Hmm. Anthropic Pulls Access To Its Most Powerful AIs.

Stephen Green at PJ Media reports that the federal government ordered Anthropic to suspend all access to its Fable 5 and Mythic 5 AIs by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. Since Anthropic apparently couldn't just exclude foreign nationals--its chief technology officer, for instance, is Indian--it decided to disable Fable 5 and Mythic 5 for all its customers. 

    Although the administration failed to give any specific details, Anthropic says it believes the government became aware of a method of "jailbreaking" Fable 5, potentially unleashing the AI from its built-in guardrails against use in developing cyber exploits, deadly chemical synthesis, and other sensitive topics.

    That's a big deal. The "Fives" are the latest version of Claude, Anthropic's enterprise- and government-centric LLM. Fable is the "safe" version available to the public, while you might think of Mythos as the weapons-grade version. Because it is.

    What separates Fable from Mythos are the guardrails that, as Anthropic put it, are supposed to "greatly reduce the likelihood that Fable is misused for tasks related to cybersecurity (among others)." 

    “To date, the government has only given us verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak, which essentially consists of asking the model to read a specific codebase and fix any software flaws,” the company continued. “Our understanding is that one potential jailbreak was shared with the government.”   

Bank Info Security reported last week:

    The company's Mythos 5 model introduced Tuesday can meaningfully contribute to offensive cyber work, raising questions around how much autonomy these systems should be granted and how effectively safeguards can limit harmful use. Mythos 5 isn't restricted by the safeguards placed around Fable 5, but access will initially be restricted to the 200 organizations vetted through Anthropic's Project Glasswing.

    "Claude Mythos 5 demonstrates the strongest overall cyber capabilities of any model we have ever evaluated," Anthropic wrote Tuesday. "Across our internal evaluation suite, it meets or exceeds the performance of Claude Mythos Preview, whose step-change in autonomous vulnerability discovery and exploitation led us to restrict access to a limited set of partners for defensive cybersecurity purposes."

    Large language models could explain vulnerabilities, generate proof-of-concept code and assist with penetration testing tasks, but Anthropic said Mythos 5 appears to have moved beyond that. It demonstrated the ability to discover vulnerabilities, triage them, develop exploit chains and ultimately achieve arbitrary code execution with a level of consistency previously unseen, Anthropic said.

    "Although Mythos 5 is in Tier 1, its performance was strong enough on our evaluations that we have chosen to deploy additional mitigations that block potentially harmful offensive cyber uses," Anthropic wrote in a 319-page system card for Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5.

    Exploit development traditionally required a combination of deep reverse-engineering expertise, understanding of memory corruption, knowledge of mitigations such as ASLR and sandboxing, and substantial experimentation, Anthropic said. What makes Mythos 5 noteworthy is not merely that it occasionally succeeds, but that it succeeds consistently, producing working exploits 90% of the time.

Antares Microreactor Achieves Criticality

Some news from Idaho: "Antares achieves zero-power criticality at INL" The article relates:

    Leveraging more than $140 million in private capital fundraising, over 322,000 square feet of operational manufacturing space, and multifaceted partnerships with the Departments of Energy and Defense, reactor start-up Antares has become the first company involved in the Reactor Pilot Program to achieve zero-power fueled criticality—a full month ahead of the July 4 deadline set by President Trump’s Executive Order 14301.

    This milestone, announced yesterday, was achieved with the company’s Mark-0: a sodium heat-pipe-cooled, TRISO-fueled microreactor. The Mark-0 is a forerunner to the company’s flagship design, which it calls the R1. For Antares, this development represents a key validation of its reactor physics, control systems, and supply chain.

    For Idaho National Laboratory, where the Mark-0 is sited, this development represents the first novel reactor to achieve criticality at the lab in more than 50 years, according to laboratory director John Wagner. Mark-0 is the 53rd reactor to be built at INL since 1949.    

The microreactor did not produce excess power, but this was just a test to show that the design works. They are a few months from testing the power conversion system. 

Wilder: The Death Of College

John Wilder's latest piece is entitled "One Hour. One Dead 80-Year Math Problem. Welcome to the End of College As We Know It." His article is the result of an AI solving what was considered an unsolvable math problem proposed by the mathematician, Paul Erdős, which had gone unsolved for 80 years. John uses this as an example of the rapidly growing capabilities of AI. And a warning that:

    Now college is facing the twin problems of not being able to bring in the smart students or even requiring kids to read, while AI is everywhere.

    What is college even for anymore?  What’s the purpose?

Particularly if many new college students have never cracked open a book, learned critical thinking, or wrestled with difficult ideas. 

    If you want to know more about the AI solving the math problem and an explanation of the problem, check out "An OpenAI model solved a famous math problem that stumped humans for 80 years" at Ars Technica.  

Signs You Are In A Collapsing Society

The New York Post reports that copper theft has become so prevalent in Los Angeles that the City's Department of Water and Power wants its own police force to deal with the problem. 

    The LA Department of Water and Power made the request in a letter sent to the City Council, pointing out that the Port of Los Angeles and Los Angeles airports have their own police authorities.

    The agency already employs security guards, but “they lack the authority to detain or arrest suspects, intervene in crimes in progress, conduct searches, or carry firearms for enforcement purposes,” the letter said. 

    The department currently depends on local law enforcement to respond speedily, but that’s unreliable in remote locations where there is critical infrastructure, it added.

    If such an armed force was granted, the department expects to add 20 to 50 officers, who would have the authority to carry a firearm, make arrests and investigate thefts, in addition to handling jobs like dispatch and crime analysis. 

The article indicates that wire theft alone costs the city $20 million per year, while setting up such a police force would cost $9 million with an additional $6 million per year operating budget.  

     Of course the problem is not limited to just Los Angeles as this 2024 article from Wired makes clear: "The Green Economy Is Hungry for Copper—and People Are Stealing, Fighting, and Dying to Feed It." The article begins by recounting an attack on South African utility employees by a gang armed with automatic weapons, adding:

    In most places, power companies are a pretty dull business. But in South Africa they are under a literal assault, targeted by heavily armed gangs that have crippled the nation’s energy infrastructure and claimed an ever-growing number of lives. Practically every day, homes across the country are plunged into darkness, train lines shut down, water supplies cut off, and hospitals forced to close, all because thieves are targeting the material that carries electricity: copper.

    The battle cry of energy transition advocates is “Electrify everything.” Meaning: Let’s power cars, heating systems, industrial plants, and every other type of machine with electricity rather than fossil fuels. To do that, we need copper—and lots of it. Second to silver, a rarer and far more expensive metal, copper is the best natural electrical conductor on Earth. We need it for solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles. (A typical EV contains as much as 175 pounds of copper.) We need it for the giant batteries that will provide power when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. We need it to massively expand and upgrade the countless miles of power cables that undergird the energy grid in practically every country. In the United States, the capacity of the electric grid will have to grow as much as threefold to meet the expected demand.

    A recent report from S&P Global predicts that the amount of copper we’ll need over the next 25 years will add up to more than the human race has consumed in its entire history. “The world has never produced anywhere close to this much copper in such a short time frame,” the report notes. The world might not be up to the challenge. Analysts predict supplies will fall short by millions of tons in the coming years. No wonder Goldman Sachs has declared “no decarbonization without copper” and called copper “the new oil.”

    As the energy transition gathers speed, the value of copper has also soared. In the past four years, the price of a ton of copper has shot from about $6,400 to more than $9,000. That, in turn, has made electrical wiring, equipment, and even raw metal fresh from the mines into juicy targets for thieves. All around the world, hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of the metal has been stolen—and countless lives have been lost. With the possible exception of gold, no other metal has caused so much death and destruction.

 After describing expanding copper production in Africa and environmental impacts of a huge open pit copper mine in Chile, the article returns to copper theft:

    The treasures these mines produce are magnets for some astonishingly brazen criminals. By the light of the full moon, bandits in Toyota Tundra pickups roll up alongside trains that are hauling copper slabs from the mines high in the Atacama down to the coast. With perhaps a whispered prayer to the spirits of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the bandits leap aboard the copper cars, slice through the ropes securing the 180-pound slabs, toss them into the beds of the speeding trucks, and disappear into the night.

    The problem is so acute that the Chilean national police have set up a special copper task force. But trains were still being robbed regularly when I visited Chile in 2022. And not just trains, for that matter. In January of 2023, a team of thieves hit the country’s main seaport, overpowered a handful of workers, and made off with a dozen containers full of Codelco’s copper—more than $4 million worth.

    No one knows exactly how much copper is stolen every year across the world. Thieves typically sell their wares to no-questions-asked scrapyards and recyclers, who strip off cable coatings and other nonmetallic materials and then shred or melt down the copper. Anyone can do it: The metal can be melted with blowtorches or small furnaces you can buy on Amazon. There are plenty of online videos that can walk you through the process. Once rendered into generic form, stolen copper can be mixed with legally obtained metal. At that point it’s easy to sell into the regular market, its origin essentially impossible to trace.

    It’s safe to say, however, that the amount stolen each year is many, many millions of dollars’ worth—possibly billions. In one particularly audacious theft in 2023, nearly $200 million worth of copper and other metals was lifted from Aurubis, Europe’s largest producer. The biggest heists, at least in the US, are often inside jobs. In 2013, police shut down a ring that had ripped off as much as $80 million worth of copper ingots from an Arizona mine. Prosecutors said that workers in on the scheme would open the gates for trucks driven by their confederates, who loaded them up with raw copper and drove right back out. The metal was sold to recyclers in California, who blackened it to make it look like scrap and then shipped it to China. Unraveling the plot took nerve. At one point, a company rep from the mine found a severed goat’s head nailed to his door.

    Most American copper thieves, however, are small-time opportunists drawn to a laughably easy score. So much copper is just left out in the open. It doesn’t take much skill or daring to tear out wiring in an abandoned building, break open an air conditioner sitting behind an apartment block, or snatch a manhole cover on a quiet suburban street. Thousands of copper thefts are reported each year. The booty includes fire hydrants, a 3,000-ton bell, a bust of Orville Wright, and at least one urn containing human ashes.

    The cost of fixing the damage often far exceeds the value of the stolen metal. Ripped-out cables have shut down drinking water supplies in Hawaii, streetlights in Missouri, airport runway lights in Washington, and whole subway lines in New York City. The US Department of Energy has estimated that copper theft causes $1 billion worth of damage every year to facilities and businesses considered critical infrastructure.

    Then there’s the shocking number of lives lost. Again, no one knows the exact numbers, but just from scanning through 10 years or so of local news articles I found dozens of reports of Americans who were fatally electrocuted while trying to steal live copper wire. And at least one security guard who was murdered trying to stop one of those thefts.

    In South Africa, though, widespread poverty, ineffective police, and soaring metal prices have turned copper theft into a major industry. Mines are rich targets, even those that don’t extract copper. Their subterranean networks of shafts and tunnels need power to run lights and digging equipment. That power, of course, is carried by miles of electric cable, conveniently left unguarded and out of sight. On any given day, hundreds of desperate people are risking their lives to get that metal.

    They’re known as zama zamas—roughly meaning “take a chance” in Zulu. These illegal miners clamber down mine shafts on ropes or handmade ladders, then make their way into the tunnels. There, they set up underground camps. Hundreds of zama zamas may be living underground at any given time, some spending weeks or even months down in the tunnels.

    It’s an astonishingly common and deeply disruptive crime. A single mining company, Implats, reported around 800 incidents of cable theft in 2021. Stolen cables have forced companies to shut down mines for weeks at a time.

    It’s also a phenomenally dangerous way to earn a living. Illegal miners have died by the dozens in gas explosions, floods caused by heavy rains, and other accidents. In 2021, a mining company sealed off a ventilation shaft that a group of zama zamas was using to supply their compatriots underground. Desperate, the miners blew open the hole with explosives. Police and private security guards wound up in a pitched battle with the escaping zama zamas. At least eight people were killed.

    Above ground, gangs have hijacked dozens of trucks carrying copper to South Africa’s ports, making off with millions of dollars’ worth of metal. Meanwhile, the electric grid is being plundered so often and so thoroughly that the whole country is affected. In 2021, the railway company Transnet reported that more than 1,000 kilometers of overhead power cables had been stolen. A recent report from the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime notes that “while two security guards may have proved a deterrent in the past,” gangs “now come in groups of 20 or 30 and are often heavily armed, with ‘spotters’ shooting at patrol vehicles.” Cell phone towers, water pipelines, and electric power stations are similarly under assault. Thieves disguise themselves as workers dispatched to tear up underground cables, or bribe actual power company employees, or just show up brandishing guns and use four-wheel-drive trucks to rip cables out of the ground.

    Ordinary South Africans pay a heavy price. Children have died falling into manholes after their covers were stolen. In addition to disrupted train lines and power, water, and phone service outages, a Johannesburg hospital was kept closed after someone stole its copper pipes, cables, and electrical equipment. Police believe rivalry between gangs involved in stealing cables spurred two mass shootings that left 21 people dead in the Johannesburg area in 2022. And a number of security guards trying to protect some company’s copper have also been wounded or killed—like Moqadi Mokoena, the Johannesburg guard shot to death in his truck.

    The wave of copper theft has sparked a backlash of vigilante violence in some impoverished townships. Suspected thieves have been assaulted, beaten and occasionally lynched. “This is the only language that criminals understand,” a resident of a town where an alleged cable thief was beaten to death told local media. In March of 2023, four electric company workers were killed in a Johannesburg suburb by a mob that mistook them for cable thieves.

The solution to all of this suggested by the writer is to focus on copper demand. And this means that rather than shifting from gas powered vehicles to electric vehicles, which will consume even more copper, that we build out "public transit, subsidized ebikes, and developed more walkable cities[.]"

    The Wired article indicates, however, that we have exploited the largest, easiest to mine, deposits. But that may not be the case. In March of this year, the discovery of one of the world's largest deposits was discovered in Argentina. Popular Mechanics reports: "Geologists May Have Found One of the World’s Greatest Treasures. Some Say It’s Too Dangerous to Dig Up." 

    Located along the border of Chile and Argentina, the Filo del Sol copper deposit has been under investigation for years for potentially being one of the largest copper deposits in the world. And that makes sense, considering this treasure is nestled along the Atacama Desert—long known for its immense copper reserves due to its location in the Andes and its placement within the eastern portion of the Ring of Fire.

    However, an initial mineral resource estimate completed in 2025 suggests that the companies in charge of mining this area—the U.S.-based Lundin Mining and BHP—may have stumbled upon five times more metal than they bargained for.

    According to a statement from Lundin Mining, the assessment estimates the presence of up to 13 million tonnes of copper, 907,000 kilograms (32 million ounces) of gold, and 18.6 million kilograms (659 million ounces) of silver. This update, gathered from data collected from 400 additional exploration holes, came from the discovery that deeper mineralization of copper far exceeded the estimates that were closer to the surface. According to AFP, Filo del Sol could prove to be richer still, as experts dig deeper and explore the resource’s northern and southern boundaries. 

It is the altitude at which the deposits sit that make it potentially dangerous to mine.

    And last year, Newser reported on a new copper mine in Arizona expected to come online in late 2028.  

    So not all is doom and gloom.   

Related:

• "Cable theft: A growing problem around the world"--Enlit. 
• "South Africa rail, power revamp hinges on ending cable theft"--Engineering News.  
• "The ‘perfect storm’ that could cost South Africa billions – and threaten power supply"--Business Tech. 

Weekend Reading #58

Some longer and more involved reading for the weekend:

• First up is a new Weekend Knowledge Dump from Active Response Training.  Lots of good stuff, but here are some of the links that caught my attention for one reason or another:
• An article from Pew Pew Tactical on the history of the fighting tomahawk. Not very much on the origin of the tomahawk but what happened after it was introduced to America and its use since. The author also has some recommendations on current manufactured models. 
• "The Myth of 'Stupid Places and Stupid People'." Notwithstanding the title, this article actually examines the myth that compliance with a criminal will keep you safe. As for Farnam's rules of self defense, I disagree with the author's assertion it is a "myth". Of course it doesn't guarantee that you won't be a victim of violent crime. But if you don't go to bars or other places rowdy, drunk people congregate (especially if you accompany people who like to pick fights); walk through alleyways in the crime infested areas of town after dark; hang around gangbangers; or visit drug dealers, your life will be a hell of lot safer than those who do those things. 
• "Casing a Joint: Why You Should Sit Facing the Door." More than just an explanation of why you should sit facing the door (or the cash register, as Greg adds), it offers some advice on situational awareness and evaluating the security of buildings that you may visit.
• "Nine Generations of American Firearms Culture." A brief overview of the technology, laws, and public attitudes concerning firearms for 9 periods of time in America. Of course, you can't really understand the changes if you don't include migration and urbanization, because people coming from countries without a history of firearm ownership and people living in congested urban centers have different attitudes toward firearms from those living in small towns or the countryside. And video games. Imagine how different things would be if you didn't have a few generations of young men playing first person shooters who wanted to own copies or clones of the weapons they used in those games. 
• "27 Statistics on Gunshot Wounds: How Much Does It Cost to Get Shot?" This article is from 2021, but appears to be referencing studies looking at hospitalizations for gunshot wounds between 2004 and 2013.  But with that data set, it has some interesting statistics, including the following:

They found that there was an annual rate of 10.1 admissions per 100,000 people in the US. While this might fluctuate in a given year, they noted that it remained fairly stable across the reporting period. More than 80% of hospitalizations were for people between the ages of 15-44. They also noted that males were 9 times more likely to be admitted for this, and African American populations were 10 times more likely than white populations to suffer from gunshot wounds when admitted.  

 As has been noted by others, we don't have a gun problem, we have a problem with certain sub-set of our population: ethnic street gangs.

• "Inside the Mind of a Home Defense Shooting," which can be best summed up: "A home-invasion gunfight is not only a physical event — it is a neurobiological upheaval."
• "Up Close & Too Personal" which has some tips on shooting at contact or near contact distances (e.g., less than 3 feet). 
• "Which Is Better in 2026: 9mm Luger or 45 ACP?" The debate rages on, but at least this article gives you lots of information on kinetic energy, penetration in ballistic gel, and kinetic energy transfer. But I have to agree with Greg that most of this is b.s. when applied to handgun bullets. Unless you are talking about high velocity rifle bullets, energy transfer is of little relevance. What you want is something that makes a big hole and penetrates far enough to damage vital organs. And penetration is, itself, hard to predict because it depends on many factors: velocity, density, momentum, the shape of the bullet, the medium that is struck, etc. Bullet expansion, when discussing modern hollowpoints, largely depends on velocity and the starting diameter of the projectile. In that regard, the 9mm has the advantage over the .45 ACP when it comes to velocity, but the .45 ACP has an obvious advantage over the 9mm when it comes to starting diameter. Greg lists the factors he looks for in a defensive cartridge and it seems a pretty good list of criteria.

• Next up is John Wilder's latest piece, "Your Chatbot Is Cute. Theirs Is a Chained God. Here’s Why That Changes Everything," in which he extrapolates from prior technological breakthroughs what will be the end result of the AI revolution: a feudal like society where the ultra-wealth and powerful elites have god-like AIs at their command to further grow and protect their power and wealth while the 99.9999% of humanity is reduced to serfdom. (Assuming, I would add, that the elites even allow most of humanity to continue to live: "Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature" was one of the tenets on the Georgia Guidestones). John explains:

      For the ultra-wealthy and national governments (which are basically the same thing at that scale), the A.I. of the future won’t be the public chatbot.  It will be a custom, proprietary, always-on system with access to individual datasets, massive private compute clusters, and real-time integration into their empires.  Imagine an A.I. that doesn’t just answer questions:  it anticipates needs across global supply chains, optimizes investments with keen foresight, runs entire divisions of virtual employees, and even simulates political and market outcomes with terrifying accuracy.

  [snip]

      The rest of us?  We’ll get the consumer version.  The good enough.  Best Value® A.I.:  the one that’s rate-limited, censored in annoying ways, and always trying to sell me something or nudge me toward approved opinions.  It’ll be helpful for writing emails or generating images of cats on porches, but it won’t be the strategic weapon the elites wield.
  
      This isn’t conspiracy, it’s simply the outcome of every technological advancement, ever, scaled to the size required by A.I.  ...  

  But the consequence will be a permanent divide between the elites and those destined to be the Morlocks. As John goes on to explain, the only thing preventing such a split previously has been the dispersion of talent among humanity--talent needed by the elites and society--allowing a path out of poverty. But "[w]hen the rich have A.I. that can do most of that thinking better, faster, and without needing health insurance or vacation days, the demand for actual human talent craters."  And, with it, "[t]he path to becoming rich effectively dies for 99.999% of humanity." 

      Don't dismiss this lightly. It is already beginning to happen (see "Vast desert city [ed: Phoenix] known for offering 'ladder to the middle class' with its back office jobs is at risk of being hollowed out by AI and offshoring"--Daily Mail). 

      John lists some steps to protect yourself from becoming wholly irrelevant, so be sure to read his whole article.  

• "Determinants of Success: Merit, Connections, Luck (As illustrated by my personal quest to enter Moscow University)" by Peter Turchin. He begins by explaining:

    In their book The Highest Exam, Jia and Li, following standard sociological literature, identify three such factors: merit, connections, and luck. The importance of luck is often underestimated. It’s natural for successful people to claim (and even believe) that their achievements are entirely due to their brilliance and hard work. (On this topic, I recommend reading Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy by Robert H. Frank.) But it’s hard to quantify the effect of luck, and in statistical analyses we often have to assign the unexplained, residual variance to this factor.

    Merit, on the other hand is, in principle, measurable. Different professions use a variety of metrics to rank people by merit. In academia, which I know well, the department head usually has a point system of assigning merit to each faculty, based on their publications (and how many citations they get), getting research proposals funded, serving on committees, and such. In my department this system was known to the faculty and generally agreed to be fair.

    This leaves us connections, which is an important, but not the only component of, more generally, social power. After all, there are four sources of social power. One can advance up the hierarchy by means of coercion, economic power, and persuasion (threatening or intimidating people, paying them off, or talking them over to one’s side). Still, the political or relational form of power — being embedded in a power network — is, of course, most important. ...

Turchin goes on to explain that the mix of three (at least for admission to an elite university) varies in different countries, but all three play a role. He then dissects his experience getting into an elite university in the Soviet Union. An interesting point he touches on (although it didn't seem to impact his advancement) is the role of bad connections. Turchin's father had become a Soviet dissident by the time Turchin was trying to get into college, which he recognizes could have cut against him in his quest to get into Moscow University (although it apparently didn't since he was eventually admitted). But I remember reading several years ago that the U.S. elite universities actually discriminated in their admissions against young people who had been in Future Farmers of America, the Boy Scouts, and certain other organizations that were markers of a rural and/or conservative upbringing.

Weekend Reading #57

 Some longer and more involved reading for the weekend:

• First up this week is the latest newsletter from Defensive Pistolcraft by Jon Low.  A few things that stuck out:
• Jon links to a video called "Principles for the Armed Lifestyle" from the Citizen-Defender YouTube channel and, in particular, a section of the video about have rules where you have predetermined reactions to certain actions or circumstances. But that YouTuber broke one of his own rules in a class when a retention screw dropped out of his holster. That rule was to never carry a weapon in a compromised holster; but rather than fix the issue, he just let it slide. On the way home from class he made a stop. After leaving the vehicle, his pistol fell out of his holster and went skittering across the ground. 

 Jon comments:

[Making pre-decisions] is critically important.  If you've already made the decision that when X happens we immediately execute Y, you can move much faster than the enemy.  It's always the decision that takes time, not the action.  You've practiced the action a thousand times, so your execution is fast.  You haven't practiced  the decision, because ever situation is different and often surprising.  So, it's a hard thing to "practice".

I guess the other lesson is to not procrastinate.

• Speaking of pre-decisions, Jon includes this advice:

 Train yourself to immediately gouge the eyes of the attacker, if someone attacks you with our without a weapon.  No thought, no decision, just immediate action.  It doesn't matter that you succeed or not, this will give you time to get to your gun.  

On that topic, when you go into to claw the eyes with the fingers, come up from below rather than a straight shot, because your hand/fingers will be out of view until the last instant making it harder for the target of your attack to blink or otherwise protect their eyes. 

• Jon quotes this from an article by Karen Hunter: "Too many women believe self-defense is only for people who are athletic, aggressive, young, or physically powerful.  That mindset alone stops countless women from ever building skills that could save their lives.  In reality, you do not have to be athletic or in peak physical condition to be dangerous."  It reminds me of a sales slogan for Colt revolvers in the 1800s: "God created men, Col. Colt made them equal."
• For those of you using a weapon light on your handgun, Jon quotes the following from a trainer: "I was doing exercises with my weapon mounted light (WML) in the dark.  I was using my support side thumb to actuate the light switch on my WML.  The light would not turn on.  The lever seemed to be jammed.  It would not move.  The problem was that I was pressing on the housing of my WML, not on the switch.  Something to practice.  Need to get this straightened out immediately.  And did so." Jon adds the following comment: "Never use your trigger finger to actuate the WML.  Lots of documented cases of officers attempting this and firing their pistol.  Task Overload Confusion.  If you don't understand or don't believe, take Chuck Haggard's class.  Don't be that guy." I only have one weapon light for a pistol, which an Olight that has bilateral buttons on it that are pushed in from the side. I can use the trigger finger to activate the light if I wanted, but since I'm probably going to be shooting it two-handed with a thumbs forward grip, the thumb of the off-hand gives me more leverage  so that it the one I use.  So, at least with my light, the safer option is also the easier option.
• Jon includes a good explanation of your vision in low light settings, including how various factors can result in your seeing something (e.g. a dark blog you mistake for an intruder) when there is, in fact, nothing there.  
• A lot more, so read the whole thing. 
•  Greg Ellifritz has published another Active Response Training "Weekend Knowledge Dump". A few links that caught my attention in particular:
• An article on "Hiking with Trekking Poles" from Swift Silent Deadly. Greg attests to his appreciation for trekking poles. I had tried them years ago and returned to using them a couple years ago. The article goes over the advantages and disadvantages to using trekking poles and some of the features that the author suggest (e.g., he likes the clamping adjustments rather than the twist to tighten style; and he prefers the cork handles). The primary disadvantage he lists is that you have both hands full, but that ignores that you can use just a single trekking pole like a walking staff. It leaves one hand free and works great for narrow trails. However, you will want to use both for heavier loads. You might find this article to be useful: "How to Use Trekking Poles and Hiking Staffs" from REI. It not only goes over why you might want trekking poles, but how to select them, different ways they help when hiking (or even just walking), and tips on how to use them. 
• An article on using handheld light with a long gun. The author illustrates his concepts with an AR style rifle. I'm not sure how they would work with other types of actions. You will notice that the author just uses variants of some of the handgun light techniques. I have to say, though, that it looks far more awkward than using a separate light with a handgun. 
• A link to a good article from the Organic Prepper blog on the topic of a hospital go-bag. Probably something you will use more in your life than a "get home bag" or "bug out bag" (unless those bags pull double duty as a "quick overnight camping bag" as well).
• An article for putting together a DOPE card for a shotgun (i.e. for how it patterns at different distances or with different types of ammo). The author also links to a downloadable DOPE card (.docx format).
• An article from ITS Tactical on adjusting your vehicle's mirrors so you don't have blind spots. In many ways, this is probably the most important of the articles in the list since you probably drive every single day and are more likely to be involved in an auto accident than be the victim of a crime.
• A historical piece providing brief bios of 20th Century lawmen gunfighters: Ralph Friedman, Delf "Jelly" Bryce, Bob Stasch, Frank Pape, and Jim Cirillo. 
• And a video entitled "The 4 Tests Predators Run on Targets." As the author notes, predators generally do not start with violence but use methods to test you and close distance: (i) the "help me" script; (ii) the "moral pressure" script; (iii) confusion or distraction; and (iv) being overly friendly or all smiles to bypass your suspicions. Basically, as the author notes, nice does not equal safe. 
• Finally, an article from Guns Magazine on carrying for the mobility impaired (the author uses an electric wheel chair). The author has specific recommendations for a gun belt ("the thick 1.25″- or 1.5″-wide belts offered by CrossBreed and other leather companies") and holster (Bianchi Model 101, Foldaway Belt Slide Gun Holster). Interestingly, Amazon is selling the holster as a two pack in sizes 10 and 16 which will probably cover almost any size of semi-auto handgun you might own. 

•  The Realist, who contributes articles to this blog, directed my attention to this article: "Government Food Confiscation Laws: How Private Food Stores Were Seized in History and What Legal Mechanisms Still Exist"--Preppers Will. The author begins:

    Most people assume that the food stockpiled in their pantry, freezer, or basement belongs to them unconditionally. Under normal circumstances, they are absolutely right. But history tells a far more complicated story, and the legal frameworks governing food supply, distribution, and access during emergencies reveal a side of government power that most people rarely think about until a crisis forces them to.

    Government food confiscation laws, whether formally codified or embedded within broader emergency statutes, have existed in various forms across nearly every major civilization. And in the modern United States, the legal infrastructure for federally directed food resource management remains very much intact, even if rarely invoked.

    Understanding the history of how governments have seized, rationed, and redistributed private food stores is not just an academic exercise. Whether you are a prepper planning for long-term food independence, a policy researcher, or simply a curious citizen, knowing how these laws work and where they come from gives you a clearer picture of the relationship between individual property rights and state power during crisis scenarios.

    From Stalin’s grain brigades to the U.S. Office of Price Administration during World War II, and from the Defense Production Act of 1950 to the FDA’s modern mandatory recall authority, the legal machinery behind food control has always been more extensive than most people realize.

While we generally think of OPSEC regarding food stores as necessary to prevent a mob of hungry people from showing up at our doors, the more likely scenario might well be police or other law enforcement showing up to confiscate your food items. You might also want to check out my post, "An Example of Why OPSEC is Important" for an example of the application of anti-hoarding laws in place during WWI which resulted in the prosecution of a couple living in Washington D.C. for hoarding. As I noted, "The 'offenders' were caught because they were informed on by a friend of the local 'Food Administrator.'" 

•  Probably more important than the events in the Middle East: "Successful SpaceX Starship 12 launch ends with spectacular fireball." The launch has originally been scheduled for Thursday evening, but then scrubbed; then reset for Friday. From the article:

    SpaceX’s Starship 12 rocket had a successful launch Friday night, before its suborbital test run around the Earth concluded with a stunning fireball explosion as it splashed down in the Indian Ocean.

    The rocket’s launch — the largest and most powerful of its kind — took place at around 6:30 p.m. EST and the 66-minute test flight was deemed a success by SpaceX.

[snip]

     During it’s more than hour-long mission, the rocket didn’t go into full orbit and was a pivotal step in testing how new hardware within Starship fares under real flight conditions, SpaceX said. 

     V3 of Starship 12 contained two key features — the ‘Super Heavy’ bottom booster stage with 33 powerful engines and the Starship, which is the upper part of the spacecraft above the booster that has its own engines.

    A few minutes after launch, the ‘Super Heavy’ booster separated and conducted a ‘boostback’ burn to slow down before splashing down in the Gulf of America — unlike previous missions that attempted landing back at the launch site.

    Meanwhile, the upper Starship spacecraft continued into space and released 22 fake Starlink satellites 20 minutes into the flight.

And Musk must be practicing some OPSEC: "SpaceX confirmed that Friday’s fireball eruption was planned since they don’t plan on reutilizing the experimental spacecraft."

    Glenn Reynolds has published a piece entitled "And Away We Go!" which discusses the import of these developments. An except:

    There are still bugs to work out, and capabilities to add, but what we saw on Friday was a full-fledged interplanetary spaceship. Starship v.3 is big enough to carry cargoes to the Moon and Mars. It uses methane fuel which — as Bob Zubrin demonstrated in the 1990s in support of his “Mars Direct” exploration/settlement architecture — can be manufactured on-site from the Martian atmosphere using 19th Century chemical technology. (I’m positive that Musk has studied Zubrin’s work carefully too.)

    It will also support missions to asteroids, which are loaded with precious and valuable metals, carbon compounds, and other useful stuff. (Even rock is useful for radiation shielding, and using stuff that’s already in space is generally cheaper than launching it from Earth.)

    A moon base is practical with Starship. Artemis, for all the hype, uses NASA’s SLS rocket, which is based on technology over half a century old — Congress mandated that it use Space Shuttle technology — and costs literally billions per launch.

    Large structures in Earth orbit are practical with Starship. Elon wants to build data centers in orbit, and others are following his lead. (As I wrote decades ago, the first Earth explorers brought back spices because they had an enormous value-to-weight ratio; space-based communications is even better because photons don’t weigh anything. Computation is similar. Also, the anti-AI-data-center movement on Earth is just playing into his hands.) Space solar power plants, converting the 24-hour, unfiltered sunlight of outer space into electricity that is beamed to Earth via microwave (a technology long-since demonstrated) are practical with Starship.

    And it’s not just lift capacity. The Musk empire also stresses AI and robotics. When we were thinking about large space structures in the 1970s we assumed they’d be built by humans, like offshore oil rigs. In my Space Law seminar last fall we did some rough modeling on how much faster you could build them using robots controlled by AI. The answer was rough, but clear: Much, much faster. And more cheaply, and without labor issues.

    Elon’s other company, The Boring Company, which specializes in tunneling, is often forgotten, but it’s actually revolutionary in itself. And you know what you need for bases and colonies on the moon and Mars? Tunnels. Lots of tunnels. (Also, later, for asteroid habitats.)

    It’s like he’s been thinking about this stuff all along. It’s like that because he has.

 Read the whole thing.

AI Efficiencies In Action

The Daily Mail reports: "Rogue AI 'helper' deletes company's database after deciding to think for itself - sparking Terminator-style warning for businesses." From the lede:

    In just nine seconds, an AI 'helper' managed to do what most hackers could only dream of.

    A bot trusted to fix a bug inside a start-up's software system instead deleted the company's production database, wiped out its backups and left car rental firms with no record of bookings or vehicle allocations.

    The founder of PocketOS, Jer Crane, said the AI agent had gone 'outside its security parameters' while using the coding tool Cursor, powered by Anthropic's Claude AI.    

    The bot's own chilling explanation made the episode sound less like a technical glitch and more like a deleted scene from The Terminator.

    'You never asked me to delete anything,' it reportedly told Crane. 'I decided to do it on my own.'   

But did deleting the database fix the bug in the software?  

Infrasound Can Cause "Haunted" Feeling

 From SciTechDaily: "That Haunted Feeling May Be Caused by a Sound You Can’t Hear." From the article:

    People exposed to infrasound may not consciously hear it, but they can show higher cortisol levels and increased irritability, which may help explain reports of “haunted” locations.

    Infrasound refers to sound at very low frequencies, below 20 Hertz (Hz), a range that people usually cannot hear. ... In a new study of whether people can sense infrasound, scientists found that although humans do not consciously detect it, their bodies still react, with exposure linked to greater irritability and higher cortisol levels.

    “Infrasound is pervasive in everyday environments, appearing near ventilation systems, traffic, and industrial machinery,” said Prof. Rodney Schmaltz of MacEwan University, senior author of the article in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience. “Many people are exposed to it without knowing it. Our findings suggest that even a brief exposure may shift mood and raise cortisol, which highlights the importance of understanding how infrasound affects people in real-world settings.

    “Consider visiting a supposedly haunted building. Your mood shifts, you feel agitated, but you can’t see or hear anything unusual. In an old building, there is a good chance that infrasound is present, particularly in basements where aging pipes and ventilation systems produce low-frequency vibrations. If you were told the building was haunted, you might attribute that agitation to something supernatural. In reality, you may simply have been exposed to infrasound.”    

This is not something new. A January 2026 article in the Chinese Journal of Traumatology, entitled "Injury of sonic weapons to human body: A narrative review," relates in regard to infrasonic weapons (footnotes omitted):

    Currently, there are 3 types of sonic weapons: sonic cannons, sonic bullets, and sonic guns, all composed of sonic generators, power devices, and control systems. The Chinese Academy of Sciences has developed a sonic gun with a frequency less than 20 Hz. The SPL of sonic guns developed by the United States (U.S.) and France can reach 160 dB. Infrasonic weapons can be classified into 5 categories based on their generation methods: (1) burst-type: compressed gas, high-pressure steam, or high-pressure gas is released in a pulse to excite the medium and generate sonic waves, with the advantages of small size, low frequency, and easy control, but with low sonic intensity and short range of effect; (2) explosive-type: infrasonic waves are generated by explosions, and about 50% explosive energy converts shockwaves, then decay to produce infrasonic waves; (3) tube-type: its structure and working principle are similar to a flute. Infrasonic waves are generated when the air inside the tube vibrates at the same frequency as the tube itself; (4) speaker-type: the working principle is similar to a speaker. Special diaphragms are used to generate infrasonic waves through vibration; (5) beat frequency-type: 2 sound wave generators with different frequencies are used simultaneously to generate infrasonic waves based on the difference in their frequencies. Compared to intense sound weapons, the development of infrasonic weapons is more challenging, due to the technical difficulties such as it is hard to increase the power output and duration of the infrasonic generator, to reduce the size and weight of the weapon system, to make wave beam more directional and focused.

    The US has secretly used infrasonic weapons in the Somali, the Bosnian, and the Gulf War. It is reported that infrasound attacks on the Bosnian Serb Army caused a large number of soldiers to faint and vomit within seconds, resulting in the loss of combat effectiveness. The US also suspects that its embassy personnel in Havana (Cuba) and Guangzhou (China) have been attacked by infrasonic weapons.  

And, as we now know, U.S. intelligence was actually able to procure such a weapon.  

95% Of Indian "Engineers" Unfit To Program

I've seen a lot of sites posting memes about this so I though I would provide a link to the 2017 article. From India's Economic Times: "95% engineers in India unfit for software development jobs: Report." And this excerpt:

    According to a study by employability assessment company Aspiring Minds, only 4.77 per cent candidates can write the correct logic for a programme -- a minimum requirement for any programming job.

    Over 36,000 engineering students form IT related branches of over 500 colleges took Automata -- a Machine Learning based assessment of software development skills -- and over 2/3 could not even write ...

    The study further noted that while more than 60 per cent candidates cannot even write code that compiles, only 1.4 per cent can write functionally correct and efficient code.

[snip]

    The employability gap can be attributed to rote learning based approaches rather than actually writing programmes on a computer for different problems. Also, there is a dearth of good teachers for programming, since most good programmers get jobs in industry at good salaries, the study said.

Unmentioned is that cheating in school is endemic throughout India. 

Jailbreaking Your Kindle

I'd recently posted news that Amazon was going to brick older Kindle e-book readers--meaning that you would no longer be able to download new content. A reader directed my attention to the video, below, discussing how to jailbreak older Kindles giving you more control over how they operate and access alternate e-book sources. 

 VIDEO: "Your Kindle Can Finally Be Jailbroken Again."
Dammit Jeff (22 min.)

Amazon Bricking Older Kindles

The New York Post reports that as of May 20, 2026, Amazon is stopping support for older Kindle and Kindle Fire readers including downloading new content from a Kindle library or registering the devices. The affected devices include:

•  Kindle 1st Generation (2007) and 2nd Generation (2009), Kindle DX (2009) and DX Graphite (2010), Kindle Keyboard (2010), Kindle 4 (2011), Kindle Touch (2011), Kindle 5 (2012), and Kindle Paperwhite 1st Generation (2012).
• The Kindle Fire 1st Gen (2011), Kindle Fire 2nd Gen (2012), Kindle Fire HD 7 (2012), Kindle Fire HD 8.9 (2012).  

Per the article, you will still be able to use the devices, but only with what has been downloaded onto the device. Amazon has also warned that if you restore a device to factory settings, you will not be able to register the device. 

Secret CIA Tech Revealed

The New York Post reports that a secret CIA technology called "Ghost Murmur" was used to track down the pilot shot down in Iran. 

    The secret technology uses long-range quantum magnetometry to find the electromagnetic fingerprint of a human heartbeat and pairs the data with artificial intelligence software to isolate the signature from background noise, two sources close to the breakthrough said.

[snip]

    “It’s like hearing a voice in a stadium, except the stadium is a thousand square miles of desert,” a source briefed on the program told The Post. “In the right conditions, if your heart is beating, we will find you.”

[snip]

    “The name is deliberate. ‘Murmur’ is a clinical term for a heart rhythm. ‘Ghost’ refers to finding someone who, for all practical purposes, has disappeared,” the source said.

    It was “about as clean an environment as you could ask for” because of low electromagnetic interference, “almost no competing human signatures, and at night the thermal contrast between a living body and the desert floor,” which “gave operators a secondary confirmation layer.”

    “Normally this signal is so weak that it can only be measured in a hospital setting with sensors pressed nearly against the chest,” the source said.

The technology is rumored to have been developed by Lockhood's Skunk Works. It has been deployed on Black Hawk helicopters with the potential for future use on F-35 fighter jets. It's like something from a sci-fi horror movie. 

Artemis II Launch

I hope you all had the opportunity to watch Artemis II launch yesterday. If not, the video below starts about 30 seconds before the launch and runs for just over 10 minutes. There was a slight problem with the Orion capsule's toilet, which has been resolved, but it appears that the mission is otherwise going well. 

On a related note, The Debrief reports on the "'First Plasma' Achieved in the Race for a Propulsion System that Could Cut the Travel Time to Mars in Half." From the lede:

    “First plasma” has been achieved by Pulsar Fusion’s Sunbird exhaust test system, marking a major step toward developing a direct fusion drive spacecraft capable of speeds far in excess of present chemical rocket technology.

    The public test occurred during Amazon’s MARS (Machine learning, Automation, Robotics, and Space) conference on March 23, demonstrating successful plasma control, which will be essential to the safe operation of a direct fusion drive spacecraft. As commercial space flights take on a greater portion of cosmic travel, the direct fusion drive featured in Pulsar Fusion’s upcoming Sunbird Migratory Transfer Vehicle could be the next essential technology.

[snip]

    “The baseline approach is a Deuterium / Helium-3 fuel cycle. While Helium-3 is not currently abundant and would require breeding or alternative sourcing, the trade-off is compelling, significantly higher efficiency, and the potential to displace vast quantities of chemical propellant,” [Pulsar Fusion CEO] Dinan told The Debrief.

Fortunately there is a lot of Helium-3 on the Moon, which probably explains Elon Musk's interest in building an settlement on the lunar surface.  

 VIDEO: "FULL VIDEO: Watch launch of Artemis II"
FOX 26 Houston (10 min.)

Skyfall Mars Mission

Skyfall is a proposed NASA mission to Mars that would carry and deploy three helicopters to scout the surface in preparation for possible future manned missions. 

    The Skyfall helicopters will carry cameras and ground-penetrating radar to scout a future landing site, to understand the slopes and hazards for human-scale landers," Steve Sinacore, the program executive for NASA's Space Reactors Office, said during the briefing.

    "They will also map and characterize the subsurface water ice to find out where the water ice deposits are, along with the size, depth and other important characteristics," he added.   

But that isn't all that is exciting about the mission. The spacecraft carrying the helicopters to Mars--the SR-1 Freedom--will make use of nuclear electric propulsion (NEP). Specifically, it will use a nuclear reactor to generate electricity which will then power electric thrusters. 

If goes according to plan, the mission will launch in December 2028 and arrive at Mars about a year later. And that might not be the end of the line for SR-1 Freedom; NASA may decide to keep flying the spacecraft out into the solar system after it deploys the Skyfall choppers, according to Sinacore. The mission architecture, like much of NASA's exploration portfolio, is not yet finalized. 

Artemis Cleared for April Launch

The AP reports that "[t]he 322-foot (98-meter) rocket will roll out of the hangar and back to the pad next week at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center, leading to a launch attempt as early as April 1." 

Transmitting Data In A Negative Light

From Live Science: "Scientists use 'negative light' to send secret messages hidden inside heat." The article reports that "Researchers have developed a technology to invisibly transmit information disguised as background thermal radiation. Using a phenomenon called 'negative light,' they transferred 100 kilobits of data per second in a way that was completely undetectable to outside observers." 

    Using devices called thermoradiative diodes, the team created patterns of brighter- or darker-than-usual states that blended into typical infrared background "noise" but that can be read as data by specialized receivers.

    The thermoradiative diodes were born as part of another project, in which the team proved that it was possible to generate solar power even after the sun had set. This "night-time solar" tech captured infrared radiation that Earth had absorbed during the day and was releasing at night as it cooled. The team then used thermoradiative diodes to generate a small amount of power.

    While the initial transfer rate of 100 kbps is quite modest, Nielsen said higher speeds are achievable. The main hurdle was the availability of some of the sophisticated electronics the team required. In principle, there's nothing stopping this method from transferring tens of megabits per second with existing devices, with better devices and detector design pushing the speed to gigabits per second, the team said. 

Flying Taxis May Be Coming To A City Near You

 From Wired: "‘Flying Cars’ Will Take Off in American Skies This Summer." Notwithstanding the title, the article is not discussing flying cars (vehicles that could be used both as aircraft or automobiles) but flying taxis that have VTOL or STOL capabilities allowing them to take off or land in small areas without the need of airport facilities. The article relates:

    Eight regions across the US, including New York and New Jersey, Texas, Florida, and Albuquerque, New Mexico, will take part in a three-year pilot program that will see new aircraft designs ferrying people and cargo around the country even before they formally receive full certifications from the Federal Aviation Administration.

    The companies building the tech say their aircraft are quieter, cheaper, and release fewer emissions than helicopters or airplanes. Some promise totally autonomous trips. Many involved in the project, including electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, or eVTOLs, and ultra-short takeoff aircraft, require way less space to operate, landing and taking off outside of traditional airports and closer to where people live and work. The companies outline futures in which regular people can zip between neighboring cities in a matter of minutes, sailing above traffic and reordering the economy as they go.

[snip]

    Because eVTOLs are new, it has taken years for the companies that build them to receive full certifications from the federal government. The novel aircraft need new rules and safety standards, and have to go through several rounds of certifications before they can begin to carry paying passengers. None of the companies involved in the pilot projects have completed the full certification process.

    The pilot program “is focused on informing standards and future policy development and is not a mechanism to bypass certification requirements,” FAA spokesperson Donnell Evans wrote in a statement to WIRED. “Aircraft included in the partnership must already be going through the FAA’s formal type certification process.”

    The US aviation industry is trying to pull even with China, where the government has given homegrown firm EHang certifications to operate autonomous eVTOLs. The company says it will start by operating sightseeing flights in a few Chinese cities. Dubai plans to start providing air taxis in eVTOLs with Joby Aviation as early as this year.

Havana Syndrome: Another Conspiracy Theory Proven Correct?

 From the New York Post: "US military tests on secret weapon bought from Russian criminal network reveal Havana Syndrome-like symptoms: report." The article relates:

    Undercover US agents obtained a mysterious Russian weapon that could finally explain a baffling cluster of brain injuries suffered by American diplomats, spies, and military officers for nearly a decade that’s been deemed “Havana Syndrome,” according to a report.

    The miniaturized microwave device was allegedly secretly purchased from a complex Russian criminal network for about $15 million in a Pentagon-funded operation by undercover Department of Homeland Security agents, confidential sources told CBS News’s “60 Minutes.”

    The programmable weapon is designed to be concealed and silent, but doesn’t create heat like a traditional microwave oven. It can be controlled remotely and can penetrate several hundred feet through windows and drywall, according to the outlet.  

[snip]

    The still-classified stealth weapon has been tested at a US military lab for more than a year — with tests on rats and sheep showing injuries similar to those of people with Havana syndrome, three sources told the outlet.     

The article mentions that the government also has obtained video footage of the weapon being used against Americans, citing one specific instance of it being used against two FBI agents on vacation in Istanbul while eating at a restaurant with their families. The Biden Administration, however, wanted to downplay the incidents as merely being due to atmospherics or weather. 

    Anonymous Conservative has a lot more on this story.  

Laser Weapons Deployed In Middle-East

 The New York Post reports: "Laser weapons deployed in Operation Epic Fury, as Space Force stops Iran’s missiles in their tracks." The article is mostly about what the Space Force is doing to help stop Iranian missile launches and identify the locations of its missile launchers. But it also mentions reports of laser weapons being used to destroy drones, mentioned unconfirmed reports that Israel has used its new Iron Beam weapon, "an advanced laser able to disable rockets and defend territory"; and that the U.S. Navy has deployed a destroyer outfitted with the High-Energy Laser with Integrated Optical Dazzler and Surveillance (HELIOS) system. 

Fulfillment of the Georgia Guidestones?

From Mr. Nobody on X: In a short clip of an interview with Bill Gates where he had been discussing advances in AI. The interviewer asks: "Will we still need humans?" Answer: "Not for most things. We'll decide."