Shouldn't That Be Considered Cannibalism?

Not our wiring, but illustrative of the problem. Mice (the four-legged rodent variety)
 start more house fires this way every year than arsonists do.

We finally replaced our long-serving wired mouse with one of the wireless models, albeit reluctantly. Partly because we appreciated that with a wired model, no one else could intercept (or simply interfere, even inadvertently) with our input, but mainly because we didn't have to feed it a new battery every year or two, and we're cheap like that.

Imagine our surprise at the short life of the previous finalized technology, when we discovered it had become wonky because back before we eradicated the little bastards, actual mice had chewed partially through the hard wire cable. (Reason #27 on why we hate the little vermin m*****f****rs with a passion rivalled only by cats.) Now you know why Groundskeeper Carl Spackler referred to their cousins accurately as the Varmint Cong.

But it strikes us that mice killing our mouse by eating it has to qualify as behavior reminiscent of the Donner Party.

It also warms our heart to have wiped them out to the last with glue traps and peanut butter bait, and then smashed their little heads with a wooden dowel while they squealed in helpless immobility. If we'd ever thought about it at the time, we'd have strangled one instead, and made a taxidermist mount for the wall.

Now that the cause of the problem has been eradicated locally, we'll probably go back and get a new wired mouse. Maybe we can relegate the superfluous wireless mouse to occasional use on the TV monitor.

Image FYI

FYI, image uploads across the 'net are FUBAR'ed. This isn't anyone's site/host problem, it's a Goolag/Interwebz problem.

Always remember, technology is great, until it's not.

And The Jetsons was a documentary.

Remember this when they tell you how wonderful it will be when everyone has self-driving cars.

But Srsly

 h/t Daily Timewaster

And I suppose they recruit pilots from the deserts of
BFE who used to bullseye womp rats in their T-16s, right?

CW posted this (he was kidding) as the "artists conception of the SR-81".

But srsly:

Look, we retired the SR-71s in 1999.

Some anonymous soopergenius opined that "satellites replaced the SR-71" and "high flyers aren't coming back".

Bitch, please.

Catch up on anything-but-current-events, from 30 years ago in fact:

(REALITY) The mysterious rumble and bounce has occurred five times since last June, always about 7 a.m. on Thursdays. These were no earthquakes, but a passing aircraft, Caltech seismologists say.

"All I can say is that it's something that's traveling through the atmosphere at several times the speed of sound in a generally northeasterly direction," said Jim Mori, a seismologist with the United States Geological Survey at Caltech.

Analysts from Jane's Defense Weekly, the widely respected London-based military periodical, say that the Thursday morning phenomenon could be a top secret new spy plane, dubbed the Aurora, that can fly up to six times the speed of sound, or about 4000 MPH.

The Air Force denies that any such plane exists.

Jim Mori, Ph.D., anything but dumb, is a SME on earthquakes and seismology. And California is paved with GPS-precise-to-millimeters seismographs wall-to-wall, which made collecting the data easy and meticulously precise. So when a string of "earthquakes" hit SoCal in 1991-1992, always before 7am, always on a Thursday, he plotted the rumbles on the SoCal seismograph network, and did some napkin math.

The minute-by-minute timelines formed an arrow-straight chevron moving at about 70 miles a minute south to north from the Pacific Ocean towards Area 51, and Tonopah AFB beyond that, and based on speed-over-ground, they were moving at 4000+ MPH. Mach 6.

Pre-7am, because this was a project in progress, and on Thursday, unlike Fridays, traffic was lighter, so less people up and about. Project engineers and such tend to be M-F guys. And earthquakes don't punch time clocks.

Ergo, something moving in the air, not in the ground, at Mach 6, and coming in for a landing at one of the two most secured and remote AFBs we have.

Since then, other evidence has piled up:

Black delta-wing unidentified aircraft, frequently seen in high-altitude formation with USAF birds like KC-17s and F-15s, etc., over the USA and Europe. Frequently with contrails suggestive of a pulse-jet, and making an unfamiliar and distinctive sound.

I remind all and sundry that it was years between the SR-71s first operational flights for recon after the U-2s vulnerability was exposed to the world in 1960, and the time the USAF actually admitted to owning and flying the -71.

To date, AFAIK, they've still never copped to the existence of the Aurora, let alone revealed nomenclature, official photos, performance specs, or anything like, in 30 years.

But you think they gave up a world-beating recon and intel asset like the SR-71 (it was still setting speed records the day they retired it), in exchange for nothing? Or satellites? Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight. Sure they did. NOT.

Now, see if you can figure out why China and Russia have spent the last 30 years busting their scientific asses to develop hypersonic missile tech, at a huge cost in effort and treasure.

Hint: It ain't to shoot down recon satellites, kids.

(Sidenote: If the Air Farce had someone really bright somewhere, their most top secret:codeword-level unit would be a couple of science fantasists, and a small crew of welders and carpenters, and their sole job 24/7/365 would be to create whimsical plywood and sheet metal fake aircraft, especially designs that failed spectacularly, and plant them at a few testing airbases, and leave them out for satellite recon and GoogleEarth to find. I'd also have them take a couple of cutting edge planes and paint false black silhouettes on the undersides, and change the shape using light blue over wingtips and such, maybe a couple of smoke generators on underwing mounts to fake additional engines, just to give amateur airplaneologists something misleading to photograph. For that matter, they'd create fake ICBM silos scattered on military bombing ranges, and leave a few SSBNs fake hulls moored at several Navy docksides too, with full guards and foot traffic. Just saying.)

On a tip from a reader - Morons will be morons: The Great Canadian Dronemaster Windbag gets it wrong again. Space starts at the Kármán Line, where the atmosphere ceases to exist, which is 100km (330,000') up, some 230,000' feet higher than reconnaissance aircraft reportedly fly, i.e. nearly 2½ times higher than anything with wings goes since the X-15 stopped going there. This boundary was established in the 1960s, and recon planes don't fly there, because by definition, no one flies where there's no atmosphere within which aircraft (which cleverly has "air" in the description) control surfaces would work. People who fly to space get astronaut wings. People who fly recon flights have ordinary pilots' wings. And they carry their balls in their helmet bags, because they need something that big to hold them. Stick with being massively ignorant about drones, Gasbag. Being ignorant about everything you touch only takes you from sad to utterly pathetic. But thanks for playing, and enjoy the extra looks.

Relax

h/t WRSA

Don't worry.
Unlike every invention in human history since rocks and pointed sticks, small hobbyist-level drones will not be weaponized.

No one will ever use the fliegenden flammenwerfer to start brush fires, set oil terminals or LNG facilities on fire, or burn down the houses of opposition leaders at night when they're sleeping in them, let alone use them at protests either for or against the government.

Never, ever, ever.

And no one will ever make one and use it on, say, homeless mega-encampments.
Or from merchant ships, against Somali pirate motherships.
Or on groups of illegal aliens crossing the border.
Or on gang bangers selling crack on the corner.
Because that would be double-plus ungood.

The "experts" have proclaimed this as unpossible.

Sleep tight, America.





Personally, I want two dozen of them.
For...contingencies.

Napalm for the common man.
That's the Second Amendment, chickadees.

Picture a few of these zooming down on the redcoats at Concord Bridge, or the BATFE cattle car at Waco, and tell me I'm mistaken.

Fundamentals, Not Magic



Drones: Still not wizard combat. Ever.

From comments to yesterday's post:

"Drones and AI can and most likely will be the deciding factor in the next WW. To ignore this fact puts us in the same position Poland was in when they met the advancing Nazi tanks while on horseback. I do think it would be easy to misunderstand drones and assume that they are super expensive and super susceptible to enemy fire and that is why they will fail and be useless in battle. Yes there are some drones like that. Now imagine a cheap tiny drone that can do only one thing and that is to search out and kill a single enemy soldier. Then imagine that China or Russia sends millions of these into battle. Or a small single purpose drone that simply hunts down and explodes ships, any ship it finds. And that the drone is used all over the world on day one minute one of WW 3 while the Russian or Chinese ships are all in port. Apply that same logic to drones designed to take down aircraft or land vehicles etc. In reality the problem of accurately understanding the possibilities drones bring to battle are only limited by your imagination and if you lack imagination you will correspondingly lack understanding of the potential threat." - Anonymous commenter 

Drones can be handy things. But at best, they are but a tool, not a magic wand.
This is why the military wants people in charge who can do mathematics in their head.
Not wizards and necromancers.

Drones work well when used against a disparate and unexpecting opposition. Against soft targets. Vulnerable and unsophisticated enemies. I've written at length about how much damage you can do to civilian targets with COTS drones, and year over year, the reality of that is proving the truth of the statements.

But most of our experience, or anyone else's, with drones, is against 19th (or 6th) century opponents, with no tech to speak of, and battle tactics from no more recently than 1900.

Peer-to-peer, not so much.

A drone that kills "any ship it finds" will wipe out your own fleet too. Even in port. Russia and China are totally dependent on imports and exports, whereas the U.S. is food and energy self-sufficient, and most of our trade goes on north and south, not east and west. Well-played.

You can use drones to assist in prosecuting the battle.
If you use more brains than most defense contractors have, and if they're built for the job right.
So that's two strikes of if against you before you start.

Try to remember that the best fiction is truer than most tech news stories.

Drones are not the Jedi Clone Army, nor ever will be in 10 lifetimes.
We're currently on the fifth or sixth generation of "fire-and-forget" weapons that still really aren't.
No one trusts them enough to depend on them as such, and when they try, they fail spectacularly. And that's before we have the Skynet discussion.

If a land droid was armed well enough to venture out on its own, it'd be a tank. Which you kill with AT weapons and defenses, or another tank. All of which have been around since 1917.

Putting a virtually unarmored machine out front with an MG and sensors just makes it, the weapons system, the data link, and the operator four points of failure. Add in the ordnance, parts, and fuel logistics, and you have three more points. Attacking all of them destroys that advantage; and at that point, if you don't have 5:1 or better advantage in the conventional attack, you're going to be eaten for lunch. Not metaphorically.

Intelligence from sky drones can be thwarted, spoofed, fooled, and avoided.
Keeping the enemy blind and confused while you execute your objectives is what war has been about since Sun Tzu. Drones can complicate that, but they also complicate the intelligence analysis problem for the other side. The only thing worse than too little intelligence is too much; ask the German Army how Patton's amphibious assault at the Pas De Calais worked out for them in 1944.

Drones alone or in concert will decide nothing.
What wins battles and wars is executing the fundamentals flawlessly.
Surprise, mass, economy of force, unity of command, secure interior lines, etc.

Cut off logistics, and disrupt command and communications, and you turn your enemy into Saddam and the Iraqi Army in 1991 and 2003.

Try to rule a hostile population through dependence on military power, and you end up like the U.S. Army in 1965-1973 and 2004-2019. (The dot-mil are slow learners, but not that slow; which is why I posit they'll either switch sides, or sit an internal conflict out ab initio, and wait to see who wins. If they don't do either, they'll cease to exist in about a month, and die on the vine from a death of ten thousand cuts.)

Try to rule a hostile well-armed civilian population, and you end up like the U.S. Army at the Little Big Horn in 1876.

I don't know about you, but if I ever have to grab a rifle and leave the house to take care of business, my death song has already been sung, and I'm not so worried about getting home to a wife and kids, and I'm going to make sure they don't get to do that either.

No quarter will be asked nor given, and there will be zero POW camps (or at least, not for very long) in the coming unpleasantness. It's going to become an unaffordable luxury.

Maybe folks will even be starting by taking out their opponents' homes and everything they take for granted first, to give them something else to think about before they suit up for work that morning.

80-90% of both sides in any war don't want to be there.
What's left is who gets it done.
And our 10% outnumbers their 10% about 100:1, and outguns them 24/7/365/ever.

Drone that.



Anonymous: Take off the hat, and lay off the egg nog.

 




Bonus comedy: If you've never seen someone get his foot stuck in a running wood chipper, then reach in with both hands to try and pull himself out, then fall head first into it, read the comments to this post, below, presumably by the same original Anonymous commenter. It's like playing poker with your sister's kids, combined with clubbing baby Harp seals.

 

 

There's Always Someone Who Never Gets The Word

"Those six thousand ships you say they haven't got?"

"WELL,THEY'VE GOT THEM!!!"

Whether it's invasion fleets and Werner Pluskat's commander at Normandy, giant sharks and small-town mayors, or weaponized drones and drone experts, there's always somebody who'll tell you it can't happen.

More than a year ago, here and over at Peter's Bayou Renaissance Man blog, I and numerous other posters pointed out that drones were going to be successfully weaponized, and kick the ass of soft targets.

A self-proclaimed subject matter expert, who for decorum I shall not point at directly (you can figure it out yourself without too much effort) explained we had to be wrong, because using drones to attack, in my example from TWO years ago, oil refineries (among other targets) with explosives or incendiaries couldn't happen, ever, because they couldn't lift enough to ever get the job done.

It was simply UNPOSSIBLE!

Sh'yeah.
And the Titanic was UNSINKABLE.

Mea culpa. Weaponizing drones is unpossible.

Oops.
Looks like somebody forgot to tell the Yemeni rebels that this could never work.

 

But let's give the expert his due: they didn't stick with piddly little hobby drones with 1lb payloads. Hell no.

These guys have money.

The built big, long-range drones. Launched perhaps from 900+ miles away.

Y'know, like people with huge backing will do.

This time.

 

I would feign humility at being so right, if it didn't happen so frequently.

This isn't an accident, or blind guesswork.  And nobody is right 100% of the time, including me. But this was Eddie Murphy-at-a-Klan-rally obviously going to happen.

I look at things, draw rational conclusions, and extrapolate data in what appears to me to be a reasonable direction and distance.

And I called this sort of thing in 2017. So did Peter. So did others.

Hell, Tom Clancy called a terrorist using a jetliner as a missile in 1994, seven years before 9/11, and he was just a well-read insurance agent with an active imagination.

But it was the guy who was sure it couldn't possibly ever happen because of his own expertise on drones that missed this by a country mile, 180° in the wrong direction.

 

Now cue the next round of "See? I told you no one could do anything with COTS drones from Best Buy!" Which will be true, until it isn't. Because not everyone who wants to bomb a refinery (or something bloodier) has the backing of Iran, and millions of dollars of assets to fund it. So when someone drops a soda can thermite bomb over the LNG terminal at San Pedro/Long Beach, and it looks like a nuclear mushroom cloud going off, remind yourself it's still unpossible.

 

Because who'd want to do that?

Oh, I mean, besides the jihadi on a tight budget.

 

Dear Mayor Vaughan,

 

Consider your ass bitten.

 

FROM TWO F****** YEARS AGO, GENIUS!
NOW can we close the goddam beaches and holler "Shark!"?
Or was this just a figment of our over-active imagination too???

Technology doesn't have a side.
It merely has applications.

Of Course, This Will NEVER Be Misused

h/t Bayou Renaissance Man

For what it is, it's great.

The key component is the GPS.

Getting back to the perpetual drone-bomb topic, how long before low-tech non-country players use this method to air-deliver 1-ton bomb loads right onto a target?

Unless you've pre-degraded GPS (which we almost never do, because of civil aviation), your first clue will be when Mohammed FedEx's you a 2000-pound nitrocellulose enema.

This thing is nothing but a cardboard box with wings and a simple brain.

Of course, no one will ever do that with something you could drop from a Cessna 15 miles away.

Let alone from airliners 40 miles away at 25k'.

As if.

And if you think one-ton blivets of drugs from the cartels that can be pinpoint-dropped to a waiting van far from the border aren't going to start being a thing, just like semi-submersible coke ships are, I've got a bridge for sale, cheap.

You'll also see them dropping resupply to groups way out in the Middle Of Nowhere, to facilitate human smuggling. You read it here first. (The solution to that is to build the frickin' wall, so they can't get here in group quantities.)

This is going to make air defense and interdiction quite a thing, going forward, at every level.

What goes around, comes around.

Technology doesn't have a side. It merely has applications.

Technology "Killing" Jobs? NEVER.

h/t SiG

SiG had a post.
He noted some folks might think technology and "robots" would cut into jobs.
But he himself was skeptical.
Let me drive an oaken stake through that idea, and then nuke it from orbit, just to be safe.

Yeah, not so much.

1) That's not a "robot", it's simply a machine that can do 1 or 3 human-y things whilst being flung through the air. You've basically given the stunt doubles their own stunt doubles.

2) Some reality from 20+ years behind the camera:
A 20-40 person team of construction grips built the contraptions for that set up, over several days. Possibly even several different teams.
Another 5-10 are standing by for the actual shot.
4-5 electricians lighted it.
Another 6-10 SFX personnel operated the mechanical stunt dummy (not "robot").
It took 10 more to build it. And probably for months, and probably the 4-10 other ones, for when that one gets broken, fails, or just shits the bed. (Read the behind-the-scenes on Jaws and the "revolutionary" mechanical shark sometime.)
You had a crane operator pulling down $100/hr. Maybe 2-3.
Throw in security guards, 3-6, 24/7, just to watch the site.
2-5 person camera crew per camera filming that.
(And 1-4 cameras, including maybe even a remote GoPro type inside the maquette's head.)
Director.
Assistant director.
A couple of production assistants.
A medic for that off-site crew.
Wardrobe person and assistant, as needed, if you put so much as a hat or shoes on it.
5-20 additional personnel for miscellany I'm not even thinking of.
10-500 CG, editing, etc. persons for post-production.
Accounting, payroll, Teamster drivers, craft service, etc. etc. etc.
And the 50-200 employees at the companies that rented the production everything from soup to nuts to bolts to every last damned thing you saw in every shot, forever, plus the people that originally built it.

And the people at the supermarkets, stores, gas stations, restaurants, and landlords where those people spend their paychecks every week.

{Bonus: See if you can guess why I get pissy as hell when mega-jackhole fucktard state governments (Ahnuld, Moonbeam, and the entire CA state legislature et al, call your offices) let motion picture and television productions slip away to BFEgypt, or force them to because of taxes, because they can't figure out that the entertainment business is a trillion dollar industry in America, and a virtual license to print money here, forever. Which is a rant for another time.}

In short, your animatronic dummy, for a single 5 second shot, employed over 100 people for weeks to months, and possibly five times that many, some for half a year.

Yeah, "robots" are taking over Hollywood jobs.
NOT.
(So, ask yourself, did the robot shark in Jaws create less jobs at Universal from 1976-present, or more...? I'll wait.)

I spent most of a week, with a 50-person crew doing CGI for Matrix II and III, just to get reference film for CGI use, with 40+ of us at 35,000', doing zero-G Vomit Comet dives, two hops a day, just for background stunts. It included Keanu Reeve's stunt double (his spitting image, BTW, a total professional and one helluva nice guy all around, and the current director of John Wick and John Wick II, along with about a dozen Mandarin-speaking stunt guys who'd just done Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon , so that we could do Neo vs. Kung Fu fight action shots in zero-frickin-gravity for the sequels). So we sent the stunt guy employment numbers literally to 35K', before production even officially started, on those movies alone. You're welcome. Oh, and $420M gross returns, so I think the FX budget paid for itself.

Absolute most fun I ever had at work in Hollywood, and they paid us to do astronaut training NASA used to spend millions of dollars to conduct. (Our entire air crew were former NASA Vomit Comet pilots and flight crew.) And that gig didn't exist in Hollywood from 1900-1998 or so.

And the company that was starting from scratch that week? The one that only existed because Fat Bill was downsizing NASA? They seem to be doing pretty damned well too, and now have multiple aircraft and employ another bunch of people, nearly twenty years later. I was supposed to go on their next L.A.-area flight after the movie work. On 9/15/2001. 9/11 kind of put a crimp in that plan, dammit. (Ray: I'll still fly with you guys anytime, anywhere.) They're now getting $5K a head for a single hop, retail, in a business that didn't exist before they started it.

(Two tips if you ever go up with them (and if you can, you should) straight from me, and the Medical Director of NASA at the time:
1) Dramamine pre-flight. Period.
2) Don't turn your head in the transition from gravity to zero-G, or you'll be puking for days.
Do not question this expertise. You'll pay for it.)

Robotic stunt dummies?

You just tripled production costs, and employed another 100 people, on any movie they're used on, forever.

Please, invent MORE; IATSE and SAG will cream their pants and buy you steak & lobster dinners, forever. And the stunt guys will soak up the easy gigs, and they'll save the spendy machines for the stupid-dangerous dumbshit for productions with more money than brains. So no more jumping off 500' dams, or dangling from cables to get into blown-open 747 cockpits. Boo frickin' hoo.

Back in the day, the pocket-protector dorks promised that "computers would reduce paper records" too.

I doodled and drew for 18 years of growing up on just the reams of discarded paper that they "reduced" for my mom's accounting position with a Fortune 50 company. (This was back before there was an entire industry to store, shred, and recycle it, that didn't exist in 1970 in any way whatsoever.)
And the reduction in a handful of accounting staff was offset by the addition of hundreds to eventually hundreds of thousands of what we now refer to as "IT staff", from programmers to sysops, times infinity.

Job reduction?
Well-played.

Telling me tech is going to reduce jobs is like telling me lawyers will reduce lawsuits.

Stop, you're killing me, and my sides hurt.

King Of Battle

h/t 90 Miles From Tyranny

Army redlegs on M777 Ultralight howitzer practice Darwinian selection on notional
enemy.  Now with twice the rangey goodness as original recipe 155mm.

Dear Redlegs: "Fire mission!"

The Army has successfully fired a 155mm artillery round 62 kilometers - marking a technical breakthrough in the realm of land-based weapons and progressing toward its stated goal of being able to outrange and outgun Russian and Chinese weapons. “We just doubled the range of our artillery at Yuma Proving Ground,” Gen. John Murray, Commanding General of Army Futures Command, told reporters at the Association of the United States Army Annual Symposium.
This concept of operations is intended to enable mechanized attack forces and advancing infantry with an additional stand-off range or protective sphere with which to conduct operations. Longer range precision fire can hit enemy troop concentrations, supply lines and equipment essential to a coordinated attack, while allowing forces to stay farther back from incoming enemy fire.
A 70-kilometer target range is, by any estimation, a substantial leap forward for artillery; when GPS guided precision 155mm artillery rounds, such as Excalibur, burst into land combat about ten years ago - its strike range was reported at roughly 30 kilometers. A self-propelled Howitzer able to hit 70-kilometers puts the weapon on par with some of the Army’s advanced land-based rockets - such as its precision-enabled Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System which also reaches 70-kilometers.

For Common Core grads, 30km is 18 miles. 62km would be 37 miles.
The source notes the newest Russian systems tap out at 40 klicks, so the new setup bones everyone downrange, except us. They also note the use of drones as OTH FO enablers, exactly as was practiced going back to the early 1980s, including by the big guns on the refloated Iowa-class BBs. (That's right, sports fans, we were killing people with drones back to the Reagan era. We just started that out with the Navy's 16" guns providing the punch.)

Being able to accurately shell the shit out of enemy targets from 37 miles away is a game changer. (Presumably, someone may have a chat with Navy Surface Warfare about this development as well, once they get the Obozo-era idiots, civilian and commissioned, out of the warship design department, and go back to fielding surface warships, instead of fielding Floating Diversity Training Classrooms.)

Artillery never gets tired, can fly in all weather, can't be shot down, and can eliminate everything involved in an airstrike, airframe, pilot, etc., except the actual ordnance delivered. One howitzer can deliver as much hate on target as a WWII B17 did, in about 3 minutes.
A six-gun battery outperforms a B-2 strike as far as tonnage delivered (not range) in about  half an hour. And at a cost savings of a couple of billion dollars. Just saying.

Air strikes are great for deep interdiction. But they pale to artillery for all-weather around-the-clock reliability and volume, unless you're willing to stand up the entire SAC boneyard of B-52s and bring SAC back online.

And that means you won't have some ill-conceived Medal of honor factory Outpost at the bottom of Death Valley in some Turd World Trashcanistan being told on the radio "Sorry, you're outside the range fan of friendly fires, lump it, and good luck with staying alive in Fort Apache."

And yes, fellow ground warriors, infantry will always be the Queen of Battle.

And we know what the King does to the Queen.
This is why you want us on your side.

"Artillery lends dignity to what would otherwise be a vulgar brawl." - Lt. Graham, Major Dundee

 And with no apologies to George Carlin, consider the howitzer:
"I really want to f**k up those guys over there, 37 miles away, but I just can't quite get to them from here..."

Problem: Solved.

These Aren't The Drones You're Wishing For...

h/t Bayou Renaissance Man and CDR Salamander

We've talked about drone attacks before hereabouts.
Did we ever.
So have a lot of others.

Capabilities have mushroomed, and prices drop. This is how tech goes from evolutionary to revolutionary. For all values of that last word.

The day of the drone assassin has arrived.

In November of 2017, The Daily Beast broke the story of the first illegally weaponized drone found in Mexico. It was a relatively primitive version that sported a homemade shrapnel bomb and was found in the back of a vehicle belonging to the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), in the state of Guanajuato.

Then, about a month ago, evidence surfaced that CJNG had already advanced their drone designs considerably.

On July 10, the house of a Mexican public safety officer was targeted in a drone attack in Tecate, Baja California—a border city in the larger Tijuana-San Diego municipality that falls within CJNG’s established territory.

According to a new report co-authored by Dr. Robert Bunker, of the U.S. Army War College, the Tecate drone managed to drop its payload ISIS-style on the officer’s residence. Although the attack was apparently meant as a warning—since the grenades still had their safety pins intact—it also showed a clear step up in cartel-drone enhancement, including a second unmanned aircraft that conducted reconnaissance on site.

“Of the two drones, the Tecate one has far better lethality than the one in Guanajuato—we are comparing military grade grenades versus an IED,” Bunker told The Daily Beast.

“This is still an evolving global threat,” Bunker said. “The next firebreak, now that earlier ones have recently been broken in Mexico and Venezuela... would be weaponized drone incidents taking place in either Western Europe or in the United States. You can’t get much closer to the U.S. than Tecate, Mexico for an incident like this.”

There's still the occasional Baghdad Bob "expert" certain that this isn't happening (even as events and people who study this for a living tell them it already has), but some people go through life as Mayor Vaughn in Amity, denying reality while townfolk keep washing up in pieces on the beach.

Nobody's telling you to panic, or try knee-jerk bans. That horse left the barn decades ago.

FFS, my former artillery platoon commander transferred to the 1st RPV Platoon (Provisional) in 1985, over thirty years ago, when military drones were off-the-shelf homebuilts, and Israel had cobbled the tech together (along with the IAF) to wipe out every SAM site in the Bekaa Valley two years before that, with no friendly losses. In both cases, they recruited guys with civilian RC experience, and stood up units that relied on ancient engines and Styrofoam to build militarily significant machines with technology three generations earlier than what kids can have Amazon ship to their doorstep now.

Twenty years ago, we were using camera-armed drones to fly film shots that blended seamlessly with ground shots to fly a camera perspective down from 5000' to right in a window of a given house and down the hall.

If you can do that with a motion picture camera, it's obvious to anyone with two brain cells and stray voltage that you can do the same thing with a few pounds of high explosive.

And as usual, the profit motive (in this case drug money) and paramilitary desires for the perfect bomb have crossed the streams, and they're only getting better at it every day.
The progress from the drones seized in November, and the attack in July with a better version, was 9 months. Think where they'll be 9 months from now.

The question isn't whether it's going to happen, it's what's going to be done about it.
Airplanes started WWI with guys on opposite sides waving at each other, until one day some took along a pistol, then a rifle, then someone figured out how to rig a machinegun to fire through the propellers, and in under two years, shooting each other down went from ancillary effort to the entire point of the exercise. And in only thirty years (and two helpful world wars), that technology progressed from stick and fabric kites, to supersonic.

We're humans; this is what we do.

Making objects into tools, and tools into weapons is in our DNA.
Ask Abel.

They're Starting To Catch On

h/t Kenny at Knuckledraggin' My Life Away

The above was presented as a gag post for his friend with the fascination with breasts, but the existence of this machine underlines an important point: the Usual F**kwits over at A.H.A. finally stumbled upon a good idea:

If you make something like this into a video game, you can teach people without them catching on that they're learning.

They also just made 95% of basic CPR instructors at AHA obsolete.
McDonald's burger flippers, take note.
They can now put any number of these in their offices, and offer training one at a time, to anyone who wants it, anytime they're open for business.

Swipe a card, have a vending machine next to this drop a shrink-wrapped textbook, pass the skills on the video trainer, and your card pops out the bottom slot.
So much for killing half to a full day for a skill that can be mastered in 20 minutes, for the most part, by anyone in middle school or older.

Put half a dozen of these in a trailer, and you can take the class to businesses and schools, like they should, and run through dozens to hundreds of people in a given day, with zero instructors, just someone to drive and park the trailer.

Or hit two-four smaller locations in a day. Or put just one or two in a cube van, and make housecalls for onesie-twosie instant classes.

Kudos, guys, really. Someone pulled their head out and yanked out a plum.

The sad part: this level of tech was available by the late 1980s, so they're now only 30 years behind the curve.

Hint: technology is a thing, and it's catching on.
In case some people thought fire and the wheel were just fads.

A Picture Worth A Thousand Words

h/t Silicon Graybeard

Great space tech post at SiG's site. RTWT.

That graph is the picture.
Here's the thousand words.

Space-X, in six years, has CRUSHED everyone else, pushing China, Japan, and most of everyone else but a small Russian ability, and the ESA, completely out of the orbital launch market.

Like to nearly the "Game Over" stage, for all commercial intents.

I did not realize that until I saw the graph.
(This, folks, is why we read other people, because it makes us smarter. I mention that in case you only had a Common Core education.)

And the only reason they haven't done the same for manned launches is because NASA won't certify their vehicles for manned launches. IOW, NASA is subsidizing the Russian monopoly on manned launches in preference to home-grown absolute capabilities. This would be like the FAA telling Delta they could only fly cargo. (And whoever that sumbitch responsible is at NASA, he needs firing. If he's civil service, I'm sure he can be de-rated down to janitorial staff at that Australian space monitoring station, for life. More on Oz in a moment.)

What NASA is doing is the worst aspect of Democrat-pushed crony capitalism.
What Space-X is doing is how monopolies monopolize constrained only by the invisible hand of the free market, and why monopolies per se aren't necessarily a bad thing.
The same thing happened with railroads, and over time, they not only consolidated, but also lowered the cost of transporting goods and people from Point A to Point B, which benefitted everybody.

Not least of which, people named Vanderbilt, Carnegie, et al.

People (rightfully) give Elon Musk a lot of $#!^ for sucking off the government's teat when it comes to the Tesla, which he makes at a loss every time he sells one, and wouldn't exist at all without massive government subsidies. (Thanks Pres. Obozo: You built that!)

If Musk would leave the cars alone, and focus entirely on the rocket business, and the NASAtards would GTFO of his way, we'd be colonizing Mars and the Moon before I die, and turning a profit at it.

I noted a few days ago that we put men on the moon in less than a decade after Pres. Kennedy said we would. And we did it with transistor technology, before microchips. So in light of that, I don't think asking for a paying moon colony by 2050 is too much to ask.

Even if it's only to provide a penal colony, and a place to repatriate the Moonbats back to their native land when they reach Peak Stupid, and can't help themselves but transgress.

Don't laugh; look what the British Empire did with their reprobates.
Oz hasn't turned out too badly, now has it?

It may even turn out that by 2200 or so, when we launch NCC-1701, that Khan was actually the great-great-great-great grandson of the current mayor of London.
Wouldn't that be a hoot!

Khaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan!!!

Odds are 2000:1 in favor that we can successfully clone Shatner by then, and the circle will be complete.