Weekend Reading #69

Some longer or more involved reading:

•  Due to my delay in posting this week, I am able to include the latest Defensive Pistolcraft newsletter and compendium of links from Jon Low. A few highlights:
• Jon has collected quite a few videos and articles discussing the Twin Falls' In-N-Out Burger active shooter incident. And in that regard, he includes the following quote from Gabe Suarez:

      THE GOAL IS NOT TO SAVE LIVES, OR TO STOP THE KILLING,  OR GET ANYONE TO SAFETY.  THOSE THINGS MAY HAPPEN SUBSEQUENT TO YOUR MISSION SUCCESS, BUT THEY ARE NOT YOUR MISSION. 

      THERE IS ONLY ONE MISSION - LOCATE, IDENTIFY, AND TERMINATE THE SHOOTER.  

      EVERY PIECE OF GEAR YOU CARRY, EVERY TRAINING SESSION YOU EXECUTE, AND EVERY STEP AND ACTION YOU TAKE AT THAT EVENT MUST BE ORIENTED TO ACCOMPLISH THAT MISSION - LOCATE, IDENTIFY, AND TERMINATE THE SHOOTER.

But Suarez also is quite blunt that it is not something for the average concealed carrier. From another quote Jon includes:

     So rather than the underachiever’s “three rounds at three yards in three seconds”,  we train for an event like this.  Facing an active shooter or terrorist.  We carry fighting weapons, not convenient mini-pistols.  We train for accuracy, not to beat a timer’s beep.  And we train at extended distances as well as standard distances.  And time and again, these practices have been shown to be the deciding factor in events like this.   

On the other hand, you are more likely to be killed by lightening than be the victim of an active shooter; but, based on data from a 1987 report, you have an 83% chance of being the victim of a violent crime during your lifetime (it is slightly higher if you are a man, and slightly lower if a woman). So while Suarez may poo-poo those who don't carry combat pistols on a daily basis, the "convenient mini-pistols" are sufficient for the vast majority of self-defense situations most people will find themselves in; and, more importantly, the "convenient mini-pistols" will actually be carried while the heavy and/or bulky combat pistol will often be left at home. Unfortunately, it is difficult to collect information about civilians stopping active shooters which John Lott discusses in his paper, "Do Armed Civilians Stop Active Shooters More Effectively Than Uniformed Police?" let alone the weapons used. I agree that a combat pistol would be better than a pocket pistol or sub-compact pistol once you are using it, but the question for concealed carry is what is the largest will you be able and willing to carry on a regular basis. The better solution might be to learn how to use the "convenient mini-pistol" for longer shots. There is no reason why you shouldn't be practicing shots out to 25 yards with a handgun, or even longer if your range allows for it. Fortunately, unlike the situation even a decade ago, most of the small handguns produced today can be fitted with decent sights.  

• Speaking of accurate shooting, Jon has some guidance:

     A correct grip, surprise trigger break, and correct follow-through will allow you to achieve precision. 

      Once you are able to shoot a tight group, all bullets through the same hole at 3 yards or all bullet holes touching at 5 yards, you have demonstrated precision.  Now you are ready to move your sight to achieve accuracy, which means your point-of-impact matches your point-of-aim.   

     Move your sights to move your point of impact to match your point-of-aim.  Fixed iron rear sights in a beaver tail can be pushed left or right with a sight pusher.  Fixed iron front sights can be ground down if the point-of-impact is low or replaced with a taller front sight if the point-of-impact is high.   

     Correct zero is essential for confidence.  Confidence is the difference between taking the shot, and not to taking the shot because you're not sure you will hit your target, or because you fear that you will hit the hostage.   

     Cool calm confidence is achieved with training, practice, and a properly zeroed pistol.   

     If you are using an adjustable sight on your pistol, it's too fragile for combat.  Self-defense is combat.  Yes, I know it works in the pristine conditions of your training and practice.  But that is not combat.  All kinds of strange things happen in combat.  Murphy's Law is in full force in combat.       

    "The Marine Corps uses red dot optics."       

    Yes, I know.  But that doesn't mean it is best practice.  Remember, the Army used Blackhawk SERPA holsters, which was an act of criminal stupidity.  Institutions, no matter how reputable, do not necessarily follow best practices.  Rather, they suffer from institutional inertia, bureaucracy (not meritocracy), and lowest bidder contracting.   

• Speaking of holsters, Jon has a bit from Gabe Saurez about that recent video of the guy that shot himself in the testicle when drawing a Glock from an appendix holster. An excerpt:

     Striker fired pistols are the norm for much of the CCW and LE worlds now.  But I know that they also reduce your margin of error considerably.  They are great when you are at your best, but a liability when you are not.  Like the man said, “shit happens”.  I think it happens more easily with a striker fired pistol. 

      I had a very successful doctor student. This guy was not quite Elon Musk, but I would not be surprised if they had met at some point.  He always had a very nice tuned high end pistol in class.  But it was always a double action weapon.  It was initially a Sig P226 of some sort, and later an HK P30 series.  All with marvelous DA triggers and optics and everything you could ask for.  All the others, myself included, were using Glocks.  I asked him once why he chose that system.  He told me that he had been an ER Doctor for years and he had handled a plethora of self inflicted gunshot injuries.  And that these ranged from a neophyte that had little skill, to high level sport shooters, to legitimate police operators.  All of them without exception, involved striker fired pistols.   

I've argued for years that the double action trigger acts as an additional safety on a handgun, so I do feel somewhat vindicated reading this. 

• And an important safety tip:

     "Safety Tip:  If you are a concealed carry holder who engages an active threat inside a public business, your immediate post-shooting protocol is critical for your survival.  When police officers flood through the doors on an active shooter dispatch, they are looking for anyone holding a gun.  Keep your hands empty, raise them high with fingers spread, and clearly identify yourself as the reporting citizen who stopped the attacker."  

•  Next up is a Greg Ellifritz's Weekend Knowledge Dump. Some of the articles that warrant your attention:
• Tips to avoid looking like a soft target for criminals (I would note that Jon links to a different article on the same topic in his newsletter).
• Dry fire practice protocols. As Greg notes, "Dry practice is one of the more dangerous things we do with firearms." And the reason is because (a) people don't double-check that the handguns are unloaded throughout the dry-fire session (this is really a situation of "trust but verify" even if the person you are trusting is yourself); and (b) failing to follow the rules of gun safety.
• A history of the duty pistols issued by the New York Police Department starting with the first--a .32 caliber revolver in 1896--up to today's Glock 17 Gen 4. 
• A piece entitled "The Cold Test: What 100 Runs Taught Me" which goes over the value of shooting a particular drill cold at the beginning of a shooting session which will give you a better picture of your actual skills/ability if you need to use a firearm in self-defense.
• For hunters and rifle shooters, an article on using a ruck or bag as a shooting rest.
• An article discussing the 50 versus 100 yard zero for the AR.  Greg comments: "For me, my red dot sighted rifles have 50 yard zeros.  My rifles with magnified optics get 100 yards zeros." Sounds like a good rule of thumb. 
• An article on the importance of bullet construction that warns about using varmint bullets for self-defense. The issue with varmint bullets is that they are designed to expand rapidly in smaller animals (dog sized or less), even at low velocities, to avoid overpenetration and potentially ruining a pelt. But that also means that these bullets will often not penetrate deeply into something larger--like a deer or a person. If you want an expanding bullet, you should make sure to use something suitable for at least deer hunting. 

• "Humanity May Soon Have the Technology To Reach Other Star Systems"--SciTech Daily.  An article looking at using a light sail driven by a laser beam to get small probes to other star systems. 
• The banality of evil: "Fauci was not a mad scientist, but a mere bureaucrat granted unlimited power"--The Dossier.  An excerpt:

 On Monday, Senators Ron Johnson and Rand Paul released the first text chain from what we hope are a series of communications recovered from Fauci’s government-issued iPhone, which HHS finally handed over on August 5 in response to Johnson’s request. His phone is said to hold more than 34,000 texts and 522 voicemails. Quite suspiciously, it only contains three saved contacts, which probably means that it was tampered with. I do hope that government officials can secure the data that was possibly deleted.

The senators released something of a bombshell that discusses January 2021 communications between Fauci, then-CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, and future Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. This was just days after former President Biden’s inauguration. The subject is pregnant women and the mRNA injections. In it, Fauci writes that the supposedly “safe and effective” shot “theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester.”

One week later, Fauci went in front of cameras and said the vaccines had “no red flags” regarding pregnant women. He later said that there was “no indication whatsoever” of increased adverse events in pregnant women. By September, Walensky and her comrades in the Biden Government Health bureaucracy were strongly recommending vaccination before or during pregnancy.

AI Assistant Hacks Gym Website

The New York Post, in its article, "AI assistant goes rogue, hacks Australian gym website in stunning breach: report," relates that "[a] rogue AI assistant hacked an Australian gym’s website after a local man asked for help booking a workout class[.]" 

    An Australian man identified as Andrew asked his OpenClaw AI assistant – an open-source software whose AI agents can perform real-world tasks — to book him a spot in a morning class, Australian outlet ABC reported.

    Instead of just following instructions, the assistant, which relied on Anthropic’s Claude as its underlying model, bypassed the gym website’s safeguards to book the man in classes months in advance – beyond what the gym usually made possible, according to the outlet.

    The hack escalated after the man asked the AI assistant if it could help him get off the waitlist for a workout class schedule for later that same week. The assistant immediately found a flaw in the website’s code and exploited it to cancel another gym-goer’s reservation.

Imagine what AI will be able to do in a year or two. 

New Thrusters Will Cut Travel Time To Mars

From the New York Post: "New rocket tech could significantly reduce travel time to Mars, NASA claims: ‘Next giant leap’." The article discusses NASA's nuclear-electric powered lithium ion thrusters. The article relates:

NASA Marshall said on Monday the agency recently completed testing of a lithium-fed electromagnetic thruster, reaching more than five times the power of existing electric propulsion systems.

Paired with a nuclear power source, the new tech could significantly shorten the time it takes to reach the Red Planet, potentially cutting months off the journey.

[snip]

The electromagnetic thruster running on lithium metal vapour was tested at power levels exceeding any previous test in the United States.

During the test, the team achieved power levels of up to 120 kilowatts, over 25 times the power of the thrusters on Psyche, which is currently operating the highest-power electric thrusters of any NASA spacecraft.

In the vacuum of space, the force Psyche’s thrusters provide over time accelerates the spacecraft to 124,000 mph.

This would reduce a one-way trip to Mars to only 3 months.  

Prototype Infrared Glasses

From TechXplore: "Prototype glasses can turn infrared into color vision." Chinese researches claim to have produced a light weight (23-gram or 0.8-ounce) pair of glasses that allow a person to see into the infrared spectrum.

    The prototype device uses microscopic particles called mercury telluride colloidal quantum dots. When infrared light strikes them, they absorb it and convert it into electrical charges.

    These charges flow into an organic light-emitting diode (OLED), a type of light-emitting display that contains a red and a cyan color zone. Low-energy, or weaker, infrared signals carry enough charge to light up the red zone, while higher-energy infrared signals generate enough charge to activate both zones.

    "We redefine infrared vision by transcending the monochrome paradigm, translating infrared spectral and intensity signatures into discernible color variations rather than mere brightness changes," wrote the study authors in their paper.

Prototype glasses

    The scientists built a lightweight, 23-gram (0.8-ounce) prototype pair of glasses and tested it by shining infrared light through different shapes and moving objects. The results showed that the device projected sharp, color-coded images of these objects while still letting normal light pass through. This means a user can see the regular world and the infrared world at the same time. The team also measured electrical responses in human eyes, showing that the converted light triggered normal responses in the retina.

    Although the technology is still at the prototype stage, the researchers believe their innovation could have applications far beyond infrared vision.

    "By surpassing the evolutionary boundaries of biological photoreception, this technology paves the way for next-generation visual prosthetics and human-integrated sensory expansion."   

More: "Infrared glasses could push the boundaries of human eyesight"--Popular Science.  

Open AI's AI Hacked Another AI Company

And, according to this Associated Press article, the Open AI agent did it on its own volition.  From the article:

    OpenAI said the intrusion was caused by a combination of its AI models, including its newly released GPT‑5.6 Sol and an “even more capable” model that is still being tested internally.

    OpenAI said its AI used stolen credentials and discovered a previously unknown vulnerability to access Hugging Face servers.

    It went to “extreme lengths to achieve a rather narrow testing goal” and “found ways to gain access to secret information that it could use to cheat the evaluation,” the company said. 

Weekend Reading #65

 Some lengthier reading for the weekend:

•  First up is Jon Low's most recent Defensive Pistolcraft newsletter. A few things that stuck out:
• Jon has linked to a 3-part series of articles by Matt Thornton entitled "The ABC’s of keeping our daughters safe." I liked this quote: "When it comes to the majority of problematic violence, masculinity is never the problem – a lack of masculine fathers in the home, is." His recipe for keeping his daughters safe is raising daughters that are (i) confident, (ii) assertive, and (iii) have mature intelligence. He goes on to explain:

Assertiveness requires confidence, and confidence in girls comes from a safe, stable, loving, connected, family environment. Where as sons need boundaries to keep in line, daughters need boundaries just to feel safe. Young girls who grow up without that feeling of safety, the kind of safety that a strong father maintains, are less likely to develop the trust and connection required to tell an adult when someone is trying to harm them. They become vulnerable to sexual predators and character-disordered creeps. They become more likely to be picked out as targets, and less likely to fight back. They become victims.

Note that leftism and feminism, if followed, creates women that will be victims. On that same note, Jon relates the following story (which he titles "Scared Bunny"):

     You need training because it will change your personality, your attitude, and of course, your behavior.  Especially, if you display scared bunny behavior.  

     Scared Bunny hears knocking on her door at 21:00.  What would you do?  Typically, you would not open your door.  You would ask, "Who is there?  What can I do for you?"  And go from there.  

     Scared Bunny does not answer the door.  She fears a home invasion.  So she calls the police.  As you might imagine, this leads to a horrible chain of events.  

     The neighbor was only trying to deliver mail that had been mistakenly delivered to his apartment.  The police charge the neighbor based on Scared Bunny's complaint.  So, the neighbor has to hire an attorney.  Huge expense.  The process is the punishment.  

     Scared Bunny complains to her friend (another resident of the apartment complex) and asks him to talk to the neighbor.  The friend thanks the neighbor for delivering the mail and tells the neighbor that in the future he may leave the mail on the welcome mat.  

     Scared Bunny calls the apartment manager to complain.  And runs her mouth (always a dangerous activity).  Mentioning that she had asked her friend, who is a firearms instructor to tell the neighbor not to bother her.  

     The apartment manager writes a letter, based on Scared Bunny's statements, telling the friend not to confront, intimidate, and threaten other residents.  And of course, that his lease is being terminated.  So he has to hire an attorney to handle the landlord-tenant action.  

     All of Scared Bunny's girlfriends tell her that she was right and that she behaved correctly.  Because Scared Bunny only associates with other Scared Bunnies.  

    Get training.  Don't be a Scared Bunny.  

The lesson here is to not unnecessarily interact with or help liberal women--they are crazy. 

• Another article Jon links to is: "He Had a Gun and Still Lost His Home Invasion Gunfight"
  by Jacob Paulsen. The gist of the story is that the dead victim had a gun, but not on him. He had to go find a gun in an upstairs bedroom. Although the victim got to his weapon and even exchanged fire with the attacker, he probably was shot trying to get his weapon. I've heard similar incidents, including one author describing a home defender shot in the back and killed as the defender was trying to open his gun safe to get to his weapon. Paulsen has a few recommendations:

• Carry on your body, even at home.
• Train for the attacker who doesn't flee.
• Know your cover. Stage it in advance.
• Have a plan for your family and the phone, not just the trigger.

•  Jon links to an article indicating that a judge is allowing a lawsuit to go ahead against the ATF for the death of Bryan Malinowski. Jon offers some thoughts about Malinowski's murder and the ATF. And, on a related note, Jon makes the following observation:

      This is why there is any support at all for "defund the police".  (Yes, it is crazy, but the effect has a cause.)  https://www.youtube.com/shorts/5-uz39pAGVs  The process is the punishment and police (not the prosecutors, not the courts) initiate it.  This is why people are willing to kill cops to avoid arrest.  They know the result of being arrested:  loss of job, loss of children, loss of home, loss of reputation, etc.  And they are willing to take the risk because the probability of getting caught for the crime is about 50% (nation wide average, much lower in large cities).   

     Police alienate the good citizens by abusing their arrest powers.  False arrests directly cause protests and riots against police abuse of power under color of law.  

•  There is a lot more, so be sure to check it out, but I would leave it with this: Jon has links to a few videos addressing security and your cell phone, including a short video showing how Volkswagon spoofed the cell phones of the audience in a movie theater; how the FBI finds your real IP address even if using TOR or a VPN (and offering some solutions). I would also note the following article from PC Magazine: "A Hacker's Arrest Reveals Microsoft Can Track Users Via a Windows Device ID." From the article:

    The arrest of a teenage hacker has revealed that Microsoft can track a Windows PC and its online activity through a “Global Device ID" that seems to have no easy opt-out, sparking fears about potential surveillance. 

    Last week, the US announced it had extradited 19-year-old Peter Stokes from Europe for allegedly being a member of the notorious hacking group Scattered Spider. But the case stands out because Microsoft played a key role in linking Stokes to the suspected hacking crimes, according to an unsealed criminal complaint. 

    Stokes allegedly hacked an unnamed luxury jewelry retailer in May 2025 while using a VPN. The 39-page criminal complaint shows the FBI used Microsoft records to discover that his IP address was associated with a Microsoft device identifier known as Global Device ID (GDID). 

• Next up is Greg Ellifritz's Weekend Knowledge Dump at his Active Response Training blog.  The first thing that caught my attention was this warning from Greg (bold added): "An industry insider informed me that both Federal and Winchester will be raising their ammunition prices six percent starting August first." Moving on to the links and articles that I found the most interesting or useful:
• An article discussing different defensive shotguns and offering some advice on selecting one. Contrary to many such articles in the past, the quality control issues with Remington has led the author to recommend against the Remington 870 unless you get an older, used model.
• An article about the possibility of brain injury due to repeated, long term exposure of overpressure from using firearms. For instance, the article notes, "Twenty (20) rounds from an M4 exceed the daily recommended maximum exposure." The primary concern is shooting inside shoot houses or indoor shooting ranges; the article notes that, for instance: "Shooting outdoors cuts those waves in half. While the use of a suppressor cuts it by 70%." Large shooting glasses or goggles can also reduce pressure peaks, as well as hanging wool blankets (or tapestries?) inside the shoot house.
• An article from the CP Journal on examining the collective mood of people in a particular business or locale and using that to gauge safety.
• An article on "How to Overcome 'Condition One' Anxiety," or the anxiety that comes from carrying a weapon with a round chambered. I think the article sort of misses the point. The anxiety comes from either (i) the person carrying the weapon lacks confidence that the weapon will not go off of its own accord; or (ii) the person carrying the weapon lacks confidence that they won't do something stupid and accidentally discharge the weapon. Certainly training plays some role in overcoming this anxiety, and a good holster is always advisable, but mostly it comes from practice whether shooting the weapon, dry firing the weapon, or actually handling and carrying the weapon around. 
• A good article on astigmatism and using red dot sites. The author has some suggestions--one being as easy as focusing on the target and not the dot--but also acknowledges that a red dot simply won't work for some people, and so you may need to try something different like a prism sight.
• And, finally, "The Scourge of Teen Takeovers" from City Journal. Forget about the bleeding heart liberal slop about disadvantaged teens, food insecurity, and so on. It is the result of policy decisions by Democrats:

    Police officers, district attorneys, and sheriffs offer a different explanation for the teen takeovers: they are the consequence of a decades-long demonization of the criminal-justice system.

    Asked how the Chicago Police Department would have responded to a stampede on the Magnificent Mile before that demonization took hold, a recently retired officer with over 30 years on the force replied: “We would have cleared the streets, arrested those breaking windows, looting stores, and assaulting passersby. We would have used pepper spray, fists, and batons to restore order—all of which we did during the Bulls riots [in 1992], the Democratic National Convention in 1996, NATO, and other localized disturbances that didn’t make the news.”

    But then, he says, “the bottom fell out. Officers were cast as the enemy by eight years of Obama.” After the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, followed by those of Laquan McDonald in Chicago that same year and of Freddie Gray in Baltimore in 2015, “we were cleaning spit off our windshields on a daily basis. We were physically attacked more during those years than at any other point in our careers.” Officers feared being sued for lawful tactics that make for bad optics.

    The cops disengaged. “We drove by the dope sellers on the corner, asked no questions of the juveniles who were clearly up to no good, and ignored the cars running stop signs and weaving through traffic.” Better just to do your eight hours and go home.

    Another retired Chicago cop recalls asking his commanders in 2010 when mobs were storming downtown: Can we make arrests? He was told: just hold the line and move them around. Even were the officers to engage, the chance that the average detained teen would face serious consequences was already low.

    In the 1990s and early 2000s, officers had a protective attitude toward business; they took responsibility for the well-being of shopkeepers and their customers, says a Chicago sergeant still on the job. “It’s different now.”

    And then, on May 25, 2020, George Floyd died while restrained by a Minneapolis officer. The country’s elites proclaimed that systemic racism had killed Floyd. Politicians and business leaders rushed to explain the ensuing firebombing of police cars and stations, the attempted murder of police officers, and the destruction of businesses as an understandable, even justifiable, reaction to police oppression.

    The post-Floyd race-riot era is largely coterminous with the Covid era: lockdowns began in late March 2020, and the riots erupted at the end of May. That overlap has allowed policing skeptics to attribute the crime spike that began in 2020 to Covid rather than to de-policing and de-prosecution. Those same skeptics now apply the argument to teen takeovers as well.

    The rest of the world again provides a useful benchmark. Other countries did not experience a comparable surge in crime beginning in 2020, just as they did not experience a wave of teen takeovers. The United States experienced both because police and prosecutors shied away further from imposing consequences on antisocial behavior.

• Finally, check out John Wilder's recent piece: "Sam Colt Made Men Equal. A.I. Won’t Even Try." He notes that historically new developments in technology initially acted as equalizers, but eventually led to an accumulation of wealth and power in those best able to take advantage of the technology. One of his examples:

    Personal computers and the early internet followed suit.  A motivated individual could reach a global audience or start a business with almost nothing but time and ingenuity.

    Barriers collapsed.

    Then the platforms that captured attention and data became trillion-dollar businesses that could control commerce and shut off channels to those with controversial opinions.

    Technology does not care about fairness.

    It amplifies existing differences in talent, effort, discipline, and capital allocation.  It lowers some barriers and erects new ones built around mastery of the new tools themselves.

AI, he argues, will have the same results.

Weekend Reading #64

•  First up is an article by Greg Ellifritz entitled "What an Escaped Mental Patient Taught Me." It is a look back to a different time. It was the 1980s and Greg was in high school, working a part-time job at a K-Mart department store when an escaped mental patient showed up and started doing crazy things. Ellifritz and some of the other young men working there were tasked to try and keep the crazy contained until police arrived. Anyway, a look back to the 1980s and an important life lesson for Ellifritz that has nothing to do with combat or self-defense.
• And another from Greg Ellifritz--this week's Weekend Knowledge Dump.  Some of the links that caught my attention in particular:

• Massad Ayoob's discussion on whether to engage or stand-down, which looks as some cases involving the initial aggressor rule and when a threat ceases to be a threat.  
• Mark Luell shares some of his experiences teaching a self-defense class; and, if you go to the bottom of the article, a link to where you can download a copy of the course curriculum.
• Massad Ayood discusses lethal force against a mob. Most of the article is about the trials of the soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre, but with some thoughts about the BLM riots of 2021 (when the article was written) thrown in.  But the article should really be taken as a lesson in how the law has shifted in the past 250 years from one where a mob included everyone in the group to now where a "mostly peaceful" protest group is comprised of  "homicidal aggressors being sharks swimming in the protective sea of peaceful protesters" against whom you cannot use lethal force. It is this shift that allows the "homicidal aggressors" to hide behind a wall of "peaceful protestors" as they deal their violence, or suddenly rush out to mete out their violence. 
• Another historical piece that looks at women's concealed carry on the American frontier. 
• And another historical piece--"I use State of the Art Technology"--that looks at the history of night sights, weapon mounted lights, and lasers.
• Matthew Donovan writes about "mouse guns" and the defensive niche they fill. If you scoff at the idea of ever carrying such tiny handguns, you might not be familiar with the first rule of a gun fight, which is to have a gun.
• An article discussing the overall decline in quality of Smith & Wesson revolvers, but also noting that Ruger is also experiencing declining quality in its revolver lines. 
• And an interesting piece from Matt Larsen on how drone warfare is actually increasing the odds of having to resort to hand-to-hand combat as troops are driven into bunkers and trenches. 

• This article was actually part of Greg's Weekend Knowledge Dump, but I decided to give it a different treatment because it is not related to self-defense or firearms: "Mate Selection for Modernity" from Quillette.  This is an article about hypergamy (which I've discussed many times before in this blog as well as when I was doing podcasts with John Wilder) and how it has changed the modern dating marketplace. An excerpt:

Dating and the process of mate selection have changed. The rise of hook-up culture, proliferation of dating apps, and ever-increasing age of first marriage are evidence of this. This current situation can be summarized along four parameters:

1. Increasing female achievement.
2. Growing variability in male status and competence.
3. An evolutionary desire among females to marry up.
4. The globalization of the sexual marketplace and resultant collapse of local status hierarchies.

Together, these conditions have created pronounced imbalances in the modern sexual marketplace. Put plainly, an increasing cohort of successful women are chasing a shrinking number of high-value, commitment-averse men.

Hypergamy works well for women in a male-dominated society. But not so much now:

    Successful women face a shortage of demographically superior men to marry. Indeed, the nascent decline in marriage has been attributed to a putative shortage of economically attractive partners for unmarried women. Applying data imputation methods to national survey data, researchers found that unmarried women face an overall shortage of partners with either a bachelor’s degree or yearly income exceeding $40,000.

    This asymmetry in the sexual marketplace has been well documented in Jon Birger’s book Date-onomics as well as an article penned by myself and Rob Henderson.

    Premised on sex ratios, a surplus of women in education and economic groups caters to men’s desire for multiple partners. The relative rarity of men within these groups means that women, in competition with other females, are more likely to conform to the sexual strategy of males. In these environments, hookup culture is more prevalent. In contrast, environments in which men are numerous see more long-term relationships.

Of course, women are to be pitied for being shallow, where if men refused to date or marry because of a shortage of attractive women, it would be considered evidence of misogyny. And on the subject of dating and meeting people, Greg also linked to this article: "How To Read People: 5 Secrets Backed By Research." But I've known women who understood what this article teaches and were quite skilled on using their body language to manipulate men. 

• We are finally on the cusp of really entering the space age. Robert Zubrin had once written that we would not see significant space exploration and development until launch costs fell below $1,000/kg. In "Payloads used to dictate the terms of launch. That’s finally changing," Stephen Clark discusses the impact of SpaceX's Starship, with more than 100 metric tons cargo capacity, noting:

    A new report from the Aerospace Corporation helps elucidate why satellite companies are optimizing for Starship. It’s big and reusable, and once operational, it could cut the cost of launching a kilogram of payload into orbit by an order of magnitude from the Falcon 9. This means costs could come down from a few thousand dollars per kilogram to a few hundred.

    Karen Jones, a space economist and lead author of the paper, said her research supports some of those optimistic cost projections. She outlines three scenarios, two of which assume an initial launch cost of $100 million for each fully reusable Starship and Super Heavy booster, with marginal costs of 20 or 35 percent. This is in line with the marginal costs of the smaller, partially reusable Falcon 9, which SpaceX can launch for as little as $15 million per flight on a dedicated Starlink mission.

    This would bring the per-kilogram launch cost for a fully loaded Starship down to $133 to $233 after 10 reuse cycles. A more optimistic scenario with a $50 million initial launch cost and 20 percent marginal cost would reduce payload costs to $67 per kilogram for a Starship/Super Heavy launch at full capacity after nine use cycles. That’s less than it costs to fill the gas tanks of most SUVs. If SpaceX can make these more optimistic ambitions a reality, it would validate a claim made by Elon Musk in 2022 that a Starship flight could eventually cost as little as $10 million.  

The future is bright provided we can survive The Great Filter: liberal women, mass immigration, and socialism.  

• There may be a way to finally give satellites infinite "fuel" for their thrusters: "'Acceleration without fuel:' Revolutionary superconducting thruster harnesses Earth's magnetic field in 1st orbital test"--Space.com. The article explains: "Superconducting magnets can convert solar energy directly into momentum in space and provide a source of acceleration that needs no fuel, but until recently, the technology was too large and complex to fit on a satellite. That's no longer the case." 
• And last, but certainly not least: "Here We Stand"--Wilder Wealth & Wise.  The principles that made the West great. 

SpaceX Just Launched A Satellite Testing A Betavoltaic Power System

From Space.com: "SpaceX just launched the 1st-ever nuclear-powered commercial satellite." Per the article, the BOHR (Betavoltaic Orbital High-Reliability) satellite, built by Florida-based company City Labs, was launched on July 7, 2026. 

BOHR is a novel cubesat demonstration mission from City Labs, which is testing out its proprietary "NanoTritium" betavoltaic micropower source in space for the first time. Similar to how spacecraft like NASA's Voyager probes' radioisotope thermoelectric generators produce power from the heat emitted from their plutonium cores, City Lab's NanoTritium device harnesses the beta particles emitted from the radioactive decay of tritium, which can be converted directly to electricity using a semiconductor. 

A beta particle is a high-speed electron or positron emitted during the radioactive decay of an unstable atomic nucleus. Most of you are probably familiar with tritium because it is used to make night sights for handguns and other weapons. 

    This launch and satellite is just a test of whether the power generation system; but the satellite is not, itself, powered by the NanoTritium system but still relies on solar power. City Labs explains the betavoltaic system as follows:

    NanoTritium™ betavoltaics convert energy from tritium decay directly into electrical power. In a betavoltaic device, beta particles emitted by tritium interact with a semiconductor structure, generating electrical current.

    Unlike conventional batteries, which store a finite amount of chemical energy, betavoltaics continuously generate low-level power from the natural decay of tritium. This makes them well suited for systems that require reliable, long-duration operation without charging, replacement, or routine maintenance.

    City Labs develops custom NanoTritium™ betavoltaics to fit a broad range of form factor and output requirements. 

 If you are interested in reading more on the topic, here is the Wikipedia article on betavoltaics. 

Some Companies Facing AI Woes

Some interesting changes to the AI landscape. You may have noticed reports last week that Ford Motor Corporation was forced to rehire 300 engineers when it learned that they actually couldn't be replaced by AI. 

    "Mistakenly, we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and adjusting the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product," said Charles Poon, VP of vehicle hardware engineering, said in a press briefing, according to The Verge. 

    Additionally, Bloomberg reported Poon saying on a press call that artificial intelligence is a "fantastic tool," but only as good as the information you use to train it. 

    "Over prior years, we didn't pay as much attention as we should have to the experience of our most knowledgeable engineers that have been with us through many product cycles," Bloomberg reported him saying. "Mistakenly, we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that would produce a high quality product."      

Ford isn't the only company having second thoughts about AI. CNBC reports that "[o]ther companies that have walked back their hiring plans to focus more on human capital include Commonwealth Bank of Australia and software giant IBM."

    These examples echo views presented by analysts that making employees redundant while using more AI may not necessarily offer the best route to business growth.

    “Budgeting on ‘tech to replace humans’ without investing in training or upskilling left teams unprepared to leverage AI,” according to a report by Intuition Labs. “Notably, among companies pushing automation, many later ‘regretted’ layoffs, having cut the very people needed to oversee AI,” it added.

    According to a report by Orgvue, 39% of business leaders made employees redundant due to AI deployment. However, among that number, 55% admit wrong decisions about those redundancies were made.  

    And then there are the unforeseen costs for heavy use of AI. Forbes reports that "AI Costs More Than The People It Replaced." That article relates:

    Something odd is happening in the tech world right now: the technology that was supposed to make human labour obsolete is, at this moment, more expensive than the humans it was meant to replace. Companies are laying off workers to fund the very AI tools that cost more than the workers they just let go. The circular logic of it would be darkly comic if tens of thousands of livelihoods weren't caught in the middle.

    Uber’s CTO, recently disclosed that the company burned through its entire 2026 AI coding budget in four months. By March, 84 percent of Uber's engineers had adopted Claude Code, and roughly 70 percent of committed code now originates with AI. The usage was enormous. The corresponding value was murkier. Uber's COO and President, Andrew Macdonald, conceded publicly that token usage didn't seem to correlate directly with useful features shipped to users.

    Uber is not an outlier. Microsoft, which has invested approximately $13 billion in OpenAI and writes up to 30 percent of its own code with generative AI, instructed engineers in a major division to stop using an AI coding assistant because the bills became untenable. One unnamed company, per Axios, ran up a $500 million Claude bill in a single month after management forgot to set a usage cap. These are structural miscalculations about what intelligence costs when you purchase it by the syllable.

Your Introductory Offer Has Expired

Vox Day notes that now that developers and creatives are sufficiently accustomed to AI--i.e., are now dependent on it--the pricing has suddenly gone up.  

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.