from their nests; they especially like living near to humans, which is what makes them so much more dangerous than more adventurous rodents. Black rats have been our not-entirely-welcome companion for thousands of years, and were living near human settlements in the Near East from as far back as 3000 BC; the Romans and their roads helped them spread across the empire and brought them to Britain, the oldest rat remains here being found from the fourth century, underneath Fenchurch Street in London.

Black rats were especially comfortable in the typical medieval house, and while stone buildings became a feature of life in the 12th century, most were still made of wood and straw. In the words of historian Philip Ziegler, ‘The medieval house might have been built to specifications approved by a rodent council as eminently suitable for the rat’s enjoyment of a healthy and care-free life.’ This type of rat is also a very good climber, so could easily live in the thatched roofs which were common then.

Because of its preferred home, the black rat is also called the house rat or ship rat, while the brown rat prefers sewers. On top of this, the animals are fecund to a horrifying degree; one black rat couple can theoretically produce 329 million descendants in three years. So the typical medieval city had lots of rats, and with them came lots of fleas.

Fleas are nature’s great survivors. They can endure in all sorts of conditions, and some have developed the ability to live off bits of bread and only require blood for laying eggs. The black rat flea, called Xenopsylla cheopis, is also exceptionally hardy, able to survive between 6-12 months without a host, living in an abandoned nest or dung, although it is only active when the temperature is between 15-20 centigrade. As John Kelly wrote in The Great Mortality, the Oriental rat flea is ‘an extremely aggressive insect. It has been known to stick its mouth parts into the skin of a living caterpillar and suck out the caterpillar’s bodily fluids and innards’. What a world.

There are two types of flea: fur fleas and nest fleas, and only the former travels with its host rather than remaining in the nest. The rat flea is a fur flea, and while it prefers to stay on its animal of choice, they will jump on to other creatures if they’re nearby – unfortunately, in the 14th century that happened to be us. (In fact, they will attach themselves to most farmyard animals, and only the horse was left alone, because its odour repulses them, for some reason.)

As part of the great and disgusting chain of being, the rats inadvertently brought the plague to humans, but it wasn’t fun for the rats either, or the fleas for that matter. When the hungry flea bites the rat, the pestis triggers a mutation in the flea guts causing it to regurgitate the bacteria into the wound, so infecting the rat. (Yes, it is all a bit disgusting). Y. pestis can be transmitted by 31 different flea species, but only in a rodent does the quantity of bacillus become large enough to block the fleas’s stomach.

The flea therefore feeds more aggressively as it dies of starvation, and its frantic feeding makes the host mammal more overrun with the bacterium. The fleas also multiply as the plague-carrying rat gets sick, so that while a black rat will carry about seven fleas on average, a dying rat will have between 100 and 150. Rats were infected with the disease far more intensely than humans, so that ‘the blood of plague-infected rats contains 500-1,000 times more bacteria per unit of measurement than the blood of plague-infected humans.’

When the disease is endemic to rodents it’s called ‘sylvatic plague’, and when it jumps to humans it’s called ‘bubonic’ plague. For Y pestis to spread, there will ideally be two populations of rodents living side by side: one must be resistant to the disease so that it can play host, and the other non-resistant so the bacteria can feed on it. There needs to be a rat epidemic to cause a human epidemic because it provides a ‘reservoir’ for the disease to survive. Robert Gottfried wrote: ‘Y pestis is able to live in the dark, moist environment of rodent burrows even after the rodents have been killed by the epizootic, or epidemic. Thus as a new rodent community replaces the old one, the plague chain can be revived’. The rat colony will all be dead within two weeks of infection and then the fleas start attacking humans.

The first human cases would typically appear 16-23 days after the plague had arrived in a rat colony, with the first deaths taking place after about 20-28 days. It takes 3-5 days after infection for signs of the disease to appear in humans, and a similar time frame before the victim died. Somewhere between 20-40 per cent of infected people survived, and would thereafter mostly be immune.

What happened next would have been terrifying. ‘From the bite site, the contagion drains to a lymph node that consequently swells to form a painful bubo,’ or swelling lump, ‘most often in the groin, on the thigh, in an armpit or on the neck. Hence the name bubonic plague.’

Posted in Animals, Science, Urbanism | 5 Comments »

Politicians are in a sense less important than intellectuals and activists

February 22nd, 2025

Origins of Woke by Richard HananiaRichard Hanania noted almost immediately that the second Trump administration was more serious about policy across the board:

In 2016, Trump took over the GOP practically out of nowhere, nobody thought he would win the general election, and conservatives weren’t really prepared to do much of anything other than give him judges to confirm. The right has since then spent the last eight years thinking about how to make full use of the executive branch for when a Republican returns back to office.

But one thing this whole experience has taught me is that knowledge is fragmented and so much of politics, like life more generally, is about drawing attention. The Origins of Woke relies on the work of several scholars who are lesser known and have been hammering on some of the points I made in the book for decades, including Gail Heriot and Eugene Volokh, and many attorneys like Dan Morenoff and Alison Somin have done important work far from the public spotlight. And I think I probably originally learned about disparate impact from Steve Sailer. So there’s a kind of pipeline here, which in this case went Heriot et al-Hanania-Vivek-Trumpverse, from the most scholarly towards the most famous and attention grabbing. It’s been instructive to play a part in this process. One maybe can place Rufo in between Vivek and Trumpverse, or as part of an independent branch between Hanania and Trumpverse.

It’s possible no single person actually made the marginal difference here. If Trump hadn’t won the election, DeSantis certainly would’ve gone just as far. Vivek would have too, and even Nikki Haley opened her campaign with a video talking about wokeness as a threat to America, although in her case we can have doubts as to whether she would have taken decisive action on the issue. And maybe if Rufo and I didn’t exist, someone else would have filled our niches.

[…]

All of this makes me think that politicians are in a sense less important than intellectuals and activists. It’s actually difficult for me to imagine all this happening without me or Rufo, but easy to imagine it happening without Trump.

As I discuss in the introduction to The Origins of Woke, I started thinking about the relationship between wokeness and civil rights law around 2011 while I was in law school. I then spent about a decade trying to convince people how important this topic was. Finally, I just wrote about it myself, and things started to change.

[…]

Another lesson people can potentially draw from this experience is that it is possible to influence policy even if you’re starting out without much in the way of fame, connections, or money. Furthermore, my messaging hasn’t exactly been optimized to win over Republicans. Yet by making a compelling case in emphasizing the issue and bringing it to public attention, I was able to contribute towards changing the conversation on civil rights law. For anyone else who wants to influence policy, here’s a demonstration that it can be done.

[…]

Most political struggles end in failure or some kind of ambiguous outcome. But sometimes you advocate for an idea, and it just wins. I wanted conservatives to go to war against wokeness as a matter of policy, and the outcome has surpassed my most optimistic hopes. It’s a very satisfying feeling.

Posted in Policy | 6 Comments »

The president did not have a need-to-know about them

February 21st, 2025

Area 51 by Annie JacobsenThe Nevada Test Site, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), led to one of the most important and most secret businesses of the twenty-first century:

Called remote sensing, it is the ability to recognize levels of radioactivity from a distance using ultraviolet radiation, infrared, and other means of detection.

Within a decade of the disastrous nuclear accidents at Palomares and Thule, EG&G would so dominate the radiation-detection market that the laboratory built at the Nevada Test Site for this purpose was initially called the EG&G Remote Sensing Laboratory. After 9/11, the sister laboratory, at Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas, was called the Remote Sensing Laboratory and included sensing-detection mechanisms for all types of WMD. This facility would become absolutely critical to national security, so much so that by 2011, T. D. Barnes says that “only two people at Nellis are cleared with a need-to-know regarding classified briefings about the Remote Sensing Lab.”

[…]

EG&G had been taking radiation measurements and tracking radioactive clouds for the Atomic Energy Commission since 1946. For decades, EG&G Energy Measurements has maintained control of the vast majority of radiation measurements records going back to the first postwar test at Bikini Atoll in 1946. Because much of this information was originally created under the strict Atomic Energy classification Secret/ Restricted Data — i.e., it was “born classified” — it has largely remained classified ever since. It cannot be transferred to another steward. For decades, this meant there was no one to compete with EG&G for the remote sensing job.

[…]

So secret are the record groups in EG&G’s archives, even the president of the United States can be denied access to them, as President Clinton was in 1994. One year earlier, a reporter named Eileen Welsome had written a forty-five-page newspaper story for the Albuquerque Tribune revealing that the Atomic Energy Commission had secretly injected human test subjects with plutonium starting in the 1940s without those individuals’ knowledge or consent. When President Clinton learned about this, he created an advisory committee on human radiation experiments to look into secrets kept by the Atomic Energy Commission and to make them public. In several areas, the president’s committee succeeded in revealing disturbing truths, but in other areas it failed. In at least one case, regarding a secret project at Area 51, the committee was denied access to records kept by EG&G and the Atomic Energy Commission on the grounds that the president did not have a need-to-know about them. In another case, regarding the nuclear rocket program at Area 25 in Jackass Flats, the president’s committee also failed to inform the public of the truth. Whether this is because the record group in EG&G’s archive was kept from the committee or because the committee had access to it but chose not to report the facts in earnest remains unknown.

Posted in Technology, War | No Comments »

Who should skip college?

February 20th, 2025

The central thesis of The Case Against Education, Bryan Caplan explains, is that education has a low (indeed, negative) social return, because signaling, not building human capital, is its main function — but the selfish return to education is negative, too, for many students, depending on ability:

First and foremost: know thyself.

  • Don’t base your life choices on what your immediate social circle finds “demeaning.” As Dirty Jobs repeatedly proves, people routinely get used to jobs that initially disgust them.
  • Don’t base your life choices on whether parents and teachers constantly tell you that you’re “smart.” They’re not trustworthy assessors of your intelligence.
  • Don’t rule out options because they require “declining status.” If your family’s initial status is above average, declining status is the mathematical norm. That’s what “regression to the mean” means.

What should you do instead? First and foremost: Get objective evidence on your own intelligence.

  • If your SAT score is at 1200 or greater, your odds of successfully finishing a “real” major are quite good.
  • If your SAT is in the 1100-1200 range, it’s a toss-up.
  • If you’re in the 1000-1100 range, only try college if your peers consider you an annoyingly hard worker.
  • Below 1000? Don’t go.

[…]

What will go wrong if you ignore my advice? The most likely scenario is that you spend years worth of time and tuition, then fail to finish your degree. Maybe you’ll keep failing crucial classes. Maybe you’ll keep switching majors. Maybe you’ll die of boredom. The precise mechanism makes little difference: Since about 70% of the college payoff comes from completion, non-completion implies a terrible return on investment.

Posted in Economics, Education, Policy | 5 Comments »

Drones are not a new category but dramatically reduce the cost of some existing functions

February 19th, 2025

The side in control of the air tends to win, Austin Vernon notes:

At a minimum, dominant air power is a massive force multiplier that allows the side wielding it to take significantly less casualties than its opponent. Aircraft can uniquely disrupt supply lines, command and control, and troop concentrations. The forces on the losing side must drastically alter their tactics to survive, limiting their ability to attack or defend.

Another feature is that air-to-air battles tend to be lopsided. It is more common to see 20:1 or 10:1 kill/loss ratios than even matches. For example, the F-15 has 104 kills and zero losses since entering service in 1976. The defining factors have been pilot quality, aircraft performance, weapon performance, and sensor capability (radar, airborne early warning aircraft, etc.).

US airpower was so dominant in the 20th century that most opponents focused on building ground-based anti-aircraft defenses. An arms race developed between these anti-aircraft missile batteries and ever more sophisticated aircraft, weapons, and tactics on the US side. Stealth to avoid detection, cruise missiles to avoid risking aircraft, and highly specialized tactics and weapons to defeat anti-aircraft batteries are an outgrowth of this competition.

Drones are not a new category but dramatically reduce the cost of some existing functions:

FPV Drones → Attack Helicopters

Advocates of rotor aircraft thought they would dominate the battlefield in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, to the detriment of traditional armor. It didn’t happen because helicopters are vulnerable to air defenses, including shoulder-fired missiles and anti-aircraft guns.

First Person View (FPV) kamikaze drones that cost <$1000 or slightly larger reusable drones are bringing this prediction back from the dead. They are still vulnerable to air defense, but it is irrelevant given their cost. Ground forces will need to make many adjustments, similar to when anti-tank guided missiles made WWII-style tanks obsolete in the 1960s and 1970s.

Bomber Drones → Attack Helicopters (pt. 2)

Some missions call for slightly larger munitions than disposable FPVs can justify, and “bomber” drones that weigh around 25-50 kg and cost $10,000 fill the void. They mostly fly at night to increase survival rates and often use satellite communications, like StarLink, to avoid jamming. Missions are attacking parked vehicles, mining roads, and dropping grenades on infantry. These drones are much more powerful than FPVs and are worth the price if they can survive a few missions.

Recon Drones → Scout Helicopters and Forward Air Control Aircraft

Scouting for artillery, ground attack aircraft, and attack helicopters has long been a scarce resource, even for the US military. Infantry and armor units still had to self-scout with limited visibility.

Small recon drones, often off-the-shelf commercial models, bring top-tier scouting down to the squad level. Their cost makes using them sustainable, while many large drones, like the US Predator, are obsolete in high-intensity battles because of their price and vulnerability to air defenses.

One-Way Attack Drones → Cruise Missiles

Cruise missiles have a unique ability to attack heavily defended targets in the opponent’s rear, but their price limits their number.

Propeller-powered one-way attack drones can cost as little as $50,000 instead of $1+ million, increasing volume. The overall impact has been much more muted than FPV and recon drones because these drones are so easy to shoot down and have small payloads that limit what targets they can be effective against. They travel slowly, roughly the same as a car on the interstate, to meet cost goals and extend range. Their utility plummets once the opponent adapts to shoot them down with cheap weapons, like guns on trucks and helicopters, cheap interceptor drones, or electronic warfare. The drones can still provide net benefits if they temporarily overwhelm air defenses, force the enemy to expend significant organizational resources to counter them, or the targets are valuable enough.

Interceptor Drones → Man Portable Anti-Aircraft Missiles

Militaries developed man-portable anti-aircraft missiles to counter helicopters and low-flying aircraft, but they are much too expensive and complex to counter drones.

Instead, small racing-style drones that cost no more than a few thousand dollars ram or explode near targets. Their prey is primarily more expensive attack drones and higher-tier recon drones that cost $30,000-$200,000.

There are some experiments with drones carrying shotguns and other air-to-air weaponry to deal with the smallest FPV and recon drones. Time will tell if these are viable.

He projects some trends:

Barbell Procurement Strategy

The battlefield is so hostile that drones must be cheap enough to be expendable or capable enough to avoid all air defenses. The somewhat fancy $100,000 recon drone is probably in no-man’s-land. Large drones without sophisticated countermeasures, like the US Global Hawk or Predator/Reaper family, are obsolete outside the most permissive airspace. Even drones that were considered cheap before the war in Ukraine, like the Turkish TB-2, have been sent to the scrap heap.

One of the only viable(?) large drones currently in use is the pricey US RQ-180 because of its size and modern stealth features. Traditional cruise missiles also continue to be viable for deep strikes.

Small Eats Large

Drones aren’t automatically cheaper than legacy systems like helicopters or strategic reconnaissance platforms. Radical reduction in size and complexity is the best way to achieve this.

Better electronics and cameras have allowed recon drones with mass measured in grams. Or a shaped charge driven by an FPV drone into the weakest part of a vehicle’s armor can be much smaller than traditional anti-tank missile warheads.

Battery-electric powertrains can shrink much more than engines can, and these drones have disrupted short-range, low-speed categories much more than long-range or high-powered missions.

The success rate of these drones is often low, between 10%-50%, and many targets need multiple hits. However, the low cost of small drones means the math is favorable and similar to artillery shells.

Single Function Dominates

Drones can only be small and cheap if they are highly specialized for one task. Examples include anti-vehicle, anti-personnel, high-value targets ~30 km behind enemy lines, hitting enemy drones, dropping mines or supplies, etc. Many of these categories even have further specialization within them.

Paths with Faster Iteration Win

Things change fast since small drones are a relatively new technology. Pathways that allow quick adjustments can outcompete slow paths. Small and single-function platforms can increase iteration speed.

Slow, electric drones have massive advantages in operating footprint and costs, he notes:

Fuel

Fuel is one of the biggest concerns for modern militaries. The US military often assumes a fuel cost of hundreds or thousands of dollars per gallon to deliver to war zones for planning. The volume of demand in a high-intensity conflict could reach the level of economies like Japan. Aircraft are often the largest fuel consumers.

These drones require a fraction of the energy of high-performance aircraft and can often use electricity instead of fuel. The AEW scout battery pack would only be a few pounds and could charge with a tiny solar panel. Models like the tactical bomber, air-defense fighter, or air superiority fighter have batteries small enough to swap by hand. A few standard-size solar panels could provide enough juice for one sortie per day and don’t require vulnerable centralized infrastructure.

Infrastructure

An aircraft’s weight and stall speed plays a large part in determining runway length and quality. Small, slow drones need minimal airstrips, if they need them at all. There is no need for traditional air bases.

Parts/Maintenance

The US military prefers “module-based” maintenance. Techs change an entire radar module instead of diagnosing and fixing a certain subcomponent to reduce labor hours and the number of parts in stock.

Many drones would cost as much as a typical module, and there would be no reason to bother with parts or repairs. The need for techs and parts management would be minimal.

Battery-electric powertrains are reliable compared to jet engines and should be able to fly hundreds or thousands of hours before replacement without maintenance.

Training

Fighter pilots are the most valuable rank-adjusted human capital in any military. One great pilot can make a meaningful difference in an entire war by helping to clear the skies. Selection is intense, and training is very slow. Simulators help, but learning to fly a $100+ million fighter jet doesn’t happen overnight.

AI pilots take more effort to train initially but can replicate as needed. The burden for any human pilot/manager will be lower given the narrower mission of drones than multi-role fighters. The low cost of the platforms means both AI and humans can train constantly on real aircraft instead of using simulators. Battles can be live instead of simulated without endangering human pilots, improving the quality of training.

Sortie Rate

Most fighters need full crews to turn the aircraft around and keep it flying. Each airframe only has so many hours without full refits. Many aircraft struggle to fly one sortie per day. A low-maintenance, battery-electric drone with swappable batteries could fly 20-22 hours each day.

The sortie challenge would be especially beneficial for countries like Taiwan. China constantly flies fighters at the edge of Taiwan’s air defense identification zone, which forces Taiwan to send fighters to intercept them, wearing down airframes and pilots. A constant picket of drones would negate this strategy.

Shipping

Munitions, especially bombs, are the biggest logistical challenge after fuel. Manned aircraft tend to drop large bombs that are overkill because of their limited sortie rates and the risk each mission entails. Drones with high sortie rates can use small bombs that make the drone more practical and reduce total tonnage dropped as each target gets the appropriate amount instead of a truck getting vaporized by a 2000 lb bomb.

Which branch should take on the drones?

The Air Force loathes low-performance aircraft and is skeptical of deleting human pilots. Its budget mostly goes towards capabilities that the drone air force isn’t replacing, like deep strike, high-end fighters, or the nuclear umbrella. Deleting these platforms makes little sense when they still provide key capabilities (hedging!) and are in the phase where unit cost is falling. For those reasons, the Air Force is a poor choice to raise the drone force, and its job is to ensure its aircraft are protected from small drones when parked.

Thankfully, the US has four air forces to choose from, three of which already operate high-end aviation (Air Force, Navy, Marines).

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | 1 Comment »

The bacteria continue to grow exponentially only within tumors

February 18th, 2025

A University of Massachusetts Amherst-Ernest Pharmaceuticals team has developed a non-toxic bacterial therapy to deliver cancer-fighting drugs directly into tumors:

The team has been finetuning the development of non-toxic, genetically engineered strains of Salmonella to target tumors and then control the release of cancer-fighting drugs inside cancer cells. In addition to sparing healthy tissue from damage, this cancer treatment platform is able to deliver orders of magnitude more therapy than the administered dose because the simple-to-manufacture bacteria grow exponentially in tumors.

[…]

Early on in the research, the scientists discovered that it was the bacterial flagella – part of the cell that aids in movement – that enables the bacteria to invade cancer cells. So they engineered a genetic circuit in the bacteria that turns on the production of flagella with a simple, over-the-counter dose of aspirin. Without the turn-on switch provided by salicylic acid, the active metabolic product in the blood after a person takes an aspirin, the bacteria remain dormant in the tumor.

“One core part of this technology is the controlled activation of flagella,” Raman explains. “And the other core part is once the bacteria go inside cancer cells, we engineered them with a suicide circuit. So they rupture on their own and deliver the therapy inside the cancer cell.”

In pre-clinical research with mouse models, the bacteria is injected intravenously. “It goes everywhere, but then the immune system rapidly clears the attenuated bacteria from healthy organ tissue within two days. The bacteria continue to grow exponentially only within tumors during that time. On the third day, we give an over-the-counter dose of aspirin to trigger the bacteria to invade the cancer cells and then deliver the therapy,” Raman says.

Posted in Science | 1 Comment »

Russian Army and FSB Veteran on the Ukraine War

February 17th, 2025

Valery Shiryaev, an ex-Russian Army & FSB Officer, reveals when Ukraine’s war will end, exposes North Korean troops’ failures in Kursk, and breaks down the flaws of Western tanks in Ukraine, in an interview dubbed using AI voice cloning:

Posted in Policy, War | 3 Comments »

Whether that’s good or bad, progressive or reactionary isn’t the point; it just is necessary

February 16th, 2025

Freddie DeBoer notes that liberals cannot admit that past examples of successful immigration have involved migrants conforming to their new culture:

Last fall there was something of a local controversy in my town regarding drive-thru workers with limited English skills. Apparently, a number of my neighbors had taken to Facebook and NextDoor to complain that local fast food restaurants employed recent immigrants whose English skills were so bad, they were incapable of doing their jobs. A particular McDonald’s location drew special ire. As a good progressive defender of immigration, I dismissed this talk as simple xenophobia, and indeed there was no doubt a lot of that. What I read about on a local blog certainly involved language that was, at least, unkind. But in the months since then, I’ve gone through that McDonald’s drive-thru window probably a half-dozen times, and I have to tell you…. I often genuinely can’t understand what the women (all women) working the drive-thru are saying. I honestly can’t, and I spent years teaching English language skills at the college and graduate school level. Most visits are an exercise in frustration. And I have to admit that a job where your primary responsibility is to talk to customers is a job that requires you to speak the native language of the country you’re in with at least a certain minimum of fluency. Whether that’s good or bad, progressive or reactionary isn’t the point; it just is necessary.

Posted in Linguistics, Policy | 1 Comment »

Why are female intellectuals crazy?

February 15th, 2025

Emil Kirkegaard presents his speculative model of sex differences among people with extreme beliefs, which explains why female intellectuals are crazy:

Women are more centrist in their personality and thus their beliefs than men. They hold views that are more common, or statistically speaking, their standard deviation is smaller for beliefs and their strength of belief. This is just a special case of the nearly universal greater male variance finding.

To move a person to adopt views that are very unlike those held by the rest of society, some kind of psychological push-factor is needed. The main push-factors are intelligence, open-mindedness, or craziness (psychopathology, P factor).

Thus, statistically speaking, women with extreme views need a stronger push factor than men do to attain those views.

Thus, statistically speaking, women with extreme views will average higher open-mindedness, intelligence, and craziness.

Posted in Policy, Science | 4 Comments »

Dangerous top secret tests can be conducted there without much scrutiny or oversight

February 14th, 2025

Area 51 by Annie JacobsenThe idea behind a facility like Area 51, Annie Jacobsen reminds us (in Area 51), is that dangerous top secret tests can be conducted there without much scrutiny or oversight:

To this end, there is no shortage of death woven into the uncensored history of Area 51. One of the most dangerous tests ever performed there was Project 57, the dirty bomb test that took place five miles northwest of Groom Lake, in a subparcel called Area 13. And yet what might have been the one defensible, positive outcome in this otherwise shockingly outrageous test — namely, lessons gleaned from its cleanup — was ignored until it was too late.

Unlike the spy plane projects at Groom Lake, where operations tend to have clear-cut beginnings and ceremonious endings, Project 57 was abandoned midstream. If the point of setting off a dirty bomb in secret was to see what would happen if an airplane carrying a nuclear bomb crashed into the earth near where people lived, it follows that serious efforts would then be undertaken by the Atomic Energy Commission to learn how to clean up such a nightmare scenario after the catastrophe occurs. No such efforts were initially made.

Instead, about a year after setting off the dirty bomb, the Atomic Energy Commission put a barbed-wire fence around the Area 51 subparcel, marked it with HAZARD/ DO NOT ENTER/ NUCLEAR MATERIAL signs, and moved on to the next weapons test. The bustling CIA facility five miles downwind would be relatively safe, the nuclear scientists and the weapons planners surmised. Alpha particles are heavy and would rest on the topsoil after the original dust cloud settled down. Furthermore, almost no one knew about the supersecret project, certainly not the public, so who would protest? The closest inhabitants were the rank and file at the CIA’s Groom Lake facility next door, and they also knew nothing of Project 57. The men there followed strict need-to-know protocols, and as far as the commission was concerned, all anyone at Area 51 needed to know was to not venture near the barbed-wire fence marking off Area 13.

And yet the information gleaned from a cleanup effort would have been terribly useful, as was revealed eight years and eight months after Project 57 unfurled. On the morning of January 17, 1966, a real-life dirty bomb crisis occurred over Palomares, Spain. A Strategic Air Command bomber flying with four armed hydrogen bombs — with yields between 70 kilotons and 1.45 megatons — collided midair with a refueling tanker over the Spanish countryside.

On the morning of the accident, an Air Force pilot and his six-man crew were participating in an exercise that was part of Operation Chrome Dome, something that had begun in the late 1950s as part of Strategic Air Command.

[…]

That morning, the bomber lined up with the tanker and had just begun refueling when, in the words of pilot Larry Messinger, “all of a sudden, all hell seemed to break loose” and the two aircraft collided. There was a massive explosion and the men in the fuel tanker were instantly incinerated. Somehow Messinger, his copilot, the instructor pilot, and the navigator managed to eject from the airplane carrying the bombs. Their parachutes deployed, and the men floated down, landing in the sea. The four nuclear bombs — individually powerful enough to destroy Manhattan — also had parachutes, two of which did not deploy. One parachuted bomb landed gently in a dry riverbed and was later recovered relatively intact. But when the two bombs without parachutes hit the earth, their explosive charges detonated, breaking open the nuclear cores. Nuclear material was released at Palomares in the form of aerosolized plutonium, which then spread out across 650 acres of Spanish farmland — consistent with dispersal patterns from the Project 57 dirty bomb test. The fourth bomb landed in the sea and became lost. Palomares was then a small fishing village and farming community located on the Mediterranean Sea. As fortune would have it, January 17 was the Festival of Saint Anthony, the patron saint of Palomares, which meant most people in the village were at church that day and not out working in the fields.

[…]

The daily brief said nothing about widespread plutonium dispersal or about the lost thermonuclear bomb. Only that the “16th Nuclear Disaster Team had been dispatched to the area.” The “16th Nuclear Disaster Team” sounded official enough, but if fifteen nuclear disaster teams had preceded this one or existed concurrently, no record of any of them exists in the searchable Department of Energy archives. In reality, the group was ad hoc, meaning it was put together for the specific purpose of dealing with the Palomares incident. An official nuclear disaster response team did not exist in 1966 and would not be created for another nine years, until 1975, when retired Brigadier General Mahlon E. Gates, then the manager of the Nevada Test Site, put together the Nuclear Emergency Search Team, or NEST.

In 1966, the conditions in Palomares, Spain, were strikingly similar to the conditions at the Nevada Test Site in terms of geology. Both were dry, hilly landscapes with soil, sand, and wind shear as significant factors to deal with. But considering, with inconceivable lack of foresight, the Atomic Energy Commission had never attempted to clean up the dirty bomb that it had set off at Area 13 nine years before, the 16th Nuclear Disaster Team was, essentially, working in the dark.

Eight hundred individuals with no hands-on expertise were sent to Palomares to assist in the cleanup efforts there. The teams improvised. One group secured the contaminated area and prepared the land to remove contaminated soil. A second group worked to locate the lost thermonuclear bomb, called a broken arrow in Defense Department terms. The group cleaning up the dispersed plutonium included “specialists and scientists” from the Los Alamos Laboratory, the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, Sandia Laboratories, Raytheon, and EG&G. It was terribly ironic. The very same companies who had engineered the nuclear weapons and whose employees had wired, armed, and fired them were now the companies being paid to clean up the deadly mess. This was the military-industrial complex in full swing.

For the next three months, workers labored around the clock to decontaminate the site of deadly plutonium. By the time the cleanup was over, more than fourteen hundred tons of radioactive soil and plant life were excavated and shipped to the Savannah River plant in South Carolina for disposal. The majority of the plutonium dispersed on the ground was accounted for, but the Defense Nuclear Agency eventually conceded that the extent of the plutonium particles scattered by wind, carried as dust, and ingested by earthworms and excreted somewhere else “will never be known.”

As for the missing hydrogen bomb, for forty-four days the Pentagon refused to admit it was lost despite the fact that it was widely reported as being missing. “I don’t know of any missing bomb,” one Pentagon official told the Associated Press. Only after the bomb was recovered from the ocean floor did the Pentagon admit that it had in fact been lost.

The nuclear accidents did not stop there. Two years and four days later there was another airplane crash involving a Strategic Air Command bomber and four nuclear bombs. On January 21, 1968, an uncontrollable fire started on board a B-52G bomber during a secret mission over Greenland. Six of the seven crew members bailed out of the burning airplane, which crested over the rooftops of the American air base at Thule and slammed into the frozen surface of North Star Bay. The impact detonated the high explosives in at least three of the four thermonuclear bombs — similar to exploding multiple dirty bombs — spreading radioactive plutonium, uranium, and tritium over a large swath of ice. A second fire started at the crash site, consuming bomb debris, wreckage from the airplane, and fuel. After the inferno burned for twenty minutes the ice began to melt. One of the bombs fell into the bay and disappeared beneath the frozen sea. In November of 2008, a BBC News investigation found that the Pentagon ultimately abandoned that fourth nuclear weapon after it became lost.

Once again, an ad hoc emergency group was put together; there was still no permanent disaster cleanup group. This time five hundred people were involved. The conditions were almost as dangerous as the nuclear material. Temperatures fell to –70 degrees Fahrenheit, and winds blew at ninety miles per hour. Equipment froze. In a secret SAC document, made public by a Freedom of Information Act request in 1989, the Air Force declared their efforts would be nominal, “a cleanup undertaken as good housekeeping measures,” with officials anticipating the removal of radioactive debris “to equal not less than 50%” of the total of what was there. For eight months, a crew calling themselves the Dr. Freezelove Team worked around the clock. When they were done, 10,500 tons of radioactive ice, snow, and crash debris was airlifted out of Greenland and flown to South Carolina for disposal.

[…]

After the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963, testing had moved underground, but often these underground tests “vented,” releasing huge plumes of radiation from fissures in the earth.

Posted in Technology, War | 1 Comment »

He had revised his former estimation of the legitimacy of monarchs

February 13th, 2025

Napoleon by Andrew RobertsShortly after the failure of the Cadoudal plot, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), Napoleon said to the Conseil:

‘They seek to destroy the Revolution by attacking my person. I will defend it, for I am the Revolution.’

[…]

He had revised his former estimation of the legitimacy of monarchs. ‘The hereditary principle could alone prevent a counter-revolution’, he added in similar vein. Afterwards, petitions started arriving from the departments begging Napoleon to take the crown. Newspapers began running articles praising monarchical institutions, and officially inspired pamphlets such as Jean Chas’s Réflexions sur l’hérédité du pouvoir souverain were published suggesting that the best way to foil the conspirators would be to found a Napoleonic dynasty.

[…]

‘No one proposed to say King!’ noted Pelet. Instead ‘consul’, ‘prince’ and ‘emperor’ were discussed. The first two sounded too modest, but Pelet believed the Conseil thought ‘that of Emperor too ambitious’.

[…]

By the time Napoleon was ready to declare himself emperor, many of the great republican generals who might have objected were gone: Hoche, Kléber and Joubert were dead; Dumouriez was in exile; Pichegru and Moreau were about to go on trial for treachery. Only Jourdan, Augereau, Bernadotte and Brune remained and they were about to be placated with marshals’ batons.

The explanation Napoleon gave Soult – ‘An end should be put to the hopes of the Bourbons’ – was of course not the whole reason; he also wanted to be able to address Francis of Austria and Alexander of Russia as equals, and perhaps also Augustus, Hadrian and Constantine.

France was de facto an empire by 1804, and it was only acknowledging that fact that Napoleon declared himself an emperor de jure, just as Queen Victoria would become for the British Empire in 1877.

Astonishingly few Frenchmen opposed the return to an hereditary monarchy only eleven years after the execution of Louis XVI, and those who did were promised the opportunity to vote against it in a plebiscite.

[…]

Eight days later Napoleon was officially proclaimed emperor in a fifteen-minute ceremony at Saint-Cloud, in which Joseph was appointed Grand Elector and Louis became Constable of France. He henceforth took the somewhat convoluted and seemingly contradictory style ‘Napoleon, through the grace of God and the Constitution of the Republic, Emperor of the French’.

[…]

Should Napoleon die without an heir it was resolved that Joseph and then Louis would inherit the crown, with Lucien and Jérôme cut out of the line of succession due to the marriages of which their brother disapproved. Napoleon was furious that while Jérôme, who was serving in the French navy, had been on shore leave in America in December 1803 and had married the beautiful Baltimore heiress Elizabeth Patterson rather than holding himself back for a European dynastic union. Napoleon did everything in his power thereafter to end the marriage, including importuning the Pope to have it annulled and ordering French officials to ‘say publicly that I do not recognize a marriage that a young man of nineteen has contracted against the laws of his country’. All of his brothers except Louis had married for love, as he himself had, which was of no use to France.

[…]

The day after he was proclaimed emperor, Napoleon appointed four honorary and fourteen active ‘Marshals of the Empire’.

[…]

Between 1807 and 1815 a further eight were created. The marshalate wasn’t a military rank but an honorific one intended to recognize and reward something that Napoleon later called ‘the sacred fire’, and of course to incentivize the rest of the high command. The title came with a silver and velvet baton studded with gold eagles in a box of red Moroccan leather and indicated that Napoleon considered these men to be the fourteen best military commanders in the French army. Not everyone was impressed: when his staff congratulated Masséna, he merely snorted, ‘There are fourteen of us!’ Masséna was lucky to get his baton at all, having voted against the Life Consulate and criticized the coming Moreau trial, but his military capacity was undeniable.

[…]

Whatever their social origin, Napoleon addressed all the marshals as ‘Mon cousin’ in correspondence, as he did Cambacérès and some of the senior imperial dignitaries.*

[…]

As well as titles and batons, Napoleon gave dotations (land presents) to his marshals, some of which were huge.

[…]

As well as founding the marshalate, on May 18, 1804 Napoleon formally constituted the Imperial Guard, an amalgamation of the Consular Guard and the unit that guarded the Legislative Body.

[…]

Reims (where coronations of French kings had traditionally taken place), the Champs de Mars (turned down because of the likelihood of inclement weather) and Aix-la-Chapelle (for its connections with Charlemagne) were briefly considered before Notre-Dame was decided upon. The date of December 2 was a compromise between Napoleon, who had wanted November 9, the fifth anniversary of the Brumaire coup, and the Pope, who had wanted Christmas Day, when Charlemagne had been crowned in AD 800. The Council then discussed heraldic insignia and the official badge of the Empire, with Crétet’s special committee unanimously recommending the cockerel, emblem of Ancient Gaul, but if that was not accepted the eagle, lion, elephant, Aegis of Minerva, oak tree and ear of corn also had their supporters. Lebrun even suggested commandeering the Bourbons’ fleur-de-lis. Miot rightly denounced the fleur-de-lis as ‘an imbecility’ and instead proposed an enthroned Napoleon as the badge.

‘The cock belongs to the farmyard,’ said Napoleon, ‘it is far too feeble a creature.’ The Comte de Ségur supported the lion as it supposedly vanquished leopards, and Jean Laumond supported the elephant, a royal beast that according to (incorrect) popular belief couldn’t bend its knee. Cambacérès came up with the bee, as they have a powerful chief (albeit a queen), and General Lacuée added that it could both sting and make honey. Denon suggested the eagle, but the problem with that was that Austria, Prussia, the United States and Poland were already represented by eagles. No vote was taken, but Napoleon chose the lion, and they moved on to the question of inscriptions on the new coinage, rather strangely agreeing to keep the words ‘French Republic’ on it, which remained the case until 1809. Shortly after the meeting broke up Napoleon changed his mind from the lion to an eagle with spread wings, on the basis that it ‘affirms imperial dignity and recalls Charlemagne’. It also recalled Ancient Rome.

Not content with having just one symbol, Napoleon also chose the bee as a personal and family emblem, which then found its way as a decorative motif onto carpets, curtains, clothes, thrones, coats of arms, batons, books and many other items of imperial paraphernalia. The symbol of immortality and regeneration, hundreds of small gold-and-garnet bees (or possibly cicada, or even mis-drawn eagles) had been found in 1653 when the tomb was opened of the fifth-century King Childeric I of France, father of Clovis, in Tournai.

[…]

On July 14, 1804 the remains of the great French marshals Vauban and Turenne were transferred to Les Invalides. Napoleon chose the occasion to make the inaugural awards of a new French order, the Légion d’Honneur, to reward meritorious service to France regardless of social origin. The first medals were five-pointed crosses in plain white enamel hanging from a red ribbon, but they had financial stipends attached according to one’s ranking in the organization. The fifteen cohorts of the order comprised grand officers, commanders, officers and legionaries, and each received 200,000 francs to distribute annually to worthy recipients.

Some on the Left complained that the reintroduction of honours fundamentally violated the revolutionary concept of social equality. Moreau had sneered at a previous attempt by Napoleon to reintroduce honours, awarding his cook ‘the order of the saucepan’. In the army, however, the Légion was an instant success. It’s impossible to say how many acts of valour were undertaken at least in part in the hope of being awarded ‘the cross’, as it was universally known. Napoleon chose ‘Honneur et Patrie’ as its motto, the words embroidered on all French standards.

[…]

The inclusion of civilians in the Légion was deliberate; the rest of society could also attain honour if it copied the military virtues, especially those of loyalty and obedience.

[…]

Out of the 38,000 people who received the rubans rouges (red ribbons) under Napoleon, 34,000 (or 89 per cent) were soldiers or sailors, but savants like Laplace, Monge, Berthollet and Chaptal got them too, as did prefects and several of the jurists who had helped write the Code. Napoleon also set up the Maison d’Éducation de la Légion d’Honneur at Saint-Denis, an excellent boarding school providing free education for the daughters of recipients of the medal who had been killed on active service, which still exists today, as does a Légion lycée in Saint-Germain-en-Laye.

At one of the Conseil meetings in May 1802, when the foundation of the Légion was under discussion, the lawyer Théophile Berlier sneered at the whole concept, to which Napoleon replied:

You tell me that class distinctions are baubles used by monarchs, I defy you to show me a republic, ancient or modern, in which distinctions have not existed. You call these medals and ribbons baubles; well, it is with such baubles that men are led. I would not say this in public, but in an assembly of wise statesmen it should be said. I don’t think that the French love liberty and equality: the French are not changed by ten years of revolution: they are what the Gauls were, fierce and fickle. They have one feeling: honour. We must nourish that feeling. The people clamour for distinction. See how the crowd is awed by the medals and orders worn by foreign diplomats. We must recreate these distinctions. There has been too much tearing down; we must rebuild. A government exists, yes and power, but the nation itself – what is it? Scattered grains of sand.

[…]

Napoleon and Josephine’s coronation at Notre-Dame on Sunday, December 2, 1804 was a magnificent spectacle, despite the somewhat last-minute organization. It was snowing when the first guests started to arrive at 6 a.m., and they entered under a wooden and stucco neo-Gothic awning designed to mask the destructive iconoclasm wrought during the Revolution.

[…]

Nothing was contemporary except the grenadiers’ uniforms lining the route, otherwise everything was part classical, part Gothic and wholly extravagant.

[…]

He wore a long satin, gold-embroidered gown that reached his ankles, over which he had an ermine-lined crimson velvet mantle with a golden bee motif bordered with olive, laurel and oak leaves, which weighed more than 80 pounds, so it took Joseph, Louis, Lebrun and Cambacérès to lift it on to him.

[…]

Although the ceremony was based on those of the Bourbons, Napoleon broke with tradition in not making confession or taking communion.

Napoleon had two crowns during the coronation: the first was a golden laurel-wreath one that he entered the cathedral wearing which was meant to evoke the Roman Empire and which he wore throughout; the second was a replica of Charlemagne’s crown, which had to be specially made because the traditional French coronation crown had been destroyed during the Revolution and the Austrians wouldn’t lend him Charlemagne’s. Although he lifted the Charlemagne replica over his own head, as previously rehearsed with the Pope, he didn’t actually place it on top because he was already wearing the laurels. He did however crown Josephine, who knelt before him.

[…]

When the Pope had blessed them both, embraced Napoleon and intoned ‘Vivat Imperator in aeternam’, and the Mass had finished, Napoleon pronounced his coronation oath:

I swear to maintain the integrity of the territory of the Republic: to respect and to cause to be respected the laws of the Concordat and of freedom of worship, of political and civil liberty, of the irreversibility of the sale of the biens nationaux; to raise no taxes except by virtue of the law; to maintain the institution of the Légion d’Honneur; to govern only in view of the interest, the wellbeing and the glory of the French people.

Napoleon’s crowning of himself was the ultimate triumph of the self-made man, and in one way a defining moment of the Enlightenment. It was also fundamentally honest: he had indeed got there through his own efforts. It is possible that he later regretted doing it, however, because of the vaulting egoism it suggested. When the great classical painter Jacques-Louis David, who was commissioned to commemorate the coronation, wrote to Napoleon’s senior courtier Pierre Daru in August 1806 about the ‘great moment’ that had ‘astonished spectators’ (his sketch of the self-crowning is reproduced as Plate 31), he was instead ordered to paint the moment when Napoleon crowned Josephine.

[…]

Although Madame Mère hadn’t attended the coronation, when she was congratulated on her son’s elevation to the imperial purple her reply was replete with her natural fatalism and great common sense. ‘Pourvu que ça dure,’ she said. ‘Let’s hope that it lasts.’

Posted in Policy | No Comments »

The only items taken were police uniforms

February 12th, 2025

Greg Ellifritz warns of terrorists in uniform:

Most recently, we saw terrorists wearing uniforms during the October 2023 Hamas terrorist attack in Israel. Several groups of terrorists wore green fatigue uniforms similar to those worn by the Israeli Defense Forces.

That wasn’t the first time. Here is a brief list of worldwide terrorist and active killer attacks where the perpetrator(s) wore uniforms of some type.

  • In 2003, at least 76 Al-Qaeda operatives conducted a series of suicide bombing attacks in Istanbul, Turkey. Some were dressed as police officers.
  • In 2004, some of the terrorists involved in the Beslan school attack wore police and military uniforms during their assault on the school.
  • In 2008, some of the terrorists involved in the Mumbai, India attacks wore Indian security forces uniforms.
  • In 2011, the killer/bomber in Oslo, Norway wore a home made police uniform to facilitate his attack.
  • In 2013 a US Embassy in Ankara, Turkey was attacked by a suicide bomber. How did the bomber get past security? He was dressed as a mailman and was carrying an envelope.
  • In 2014, Iraqi suicide bombers dressed as the police.
  • In 2015, A terrorist cell was apprehended in Belgium. They had Belgian police uniforms, explosives, and rifles. The terrorists were going to dress as cops, bomb police stations, and shoot citizens in the street.
  • In 2015, kidnappers attempted to abduct a woman in South Africa while wearing police uniforms.
  • In 2020, the Texas Walmart active killer was wearing a uniform shirt with a badge.

Why uniforms? In a crisis, people wearing uniforms aren’t generally questioned. If a bomb goes off or a terrorist starts shooting, every cop and fireman for miles around will be responding. No one will be looking at what type of uniform someone is wearing as long as he appears like he is helping out.

The uniform gives people access to areas into which they would be denied entrance if they were dressed in normal clothing. Think about terrorists wanting to detonate a secondary device to kill a large number of police and fire personnel at a bomb scene. Would any cops on the perimeter of a bombing incident stop a person in a paramedic uniform running up to the scene with a large first aid bag?

Nope. And that bag might be filled with C-4 and nails instead of bandages. I can’t think of a better way to kill a lot of cops and firemen.

How do terrorists get police uniforms? It’s easy. They steal them.

I have a friend who worked on an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force in one of the largest cities in the USA. His unit investigated regular burglaries of dry cleaning businesses for years. In these burglaries, the only items taken were police uniforms that officers had dropped off for cleaning. This has been happening for almost 20 years and you don’t hear a thing about it in the media. We’re ripe for an attack of this nature.

Posted in Crime, War | 6 Comments »

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