Medal of Honor: Melvin Earl Biddle
At daybreak (24 December 1944) he again led the advance and, when flanking elements were pinned down by enemy fire, without hesitation made his way toward a hostile machine-gun position and from 50 yards killed the crew and two supporting riflemen. The remainder of the enemy, finding themselves without automatic-weapon support, fled panic-stricken. Pfc. Biddle's intrepid courage and superb daring during his 20-hour action enabled his battalion to break the enemy grasp on Hotton with a minimum of casualties.
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We’re able to pick locks because the world isn’t a perfect place. Every machining operation produces a product with small defects but still within specified tolerances. If you machine a hundred parts, no two are precisely the same, no holes identical in diameter, no line perfectly straight. Yes, the variations may be small, but they’re there and they’re cumulative when you assemble all the different parts into a lock. THAT accumulation of defects is the crack that we are trying to exploit. Our tools and senses allow us to detect the subtle differences between pins, cores, spring tension and feedback – all of which contain defects and remnants from the manufacturing process.
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When AI Thinks It Will Lose, It Sometimes Cheats, Study Finds
Complex games like chess and Go have long been used to test AI models’ capabilities. But while IBM’s Deep Blue defeated reigning world chess champion Garry Kasparov in the 1990s by playing by the rules, today’s advanced AI models like OpenAI’s o1-preview are less scrupulous. When sensing defeat in a match against a skilled chess bot, they don’t always concede, instead sometimes opting to cheat by hacking their opponent so that the bot automatically forfeits the game.
That is the finding of a new study from Palisade Research, which evaluated seven state-of-the-art AI models for their propensity to hack. While slightly older AI models like OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 3.5 needed to be prompted by researchers to attempt such tricks, o1-preview and DeepSeek R1 pursued the exploit on their own, indicating that AI systems may develop deceptive or manipulative strategies without explicit instruction.
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Stay On Your Feet! Remember, Ground Fighting is a Sport!
Never, ever, for whatever reason, intentionally go to ground in a self-defense situation. There may be some instances where you are called to subdue a single person until help arrives, and holding out in a grounded side control might be what's necessary. But for the most part, getting stuck on the ground is a bad idea. So what should we do? How should we prepare ourselves? In self-defense, if you happen to lose your feet, the rule of thumb is to do whatever it takes to immediately get back up.
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Outside the confines of the range, the enemy and the legal system both get a vote.
The point of this article is not to parse words or argue over terminology, but rather to clarify some concepts. There are some critically important, real-world things that have become significantly more difficult to both discuss and teach in recent years because of how the term “reactive” is being commonly used across the industry.
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There Are Monsters Among Us, and That’s Why I Carry
There are stories you read once and stick with you forever. Stories that knock the wind out of you and leave you staring at the wall, hands shaking a little, wondering how the world can be both beautiful and brutal in the same breath. It's stories like that answer the question of why I carry.
This story of a Tiffin, Ohio murder suicide. . .is one of those stories.
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You can't take anything back. Whatever you've done is done, so in a sense every action is a point of no return. You can never become the person you were before you took a specific action or before a certain event happened.
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Intuition is always right in at least two important ways;
-- It is always in response to something
-- it always has your best interest at heart
-Gavin De Becker.
I raise these two cases (out of countless others), not only to emphasize just how suspicious a completely non-hostile individual can seem, but because they also show you that no matter how knowledgeable and experienced you may be, you can’t always make an omelet without breaking any eggs. When you’ve only got a limited amount of information and time to operate under, and the stakes are high enough, you sometimes simply need to act now and apologize for it later.
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Police Warn Public of Surge in 'Jugging'
Authorities are warning that bank jugging is on the rise, with perpetrators lingering at banks, eavesdropping on conversations, and then targeting individuals who withdraw significant sums.
Jugging is a term used to describe a criminal activity in which individuals loiter around banks, ATMs, or other check-cashing establishments to observe customers who are withdrawing cash. These criminals patiently track their target and wait for the opportune moment to commit a theft or robbery. Individuals need to remain vigilant both during and after the cash withdrawal process, especially when transitioning to other locations, as this is when targets are most vulnerable to potential jugging incidents.
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In Closing: Merry Christmas
Little Drummer Boy?
"The Little Drummer Boy" shouldn't be the name of a song; it should be the title of this week's "Unsolved Mystery:"
One chilly night in December, Frank left home with his drum and traveled to a small town.
Once there, he played his drum — enthusiastically — for a young, first-time mother, who had been forced to give birth in a stable, after spending a week travelling by donkey.
We caught up with her husband, Joseph — "Joseph, Joseph! Sir, what do you know regarding the disappearance of young Frank?"
