John Antal composed a nightmare scenario for the US military, The Dictator’s Dream:
A world away, the war in Gaza continued unabated, and after suffering nearly 6,000 Hezbollah rocket and missile attacks in northern Israel, the Middle East had exploded. Israel launched a full-scale invasion into Lebanon to push Hezbollah forces north of the Litani River. Reacting swiftly, Hezbollah launched thousands of missiles towards Israel. A day later, Iran and its surrogates in Yemen launched massive rocket, missile, and drone attacks aimed at Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa, and other Israeli cities and settlements.
Israel’s Iron Dome could not handle the overwhelming attack, and as a result, Israeli casualties dramatically mounted, and towns and villages burned. Hoping to avoid a war prior to the Presidential election, the United States first hesitated and then finally committed military forces to support their Jewish allies. In a massive movement of combat power, the United States military engaged with significant naval and air forces against Iran and its proxies. Consequently, Iran and its surrogates targeted American forces in the Middle East. The United States was now in a shooting war and taking casualties.
[…]
Meanwhile, in Ukraine, Russian forces were attacking relentlessly, regardless of their horrendous losses in men and equipment. The Ukrainians were fighting bravely, desperately, but the weight of the Russian attacks forced a breakthrough of the Ukrainian defenses. Ukrainian forces fell back in disorder and a mass refugee exodus from Ukraine began. The US and NATO rushed to respond with an emergency resupply operation, but it was proving to be too little, too late. With mounting Ukrainian losses in both manpower and territory, the dictator expected Kyiv to surrender to a triumphant Russia despite American efforts.
As the Americans were contending with a war in the Middle East and a faltering Ukraine, they were experiencing chaos at home. The contentious Presidential election erupted in violence. On November 7, when the winner of the election was announced, riots broke out in major American cities. The dictator’s hybrid warfare forces, already surreptitiously positioned in the US, facilitated, and supported these riots. Sabotage and violent “false flag” killings raged in cities across the US. Nuclear power plants and oil refineries were attacked by explosive laden drones. Forest fires raged across the American southwest, started by the dictator’s hybrid special forces teams and facilitated by drug cartel gangs. America’s national, military, and police forces struggled to maintain order. Sabotage, mass shootings, transportation disruptions, internet and communications outages, and attacks on the electrical grid, along with cyber-attacks from “unknown actors,” disrupted American society. Just in time logistics broke down. Store shelves were soon bare, and looting was rampant. Several major metropolises plunged into darkness. Disorder consumed America at home and abroad.
As this hybrid war played out in the United States, the dictator decided it was time to act against the renegade province that he had sworn to bring to heel. Rather than an outright invasion, his plan was more subtle, involving a siege and an ultimatum for a “peaceful” surrender. First, his military forces imposed a naval blockade, having practiced it multiple times in the prior 18 months during massive “punishment drills.” To increase the seriousness of this blockade, the dictator’s naval and air forces deployed sea mines to block the major trade routes. The dictator then ratcheted up the pressure by imposing a naval quarantine. This included halting, boarding, and detouring every ship sailing into the quarantine zone to the mainland for confiscation. The dictator dared any foreign power to challenge these actions and declared that his air, sea, and rocket forces would only respond with force if provoked.
You can also listen to Antal read the story and discuss it:
“Useful fiction” presents possible scenarios intended to develop creativity and strengthen foresight — solving problems in the short term and creating solutions for the long-run.
The increasing speed of battlefield adaptation requires the U.S. Army to innovate and develop courses of action very rapidly.
American deterrence has been dramatically affected by events in the past several years.
The next night at the Spahn Ranch, the same group convened, with three additions. There was the eighteen-year-old Steven “Clem” Grogan, a musician and high school dropout, and the nineteen-year-old Leslie “Lu-Lu” Van Houten, a former homecoming princess from the suburbs of Los Angeles who’d played the sousaphone in junior high.
And there was Charles Manson. Their leader.
The seven of them piled into the beat-up Ford on a search for more victims. After nearly three hours of restive driving through Los Angeles and its environs, Manson finally settled on a home in Los Feliz, at 3301 Waverly Drive, next door to a house he’d once stayed in. With no idea of who lived there, he broke into the house by himself, armed with a pistol and a knife. Others maintain that he brought Tex Watson with him. In any case, he spotted Leno LaBianca, forty-four, a grocery store owner, asleep on the couch, a newspaper over his face. Leno’s wife, Rosemary, thirty-eight, was in the bedroom. Rosemary was paranoid that people had been breaking in and moving their furniture around lately — and, like the whole city, she was spooked by the Tate murders the previous night. Even so, Manson was apparently able to walk right in through an unlocked side door, and he tied up the couple by himself. Then he rejoined his acolytes at the bottom of the long driveway, where they were waiting in the car.
Manson chose Watson and Krenwinkel, again, as his executioners. This time he added Van Houten to the mix. She’d never so much as struck another person before that night. He told the three of them to go inside and kill everyone. They had only buck knives.
They burst into the house, separated the couple, and stabbed Leno twenty-six times; they cut the word “War” into his stomach and impaled a carving fork beside it, its handle jutting out of his belly. They left a steak knife protruding from his throat. Rosemary suffered forty-one stab wounds, many inflicted after she’d died. Before they left, the killers scrawled “Healter [sic] Skelter” in blood on the refrigerator — misspelling the Beatles song “Helter Skelter.” On the walls, they smeared “Rise” and “Death to Pigs” in Leno’s blood.
[…]
But Manson and his cohort weren’t brought to justice for nearly four months.
[…]
As days turned into weeks and weeks to months, two separate teams of LAPD detectives — one assigned to Tate, the other to LaBianca — failed to share information, believing the crimes unconnected.
[…]
Talk about the murders long enough, and inevitably someone will bring up Joan Didion’s famous remark from The White Album: “The sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969… The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.” There’s the germ of truth in that. But the process wasn’t so abrupt. It began that day, but it wasn’t over, really, until December 1, 1969, when the police announced the crimes had been solved and the nation got its first glimpse of the killers. Here was the final fulfillment of paranoia, the last gasp of sixties idealism.
[…]
[Susan] Atkins had been charged with another, unrelated murder — that of Gary Hinman, an old friend of Manson — and was being held at the Sybil Brand Institute, a jail for women in Los Angeles County, where she bragged to cellmates about her complicity in the Tate murders. Those offhand remarks broke the case open for the LAPD, who began to connect the dots they’d been staring at for nearly four months.
[…]
These weren’t the faces of hardened criminals or escaped lunatics. They were hippies, stereotypical flower children, in the bloom of wide-eyed youth: the men unshaven and long-haired, wearing beads and buckskin jackets; the women in blue jeans and tie-dyed tops, no bras, their hair tangled and unwashed.
They talked like hippies, too, spouting an ethos of free love, eschewing monogamy and marriage in favor of sexual experimentation. They lived in roving communes, caravanning along the Golden Coast in Technicolor — bright buses and clunkers cobbled together from spare parts.
They believed that hallucinogens strengthened the spirit and expanded the mind. They gave birth naturally and raised their children together in rustic simplicity.
In other ways, though, their philosophy was gnostic, verging on theological. Time did not exist, they proclaimed. There was no good, no bad, and no death. All human beings were God and the devil at the same time, and part of one another. In fact, everything in the universe was unified, one with itself. The Family’s moral code, insofar as it existed at all, was riven with contradictions. While it was wrong to kill animals — even the snakes and spiders in their bunkhouses had to be carefully spared — it was fine to kill people, because a human life was inherently valueless. To kill someone was tantamount to “breaking off a minute piece of some cosmic cookie,” as Tex Watson later put it. If anything, death was something to be embraced, because it exposed your soul to the oneness of the universe.
A forward defense was the simplest option. If the enemy tried to attack through Wadi Al Sirree, he would have to fight through Davis’s men first. It would require the preparation of a platoon battle position east of the tank ditch to deny the enemy access into the trails. He would have to improve their present fighting positions and antitank ditch with mines and wire, thus blocking the enemy’s advance into the valley. This option would maximize simplicity, mass, and unity of command. Sometimes the simplest plan was the best one.
Davis’s second option was a reverse-slope defense at the eastern edge of the four trails that led into the valley. This course of action called for the entire platoon to reposition to the east, abandoning the hill that overlooked the tank ditch. A reverse-slope defense would deny the platoon clear observation of the enemy as he approached the valley, but it would provide better protection from enemy direct and indirect fires. The concept was to allow the enemy to breach the tank ditch and mines, place obstacles to force the enemy to move along the narrow northern trails, and then destroy the enemy at close range as he entered the valley. This course of action maximized security and economy of force.
The third option was to block the enemy in each of the four trails that led into Wadi Al Sirree. Davis knew that he had more short-range weapons than long-range weapons. He could divide the platoon into antiarmor ambush teams and assign each team a trail that led into the valley. The platoon could engage the attacker’s lead vehicles in selected short-range combat areas along each trail. By fighting a close-range battle in the trails that led into the valley, the platoon could pick off the enemy one at a time. The enemy wouldn’t see the defenders until it was too late. This option would maximize surprise and offensive action.
The author, Antal, also includes this amusing quote:
”You will usually find that the enemy has three courses of action open to him, and of these he will adopt a fourth.”
— Field Marshal Helmuth Graf von Moltke
You don’t have long to decide:
”Thus decisive action remains the first prerequisite for success in war. Everybody, from the highest commander to the youngest soldiers, must be conscious of the fact that inactivity and lost opportunities weigh heavier than do errors in the choice of means.”
— Truppenfuhrung, German Field Service Regulations, 1933
Nicholas Dames has taught Columbia University’s required great-books course, Literature Humanities, since 1998, and he loves the job, but it has changed:
Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college — even at highly selective, elite colleges — prepared to read books.
This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.
“My jaw dropped,” Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to.
Washington blames China’s dominance of the solar industry on what are routinely dubbed “unfair trade practices.” But that’s just a comforting myth. China’s edge doesn’t come from a conspiratorial plot hatched by an authoritarian government. It hasn’t been driven by state-owned manufacturers, subsidized loans to factories, tariffs on imported modules or theft of foreign technological expertise. Instead, it’s come from private businesses convinced of a bright future, investing aggressively and luring global talent to a booming industry — exactly the entrepreneurial mix that made the US an industrial powerhouse.
[…]
Hemlock Semiconductor Corp. produces about one-third of the world’s chip-grade polysilicon, which finds its way into almost every electronic device on the planet. Solar polysilicon is simply the poor cousin of the stuff computer chips are made from: While impurities of one part in 100 million are considered acceptable for solar panels, microprocessors need to be pure to as much as one part in 10 trillion.
[…]
Dow had established itself in the 1890s in nearby Midland to take advantage of rich underground deposits of brine that could be refined into useful chemicals. The trains rattling back and forth there upset the delicate polysilicon purification process, so a new plant was established on isolated farmland in Hemlock, 14 miles (22.5 kilometers) to the south.
[…]
Things started to change around the year 2000, as rising concerns about climate change coincided with a surge in oil prices and the prospect of subsidies for renewables. Solar panels were traditionally so costly they were only used for highly specialized applications such as space probes, as well as watches and pocket calculators that only sip power. Suddenly in the early 2000s, solar started to look like a competitive way of producing energy.
As a result, PV-grade polysilicon — made until then from material rejected by chipmakers — seemed like it might become a valuable commodity in its own right. Almost overnight, it went from a backwater to a boom industry. The growth has yet to stop. Since 2005, annual installations of solar panels have increased at an average annual rate of about 44%. This year, the capacity of new modules installed globally every three days is roughly equivalent to what existed in the entire world at the end of 2005.
Hemlock initially surfed this wave. In 2005, it announced a $400 million to $500 million plan to increase production at the plant by half. Eighteen months later, it promised $1 billion more to add a further 90%. One more billion was announced amid the 2008 financial crisis, along with yet another $1.2 billion for a separate plant in Clarksville, Tennessee.
Those numbers sound big — but they were insufficient to keep up with demand.
There are a few reasons for that. First, Hemlock was owned by a joint venture between two American and two Japanese chemical companies, which between them produce everything from fiber optic cables to smartphone glass, plastics to insecticides, pill casings to machine tools and gold bullion. Such setups are notorious for complexity, which can undermine their ability to adapt quickly to changing conditions. Any fresh spending needed to get signed off by four corporate boards, none of whom saw solar poly as a priority.
Making matters worse was the fact that, when solar power started to take off in the late 1990s, Hemlock’s main shareholder Dow Corning was in the middle of a decade of bankruptcy protection — the result of lawsuits from women who claimed to have been harmed by its silicone breast implants.
Another factor was energy. As much of 40% of the cost of producing polysilicon is power, and the Hemlock factory is the biggest single-site consumer of electricity in Michigan — a remarkable statistic, when you consider the state also includes the immense General Motors Co. and Ford Motor Co. factories in Detroit.
Local electricity costs are relatively high. The 2008 expansion in Hemlock only went ahead after the state’s governor Jennifer Granholm — now President Biden’s secretary of energy — signed a bill giving the facility tax credits to protect it from electricity price hikes.
Andrew Roberts summarizes (in Napoleon: A Life), Napoleon’s first few months in power:
In less than fifteen weeks Napoleon had effectively ended the French Revolution, seen off the Abbé Sieyès, given France a new constitution, established her finances on a sound footing, muzzled the opposition press, started to end both rural brigandage and the long-running war in the Vendée, set up a Senate, Tribunate, Legislative Body and Conseil d’État, appointed a talented government regardless of past political affiliations, rebuffed the Bourbons, made spurned peace offers to Britain and Austria, won a plebiscite by a landslide (even accounting for the fraud), reorganized French local government and inaugurated the Banque de France.
‘Today I’m a sort of mannequin figure that’s lost its liberty and happiness,’ Napoleon wrote to Moreau, the commander-in-chief of the Army of the Rhine, on March 16 as France prepared to re-engage Austrian forces. ‘Grandeur is all very well, but only in retrospect and in the imagination. I envy your happy lot; you are going to accomplish grand things with your gallant men. I would willingly exchange my consular purple for the epaulette of a brigadier under your orders… I strongly hope that the circumstances may allow me to come and give you a helping hand.’ Three weeks later circumstances would allow just that, when the Austrian General Michael von Melas defeated General Nicolas Soult at the battle of Cadibona, pushing him back towards Savona and forcing Masséna into Genoa, which was subsequently besieged. It was time to return to the battlefield.
He had ordered the covert formation of a 30,000-strong Army of the Reserve based at Dijon on January 7, 1800:
He was counting on an element of surprise: no one had taken an army over the Alps since Charlemagne, and before him Hannibal. Although Napoleon wouldn’t be travelling with elephants, he did have Gribeauval 8-pounder and 4-pounder cannon, whose barrels weighed over a quarter of a ton, to heave over the mountain range. Snow was still thick on the ground in early May, when the advance began, so Marmont devised sledges for the barrels made out of hollowed-out tree-trunks, which one hundred men at a time hauled up the Alps and then down again, to drumbeats. (Since the Italian side is much steeper than the French, they found it harder going down than up.)
Money and supplies were sent ahead to the monasteries and hostelries along the route, and local guides were hired and sworn to secrecy.
[…]
‘An army can pass always, and at all seasons,’ Napoleon told a sceptical General Dumas, ‘wherever two men can set their feet’.
[…]
In the strategy meeting he allegedly asked Bourrienne where he thought the decisive battle would be fought. ‘How the devil should I know?’ answered his Brienne-educated private secretary. ‘Why, look here, you fool,’ said Napoleon, pointing to the plains of the River Scrivia at San Giuliano Vecchio, explaining how he thought Melas would manoeuvre once the French had crossed the Alps. It was precisely there that the battle of Marengo was fought three months later.
[…]
In all 51,400 men crossed the Alps, with 10,000 horses and 750 mules. They went by single file in some places, and had to start at dawn every day to reduce the risk of avalanches once the sun had risen.
[…]
Napoleon rode a horse for almost the whole journey over the Alps, and a mule (as it was more sure of foot) for the iciest stretch around Saint-Pierre.
[…]
It was at this stage of the campaign that the sheer ruthlessness that helped make Napoleon so formidable a commander revealed itself once again. Instead of marching south to relieve starving Genoa, as his troops and even his senior commanders assumed he would do, he wheeled eastwards towards Milan to seize the huge supply depot there and cut off Melas’s line of retreat towards the Mincio river and Mantua. Ordering Masséna to hold out for as long as possible so that he would tie down Ott’s besieging force, Napoleon outfoxed Melas, who had taken it for granted that Napoleon would try to save Genoa. He had therefore left Nice and marched back from Turin to Alessandria to try to head Napoleon off.
[…]
At 6.30 p.m. that same day Napoleon entered Milan by the Verceil Gate in the pouring rain and installed himself at the archducal palace, staying up until 2 a.m. dictating letters, receiving Francesco Melzi d’Eril, who had run the Cisalpine Republic, setting up a new city government and releasing political prisoners interned by the Austrians, who had used Milan as their regional headquarters. He also read Melas’s captured despatches from Vienna, which told him the enemy’s strengths, dispositions and state of morale.
[…]
Genoa surrendered on June 4, by which time around 30,000 of its 160,000 inhabitants had died of starvation and of diseases associated with malnutrition, as had 4,000 French soldiers. Another 4,000 soldiers who were fit enough to march out were allowed to return to France with the honours of war, and a further 4,000 sick and wounded were transported to France in Royal Navy ships under Admiral Lord Keith, who had blockaded the port but saw the advantage of evacuating so many French away from the theatre of war.
Masséna’s health was broken, not least because he had insisted on only eating what his troops did. He never wholly forgave Napoleon for not rescuing him. Equally, Napoleon – who was never besieged in the whole of his career – criticized Masséna for not having held out for ten days longer, recalling when in exile on St Helena, ‘A few old men and some women might have died of hunger, but then he would not have surrendered Genoa. If one thinks always of humanity – only of humanity – one should give up going to war. I don’t know how war is to be conducted on the rosewater plan.’
The D-21 drone used a ramjet, just like its Oxcart mothership, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), and needed to be launched at supersonic speed:
For public safety reasons, the plan was to launch the triplesonic drone off the coast of California in March of 1966 for the first test, and to prepare his pilots, Colonel Slater had them swim laps each day in the Area 51 pool, first in bathing suits and then with their pressure suits on. “We’d hoist the guys up over the water in a pulley and then drop them in the pool. As soon as they hit the water the first time, the pressure suit inflated, so we had to have that fixed,” Slater recalls. When it came time to practice an actual landing in a large body of water, the Agency’s highest-ranking officer on base, Werner Weiss, got the Coast Guard to seal off a large section of Lake Mead, the largest reservoir of water in the United States, located just east of Las Vegas.
[…]
Both aircraft flew west until they were a hundred and fifty miles off the coast of California. There, the M-21, piloted by Bill Park, prepared for the D-21 launch. A camera in Slater’s airplane would capture the launch on 16-millimeter film. Down below, on the dark ocean surface, a rescue boat waited. Park hit Ignite, and the drone launched up and off the M-21. But during separation, the drone pitched down instead of up and instantly split the mother aircraft in half. Miraculously, the drone hit neither Park nor Torick, who were both trapped inside.
The crippled aircraft began to tumble through the sky, falling for nearly ten thousand feet. Somehow, both men managed to eject. Alive and now outside the crashing, burning airplane, both men were safely tethered to their parachutes. Remarkably, neither of the men was hit by the burning debris falling through the air. Both men made successful water landings. But, as Slater recalls, an unforeseen tragedy occurred. “Our rescue boat located Bill Park, who was fine. But by the time the boat got to Ray Torick, he was tied up in his lanyard and had drowned.”
Kelly Johnson was devastated. “He impulsively and emotionally decided to cancel the entire program and give back the development funding to the Air Force and the Agency,” Johnson’s deputy Ben Rich recalled in his 1994 memoir about the Lockheed Skunk Works. Rich asked Johnson why. “I will not risk any more test pilots or Blackbirds. I don’t have either to spare,” Johnson said. But the Air Force did not let the Mach 3 drone program go away so quickly. They created a new program to launch the drone from underneath a B-52 bomber, which was part of Strategic Air Command. President Johnson’s deputy secretary of defense, Cyrus Vance, told Kelly Johnson, “We need this program to work because our government will never again allow a Francis Gary Powers situation develop. All our overflights over denied territory will either be with satellites or drones.”
Three years later, in 1969, the D-21 drone finally made its first reconnaissance mission, over China, launched off a B-52. The drone flew into China and over the Lop Nur nuclear facility but had then somehow strayed off course into Soviet Siberia, run out of fuel, and crashed. The suggestion was that the drone’s guidance system had failed on the way home, and it was never seen or heard from again. At least, not for more than twenty years. In the early 1990s, a CIA officer showed up in Ben Rich’s office at Skunk Works with a mysterious present for him. “Ben, do you recognize this?” the man asked Rich as he handed him a hunk of titanium. “Sure I do,” Rich said. What Ben Rich was holding in his hand was a piece of composite material loaded with the radar-absorbing coating that Lovick and his team had first developed for Lockheed four decades before. Asked where he got it, the CIA officer explained that it had been a gift to the CIA from a KGB agent in Moscow. The agent had gotten it from a shepherd in Siberia, who’d found it in the Siberian tundra while herding his sheep. According to Rich, “The Russians mistakenly believed that this generation-old panel signified our current stealth technology. It was, in a way, a very nice tribute to our work on Tagboard.”
Marc Andreessen recently commented on the popularity of psychedelics in Silicon Valley:
Charles Manson’s cult introduction method was daily dosing of LSD and speed. Today we do that to ourselves with LSD, psilocybin, ayahuasca, DMT, MDMA, nitrous and Adderall.
I was never particularly interested in the Manson murders, but enough different people had recommended the book that I gave it a go, and the story is even weirder than I’d imagined.
First, it was an odd time:
Less than three weeks earlier, NASA had put the first man on the moon, an awe-inspiring testament to technological ingenuity.
Conversely, the number one song in the country was Zager and Evans’s “In the Year 2525,” which imagined a dystopian future where you “ain’t gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lies / Everything you think, do, and say / Is in the pill you took today.” It would prove to be a more trenchant observation about the present moment than anyone would’ve thought.
This passed me by when I was just listening to it, but reading it I realized I’d never heard of Zager and Evans or their number-one song:
If you go back and revisit the Top 40 from each year, it’s fascinating how many hits have disappeared down the memory hole.
The murderers were an unlikely bunch:
Late that night at the Spahn Movie Ranch, a man and three women got in a beat-up yellow 1959 Ford and headed toward Beverly Hills. A ranch hand heard one of the women say, “We’re going to get some fucking pigs!”
The woman was Susan “Sadie” Atkins, twenty-one, who’d grown up mostly in San Jose. The daughter of two alcoholics, she’d been in her church choir and the glee club, and said that her brother and his friends would often molest her. She had dropped out of high school and moved to San Francisco, where she’d worked as a topless dancer and gotten into LSD. “My family kept telling me, ‘You’re going downhill, you’re going downhill, you’re going downhill,’” she would say later. “So I just went downhill. I went all the way down to the bottom.”
Huddled beside her in the back of the car—they’d torn out the seats to accommodate more food from the Dumpster dives they often went on—was Patricia “Katie” Krenwinkel. Twenty-one, from Inglewood, Krenwinkel had developed a hormone problem as a kid, leading her to overeat and fear that she was ugly and unwanted. As a teen, she got into drugs and started to drink heavily. One day in 1967, she’d left her car in a parking lot, failed to collect the two paychecks from her job at an insurance company, and disappeared.
In the passenger seat was Linda Kasabian, twenty, from New Hampshire. She’d played basketball in high school, but she dropped out to get married; the union lasted less than six months. Not long after, in Boston, she was arrested in a narcotics bust. By the spring of 1968, she’d remarried, had a kid, and moved to Los Angeles. She sometimes introduced herself as “Yana the witch.”
And at the wheel was Charles “Tex” Watson, twenty-three and six foot three, from east Texas. Watson had been a Boy Scout and the captain of his high school football team; he sometimes helped his dad, who ran a gas station and grocery store. At North Texas State University, he’d joined a fraternity and started getting stoned. Soon he dropped out, moved to California, and got a job as a wig salesman. One day he’d picked up a hitchhiker who turned out to be Dennis Wilson of The Beach Boys — a chance occurrence that changed both of their lives forever.
That night in the Ford, all four were dressed in black from head to toe. None of them had a history of violence. They were part of a hippie commune that called itself the Family. Living in isolation at the Spahn Ranch — whose mountainous five hundred acres and film sets had once provided dramatic backdrops for Western-themed movies and TV shows — the Family had assembled a New Age bricolage of environmentalism, anti-establishment politics, free love, and apocalyptic Christianity, rounded out with a vehement rejection of conventional morality. More than anything, they lived according to the whims of their leader, the thirty-four-year-old Charles Milles Manson, who had commanded them to take their trip that night.
They all seemed to have developed drug problems before Manson took them to the next level.
I wouldn’t expect any of them to be any good at violence, except Tex.
Another detail that passed me by while listening was the name of the film Roman Polanski was working on overseas when his wife was murdered:
The four arrived at 10050 Cielo Drive, where the actress Sharon Tate lived with her husband, the filmmaker Roman Polanski. He was away in London at the time, scouting locations for The Day of the Dolphin, a movie in which a dolphin is trained to assassinate the president of the United States.
That is perhaps the most late-60s, early-70s movie imaginable — and it did get made a few years later, directed by Mike Nichols and starring George C. Scott.
The attack is premeditated:
Watson scaled a pole to sever the phone lines to the house. He’d been here before, and he knew where to find them right away. There was an electric gate leading to the driveway, but instead of activating it, the four elected to jump over an embankment and drop onto the main property. All of them were carrying buck knives; Watson also had a .22 Buntline revolver.
I had assumed that the .22 revolver was a small gun, but I looked up what a Buntline revolver was, and it is not small gun:
The Colt Buntline Special was a long-barreled variant of the Colt Single Action Army revolver, which Stuart N. Lake described in his best-selling but largely fictionalized 1931 biography, Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal. […] Lake described them as extra-long Colt Single Action Army revolvers, with a 12-inch (300 mm)-long barrel, and stated that Buntline presented them to five lawmen in thanks for their help in contributing local color to his western yarns.
In Tombstone, Wyatt Earp (Kurt Russell) carries a Colt Buntline Special.
The murder weapon was apparently missing its trigger guard:
So many details don’t make sense to me:
At the top of the driveway they found Steven Parent, an eighteen-year-old who’d been visiting the caretaker in the guesthouse to sell him a clock radio. He was sitting in his dad’s white Rambler, having already rolled his window down to activate the gate control. Watson approached the driver’s side and pointed the revolver at his face. “Please don’t hurt me, I won’t say anything!” Parent screamed, raising his arm to protect himself. Watson slashed his left hand with the knife, slicing through the strap of his wristwatch. Then he shot Parent four times, in his arm, his left cheek, and twice in the chest. Parent died instantly, his blood beginning to pool in the car.
Those four shots rang out through Benedict Canyon, but no one in the house at 10050 Cielo seemed to hear them.
Visiting the caretaker in the guesthouse, after midnight, to sell him a clock radio?
I’m curious how Tex cocked the hammer on that single-action revolver, with a buck knife in his left hand, because that first victim might have had a chance to get away with survivable injuries if he’d just floored it before taking all four shots.
Even if you’re in a nice neighborhood, you might want to lock all your doors and windows:
Finding no open windows or doors, Watson cut a long horizontal slit in a window screen outside the dining room and gained entry to the house; he went to the front door to let Atkins and Krenwinkel in. In the living room, the three killers came across Wojiciech “Voytek” Frykowski, a thirty-two-year-old Polish émigré and an aspiring filmmaker, asleep on the couch with an American flag draped over it. Frykowski was coming off a ten-day mescaline trip at the time. Having survived the brutal Second World War in Poland, he’d gone on to lead an aimless life in America, and friends thought there was something “brooding and disturbed” about him; he was part of a generation of Poles who’d been put on “a crooked orbit.”
This is where Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood diverges drastically from what happened in our timeline. Hollywood stuntman and tough guy Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), while high as a kite, just handles it:
What really happened does share a few elements:
Now, rubbing his eyes to make out the figures clad in black and standing over him, Frykowski stretched his arms and, apparently mistaking them for friends, asked, “What time is it?”
Watson trained his gun on Frykowski and said, “Be quiet. Don’t move or you’re dead.”
Frykowski stiffened, the gravity of the situation beginning to seize him. “Who are you,” he asked, “and what are you doing here?”
“I’m the devil and I’m here to do the devil’s business,” Watson replied, kicking Frykowski in the head.
In a linen closet, Atkins found a towel and used it to bind Frykowski’s hands as best she could. Then, on Watson’s instructions, she cased the house, looking for others. She came to a bedroom, the door ajar, where she saw a woman reclining on a bed, reading: Abigail Folger, twenty-five, the heiress to a coffee fortune. She’d been staying at the house with Frykowski, her boyfriend, since April. Now she glanced up from her book, smiled, and waved at Atkins, who responded in kind and continued down the hall.
If this were fiction, I’d be baffled that the author threw the Folger’s coffee heiress into the story — but it gets weirder:
She peered into a second bedroom, where a man sat on the edge of a bed, talking to a pregnant woman who lay there in lingerie. The man, Jay Sebring, thirty-five, was a hairstylist. His shop in Beverly Hills attracted a wealthy, famous clientele; he’d been the first one to cut hair in a private room, as opposed to a barbershop. He’d served in the navy during the Korean War. An intensely secretive man, he was rumored to allow only five people to keep his phone number.
On the bed with him was his ex-girlfriend, Sharon Tate, then twenty-six and eight months pregnant with her first child. She’d recently filmed her biggest role to date, in The Thirteen Chairs, and her manager had promised she’d be a star someday. Born in Dallas, Tate was the daughter of an army officer, and she grew up in cities scattered across the globe. Her beauty was such that she’d apparently stopped traffic, literally, on her first visit to New York. She’d been a homecoming queen and a prom queen; even at six months old, she’d won a Miss Tiny Tot contest in Texas.
The Thirteen Chairs (French: 12 + 1; Italian: Una su 13) was released posthumously:
You really, really don’t want to find yourself taking orders from deranged criminals:
In their shock and confusion, they offered the intruders money and whatever they wanted, begging them not to hurt anyone. Watson ordered the three who’d come from the bedrooms to lie facedown on their stomachs in front of the fireplace. Tate began to cry; Watson told her to shut up. Taking a long rope, he tied Sebring’s hands behind his back and ran a length around his neck. He looped the rope around Tate’s neck next, and then Folger’s, throwing the final length over a beam in the ceiling.
Sebring struggled to his feet and protested — couldn’t this man see that Tate was pregnant? He tried to move toward Tate, and Watson shot him, puncturing a lung. Sebring crumpled onto the zebra-skin rug by the fireplace. Since they were all tied together, his collapse forced the screaming Tate and Folger to stand on their toes to keep from being strangled. Watson dropped to his knees and began to stab the hairstylist incessantly; standing up again, he kicked Sebring in the head. Then he told Krenwinkel to turn off all the lights.
Tate asked, “What are you going to do with us?”
“You’re all going to die,” Watson said.
Frykowski had managed to free his hands. He lurched toward Atkins, attempting to disarm her, but she forced her knife into his legs, stabbing him constantly as they rolled across the living room floor, a tangle of limbs glinting with steel. He pulled her long hair. His blood was spraying everywhere, and he’d been stabbed more than half a dozen times, but Frykowski staggered to his feet. Atkins had lost her knife, so he made a run for the front door and, with Atkins still pummeling him, got as far as the lawn. Watson halted him with two bullets and then tackled him to the ground, pounding the butt of his gun against the back of his head again and again, with such force that the right grip shattered, and Frykowski’s skull cracked.
I would expect a guy who’d survived the war in Poland to put up a fight. I’m assuming the 10-day mescaline trip left him impaired.
Inside, Tate was sobbing. Then Folger, who’d lifted the noose from her neck, ran down the hall and out of the house through a side door. She was halfway across the front lawn, her nightgown flowing behind her like an apparition, when Krenwinkel caught up to her and brought her knife down, stabbing her twenty-eight times. Watson joined in and Folger went limp, saying, “I give up. I’m already dead. Take me.”
Drenched in blood and their own sweat, the two killers rose to see Frykowski, yet again, on his feet stumbling toward them. Soon they were stabbing him with the same mechanical precision, forcing steel through flesh, bone, and cartilage. The coroner tallied fifty-one stab wounds on the Pole, plus thirteen blows to the head and two bullet wounds.
[…]
Watson came back inside and ordered Atkins to kill her. Tate begged her to spare her life, to spare her unborn child. “I want to have my baby,” she said.
“Woman, I have no mercy for you,” Atkins responded, locking her arm around Tate’s neck from behind. “You’re going to die, and I don’t feel anything about it.” She stabbed her in the stomach. Watson joined in. The pair stabbed her sixteen times until she cried out for her mother and died.
Atkins dipped her fingers into one of Tate’s wounds and tasted her blood. It was “warm, sticky, and nice,” she’d recall later. “To taste death and yet give life,” she said, “wow, what a trick.” She soaked a towel in Tate’s blood and brought it to the front door, where, following Watson’s instruction to “write something that would shock the world,” she scrawled the word “Pig.”
[…]
When Watson, Atkins, Krenwinkel, and Kasabian returned to the Spahn Ranch early that morning, they went to their beds and slept soundly.
Infantry Combat: The Rifle Platoon is a simultaneous Military Tactics and Leadership crash course and semi-political argument about the wrong lessons that were learned from Operation Desert Storm (it was first published in 1995) in the format of a “Choose your own Adventure” novel.
And my god does it work. Its argument is incredibly well presented, its intangible concepts and ethos are really strongly conveyed, it teaches an impressive amount of theory and application despite NOT being a textbook of theory or doctrine…
And it just has no conceivable right to work as well as it works.
[…]
A choose your own adventure is just a series of binary choices, maybe a few 3 pronged choices to mix it up. That clearly can’t teach anything.
But Antal’s writing and veteran understanding of the concepts can, and he exploits the format perfectly to REALLY creates painful choices and moments of indecision. Your pre-knowledge of even very broad pop-military concepts, or study of history, is GREATLY rewarded. Your observing the map ever so much longer is rewarded. And your attention to detail is rewarded. Your intuitive understanding of leadership or your having read about the subject, or your complete lack of any such instincts, plays a shockingly impactful role for leading what are static words and binary decisions.
I’m certain there are skilled military officers and professionals who could go in this and get the best ending right, first try… But I doubt it’d be a majority of even actual infantry officers.
Likewise an attentive amatuer or student of history could probably do it…
But I died shot by friendly fire my first read/playthrough, so not me.
[…]
Life isn’t a videogame. There isn’t instant feedback when you’ve screwed yourself and everyone around you. The fatal decision can be 10 decisions back and every subsequent decision is just determining exact conditions and flavor text of how that failure will happen…
And absolutely all of it makes sense, is tied into the core principles Antal is teaching, and has a necessary logic such that once you see it you understand why that could only have ended that way.
I’m being incredibly vague because I don’t want to spoil the book. Failing and getting the bad endings is the real teaching part of the exercise, and if it is “Spoiled” the actual teaching value is greatly reduced.
That’s your cue to get your own copy and run through it.
France’s Defense Innovation Agency (AID) and Cailabs have established high-speed optical satellite communications between a nano-satellite in low orbit and a commercial optical ground station:
The Cailabs ground station “is a white dome that measures around four metres in diameter with a large telescope that sticks out of it.” He explained that the technology lies in the way the light is treated once it’s entered the telescope.
The laser communication terminal aboard the nano-satellite, made by Unseenlabs, another small French company, also is an off-the-shelf product. These terminals “are sold by lots of companies and thanks to the US Space Development Agency, they are all required to be interoperable,” Morizur explained.
[…]
The French experiment was launched at the end of 2023 by AID with the launch of the Keraunos satellite and the aim of testing high-speed optical communications based on the innovative technology developed by Cailabs. AID provided €5.5 million ($6.1 million) to fund the Keraunos project which also involved Unseenlabs, another startup based in Rennes, western France.
The team was able to establish a stable laser link over several minutes and thereby not only track the nano-satellite flying in low Earth orbit from the optical ground station, but also receive data sent from the satellite.
In a statement, the Defense Ministry explained that “the advantages of the optical link over the usual radio link are its speed, discretion and independence from regulations that coordinate the use of radio waves. Even if this optical link can sometimes be perturbed by atmospheric turbulence, the Keraunos satellite is able to circumvent them in order to achieve optimum transmission quality.”
For example, you might teach a computer to learn to ride a virtual bike in a simulated 3D environment by rewarding the distance pedalled, and penalising the number of times the bike falls over.
The challenge comes when the reward function misses what the human programmers really wanted. Perhaps the AI will avoid the risk of falls by leaving the bike on the floor, or maximise distance pedalled by wobbling in a big circle or even by standing the bike upside down and cranking the pedals.
[…]
The more complex the desired behaviour, the easier it is to accidentally reward the wrong thing. But there is a clever and effective approach for training computers to solve a fairly wide range of problems: reward curiosity. More precisely, reward the computer when it encounters situations in which it finds the outcome unpredictable. Off it will go in search of something it hasn’t seen before.
Shane writes: “A curiosity-driven AI will learn to move through a video-game level so it can see new stuff, avoiding fireballs, monsters and death pits because when it gets hit by those, it sees the same boring death sequence.” Death is to be avoided not for its own sake, but because it’s terribly predictable.
All this is fascinating in its own right, and hints at why humans themselves might have evolved a sense of curiosity. But AI systems, like 13-year-old boys, can also be curious to the point of distractibility themselves. For example, ask a curiosity-driven AI to teach itself to play a Pac-Man-style game in which ghosts move randomly around a maze, and you will struggle: the AI doesn’t need to do anything to have its curiosity satisfied, because unpredictable ghosts are endlessly fascinating. Or, as Shane explains, a curiositybot will quickly learn to navigate a maze, unless one of the maze walls has a TV on it that shows a series of random images. “As soon as the AI found the TV, it was transfixed.” Much like my son. Or, for that matter, me.
This problem is sufficiently well known to AI researchers that it has a name: the “noisy TV problem”,
[…]
One solution is defensive: avoid noisy TVs.
[…]
But a second approach focuses more on the positive. As well as trying to cut out mere novelty, we should seek out things worth being curious about. This is easier than one might think, because thoughtful curiosity builds knowledge, and knowledge builds thoughtful curiosity.
[…]
The more you know, the more you will prefer something in-depth, rather than the next thumbnail recommended by YouTube.
On February 19, 1800, Napoleon left the Luxembourg Palace, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), and took up residence at the Tuileries:
He was the first ruler to live there since Louis XVI had been taken away to the Temple prison in August 1792, an event he had witnessed as a young officer.
[…]
From this period can be dated Josephine’s central role in the creation of what became the Empire style, which influenced furniture, fashion, interior decoration and design. She also championed the revival of etiquette after a decade of revolution.
Soon after his arrival at the Tuileries, Napoleon collected twenty-two statues of his heroes for the grand gallery, starting, inevitably, with Alexander and Julius Caesar but also featuring Hannibal, Scipio, Cicero, Cato, Frederick the Great, George Washington, Mirabeau and the revolutionary general the Marquis de Dampierre.
The Duke of Marlborough, renowned for his victory at the battle of Bleinheim, was included, as was General Dugommier, whose presence alongside such genuine military giants as Gustavus Adolphus and Marshal Saxe must have been based on his perspicacity in spotting Napoleon’s worth at Toulon. Joubert was there too, since he was now safely dead.
Surrounded by these heroes, about half of whom were in togas, had its effect: it was in Jean-Auguste Ingres’ painting of him as First Consul that Napoleon is first seen with his hand tucked inside his waistcoat.
[…]
It was characteristic of Napoleon that he wanted value for money in all this. Concerned that the upholsterers were cheating him he asked a minister how much the ivory handle at the end of a bell-rope should cost. The minister had no idea, whereupon Napoleon cut it off, called for a valet, told him to dress in ordinary clothes and inquire the price in several shops and order a dozen. When he discovered they were one-third cheaper than billed he simply struck one-third off the charges made by all the tradesmen.
[…]
A significant part of the pre-revolutionary French economy, especially in areas like Lyons, the centre of the European silk industry, had been dependent on luxury goods, and Napoleon was determined to revive it.
Preparing for Oxcart missions involved punishing survival-training operations, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), but the high-desert survival training at Area 51 felt different — and would involve psychological warfare by mock enemy Chinese:
“I crawled slowly through the brambles, bugs, and mud for about thirty minutes when, suddenly, I hit a trip wire and alarms went off. A glaring spotlight came on and ten Chinese men in uniform grabbed me and dragged me to one of their jeeps.” Collins was handcuffed, driven for a while, put into a second vehicle, and taken to so-called Chinese interrogation headquarters. There, he was stripped naked and searched. “A doctor proceeded to examine every orifice the human body has, from top to bottom—literally,” which, Collins believes, “was more to humiliate and break down my moral defenses than anything else.” Naked, he was led down a dimly lit hallway and pushed into a concrete cell furnished with a short, thin bed made of wood planks. “I had no blanket, I was naked, and it was very cold. They gave me a bucket to be used only when I was told.”
For days, Collins went through simulated torture that included sleep deprivation, humiliation, extreme temperature fluctuation, and hunger, all the while naked, cold, and under surveillance by his captors. “The cell had one thick wooded door with a hole for viewing. This opening had a metal window that would clank open and shut. A single bright light was on and when I was about to doze off, the light would flash off, which would immediately snap me out of sleep.” For food, he was given watery soup, two thin pepper pods, and two bits of mysterious meat. “I had no water to drink and I was always watched. I didn’t know day from night so there was no sense of time. The temperature varied from hot to very cold. The voice through the viewing window shouted demands.”
Soon Collins began to hallucinate. Now it was interrogation time. Naked, he was led to a small room by two armed guards. He stood in front of his Chinese interrogators, who sat behind a small desk. They grilled him about his name, rank, and why he was spying on China. The torturous routine continued for what Collins guessed was several more days. Then one day, instead of being taken to his interrogators, he was told that he was free to go.
But halfway across the world, on November 1, 1963, Ken Collins’s experience was being mirrored for real. A CIA pilot named Yeh Changti had been flying a U-2 spy mission over a nuclear facility in China when he was shot down, captured by the Chinese Communist government, and tortured. Yeh Changti was a member of the Thirty-Fifth Black Cat U-2 Squadron, a group of Taiwanese Chinese Nationalist pilots (as opposed to the Communist Chinese, who inhabited the mainland) who worked covert espionage missions for the CIA. In the 1960s, the Black Cats flew what would prove to be the deadliest missions in the U-2’s fifty-five-year history, all of which were flown out of a secret base called Taoyuan on the island of Taiwan. When the CIA declassified most of the U-2 program, in 1998, “no information was released about Yeh Changti or the Black Cats,” says former Black Cat pilot Hsichun Hua. The program, in entirety, remains classified as of 2011.
Colonel Hugh “Slip” Slater, the man who would later become the commander of Area 51, remembers Yeh Changti before he got shot down. “His code name was Terry Lee and he and I played tennis on the base at Taoyuan all the time. He was a great guy and an amazing acrobat, which helped him on the court. Sometimes we drank scotch while we played. Both the sport and the scotch helped morale.” Slater says that the reason morale was low was that “the U-2 had become so vulnerable to the SA-2 missiles that nobody wanted to fly.” One Black Cat pilot had already been shot down. But that didn’t stop the dangerous missions from going forward for the CIA.
Unlike what had happened with the Gary Powers shoot-down, the American press remained in the dark about these missions. For the CIA, getting hard intelligence on China’s nuclear facilities was a top national security priority. On the day Yeh Changti was shot down, he was returning home from a nine-hour mission over the mainland when a surface-to-air missile guidance system locked on to his U-2. Colonel Slater was on the radio with Yeh Changti when it happened. “I was talking to him when I heard him say, ‘System 12 on!’ We never heard another word.” The missile hit Yeh Changti’s aircraft and tore off the right wing. Yeh Changti ejected from the airplane, his body riddled in fifty-nine places with missile fragments. He landed safely with his parachute and passed out. When he woke up, he was in a military facility run by Mao Tse-tung.
This was no training exercise. Yeh Changti was tortured and held prisoner for nineteen years until he was quietly released by his captors, in 1982. He has been living outside Houston, Texas, ever since. The CIA did not know that Yeh Changti had survived his bailout and apparently did not make any kind of effort to locate him. A second Black Cat pilot named Major Jack Chang would also get shot down in a U-2, in 1965, and was imprisoned alongside Yeh Changti. After their release, the two pilots shared their arduous stories with fellow Black Cat pilot, Hsichun Hua, who had become a general in the Taiwanese air force while the men were in captivity. Neither Yeh Changti nor Major Jack Chang was ever given a medal by the CIA. The shoot-down of the Black Cat U-2 pilots, however, had a major impact on what the CIA and the Air Force would do next at Area 51. Suddenly, the development of drones had become a national security priority, drones being pilotless aircraft that could be flown by remote control.
Drones could accomplish what the U-2 could in terms of bringing home photographic intelligence, but a drone could do it without getting pilots captured or killed. Ideally, drones could perform missions that fell into three distinct categories: dull, dirty, and dangerous. Dull meant long flights during which pilots faced fatigue flying to remote areas of the globe. Dirty included situations where nuclear weapons or biological weapons might be involved. Dangerous meant missions over denied territories such as the Soviet Union, North Korea, and China, where shoot-downs were a political risk. Lockheed secured a contract to develop such an unmanned vehicle in late 1962. After Yeh Changti’s shoot-down, the program got a big boost. Flight-testing of the drone code-named Tagboard would take place at Area 51 and, ironically, getting the Lockheed drone to fly properly was among the first duties assigned to Colonel Slater after he left Taoyuan and was given a new assignment at Area 51.
“Lockheed’s D-21 wasn’t just any old drone, it was the world’s first Mach 3 stealth drone,” says Lockheed physicist Ed Lovick, who worked on the program. “The idea of this drone was a radical one because it would fly at least as fast, if not faster, than the A-12. It had a ram jet engine, which meant it was powered by forced air. The drone could only be launched off an aircraft that was already moving faster than the speed of sound.” The A-12 mother ship was designated M-21, M as in mother, and was modified to include a second seat for the drone launch operator, a flight engineer. The D-21 was the name for the drone, the D standing for daughter. But launching one aircraft from the back of another aircraft at speeds of more than 2,300 mph had its own set of challenges, beginning with how not to have the two aircraft crash into each other during launch. The recovery process of the drone also needed to be fine-tuned. Lovick explains, “The drone, designed to overfly China, would travel on its own flight path taking reconnaissance photographs and then head back out to sea.” The idea was to have the drone drop its photo package, which included the camera, the film, and the radio sensors, by parachute so it could be retrieved by a second aircraft nearby. Once the pallet was secure, the drone would crash into the sea and sink to the ocean floor.
A fighting robot is inherently scary. Robot dogs with weapons will be even worse, even if they are clumsier and less capable than human footsoldiers. An opponent that feels no pain or fear, and who is immune to gunfire, is not like one made of flesh and blood.
But the UGV may be much more than an effective psychological weapon. Unlike aerial drones, the UGV can threaten an enemy position. Driving up and parking a remote-controlled machinegun turret next to them means the enemy have to either destroy the UGV or retreat. This makes it something quite new, an uncrewed weapon able to take ground, and potentially to hold that ground.
At a cost of around $16,000 per unit — as much as six artillery rounds, or a tenth of a Javelin missile — the Ukrainian Lyut UGV is, he explains, entirely expendable.
Bob Sykes: This is US/UK/EU propaganda. Prior to the coup of 2014 that removed Ukraine’s democratically elected and legitmate president, Yanukovich, and that replaced him with the current paleo-Nazi junta, over 90 of Crrimeans were ethnic Russians, and they voted to join Russia. The vote was unauthorized, but there is no doubt it was accurate. The Russian military did not invade Crimea. They were already there by treaty. And Crimea (and all of Ukraine) had been sovereign Russian territory for over 300...
McChuck: Predators seek out dark, secluded spaces. Normal people avoid dark, secluded spaces. It really is that simple. There’s a reason parking garage stairwells are now built with top to bottom windows. Public spaces are designed with clear sight lines, no obstructions above two feet or below six feet. Remove the places predators can wait in ambush, and crime drops substantially.
Phileas Frogg: Makes sense, ease of access and utilization is improved for everyone by lots of those changes, not just the young, old and disabled. Reminds me of this excerpt: “The trail I walked lacked the geometric and artificial precision of the grand boulevards of the Städte I would later come to know so well. Here Nature did not bend to Man with such frequency or slavishness, but rather the two seemed to bend around one another at regular intervals, a grant of mutual dignity prevailing between...
Isegoria: This Kind of War: The Classic Korean War History, by T. R. Fehrenbach, makes the short list.
Gaikokumaniakku: Marginally relevant, but likely to be of interest to readers who may actually have seen it already: The Marine Corps Commandant’s 2026 Reading List.
Isegoria: I think The Dracula Tape is moving up in the queue.
Bruce: “Medicine in the 19th century was in a Hell of a state.” — Dracula in Saberhagen’s The Dracula Tape, where Dracula says Lucy was killed by van Helsing’s bungled blood transfusions.
Isegoria: I felt the same way about Dumas: Reading The Count of Monte Cristo in 11th grade clarified just how derivative most of the entertainment we consume really is — everything has been done better by Dumas, and he did it over a century ago — and it got me wondering why we don’t regularly enjoy the pop classics.
Isegoria: Apparently Saberhagen’s Dracula Series goes on for nine books!
Bruce: The Dracula Tape and The Holmes-Dracula File by Fred Saberhagen are extremely good, and Saberhagen knew the source material very well.
Benjamin I. Espen: Dracula is like the still center around which a whole constellation of pop culture orbits. You can see a lot of things that were clearly derived from it, yet returning to the original is a shocking and even a refreshing experience. None of the derivatives have its power and gravity.
Isegoria: When I read Frankenstein years ago, I immediately realized how little resemblance it bore to the version of the story I’d osmotically absorbed through the culture.
Phileas Frogg: I’ve returned to Dracula many times throughout the years, and I’m always amazed that each time I pick it up I become more and more aware of the genuine horror of the story. My most recent re-read a few months ago elicited the willies on several occasions, a phenomenon that I really only experienced a handful of times while reading. Excellent novel, and far superior to, Frankenstein, despite the fact that they are paired together so often, and the latter seems to be preferred...
Gaikokumaniakku: I got up this morning planning on having a productive and diligent day, but now that I have seen a single mention of skeleton, I suppose I will spend the next sixteen hours watching Alessia Crippa videos. Che ci vuoi fare? Così è la vita.
Gaikokumaniakku: 1961: The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded. 1971: Federal funding becomes normal. 1981: Defense funding becomes foundational. 1991: Dependence survives the Cold War. 2001: No civil rights for “enemy combatants” or “terrorists.” ; 2011: Grant-seeking becomes institutionalized. 2021: Government influence over entire economy is semi-concealed...
Phileas Frogg: The cost of civilization is the vicious, perpetual, and unapologetic enforcement of civilization. The refusal to pay that cost by our leaders is their insistence that we must forego the laws of civilization and be subject to the laws of the jungle once again. While the American experience of this seems to still be at the stage where institutional efforts could, maybe, still reverse our descent, in Europe, and the UK in particular and in light of the Belfast situation, it appears that they...
Bob Sykes: So, this yet another benefit of open borders and free migration. Evidently, this is an unintended (?) consequence of the wholesale, heavily subsidized transport of illegal aliens into the US by the Biden administration. Or did the anti-red meat crowd piggy-back a pet project on the Biden scheme?
Isegoria: Apparently “Descendant“ appears in his The State of the Art collection.
Bill: Eventually, the US Army will get to the logical conclusion of this line of development, namely, the smart suit from “Descendant” , a 1987 short story by Iain Banks. After a bad crash, the protagonist is badly injured; can he walk back to base? The suit stands up and starts walking, gripping me round the calves and waist, taking the bulk of my weight off my throbbing feet. The suit walks faster than I do. It reckons it is only twenty percent stronger than the average human. Something of...
John Antal composed a nightmare scenario for the US military, The Dictator’s Dream:
