Author: openjargon

• "House of the Dragon" introduced Ulf, a common man who claims to be a Targaryen bastard.
• His claim may have merit — in "Fire and Blood," he proves to be a pivotal character.
• Here's who Ulf is in "Fire and Blood," and what happens to him in the book. 

Warning: Spoilers ahead for "House of the Dragon" season two, episode three, and the book "Fire and Blood."

This week's episode of "House of the Dragon" took a brief detour into the seedier parts of King's Landing — and in the process, it introduced us to yet another character who will likely serve a pivotal role later in the series.

Season two, episode three, titled "The Burning Mill," briefly spotlighted a cheery bar patron, Ulf. After working the room a bit, Ulf settles down at a table and almost immediately claims to a stranger he's a Targaryen descendant.

While it'd be easy to dismiss Ulf's claim as drunken hearsay, there's probably some merit to it. We're probably going to be seeing a lot more of Ulf in "House of the Dragon," depending on how closely it follows "Fire and Blood," George R.R. Martin's history of Westeros.

If you're not keen on spoilers for "Fire or Blood," or the potential future of "House of the Dragon," best not to read ahead.

Ulf claims to be the son of Baelon the Brave, and thereby a descendant of King Jaehaerys

At the tavern, Ulf meets a Dornish man and remarks that Dorne was one part of Westeros that his house never conquered. When pressed, he plays coy, and then lets slip that King Jaehaerys was his grandsire. His father, he says, was Baelon the Brave, making Ulf the illegitimate brother of Daemon Targaryen and King Viserys.

Ulf also refers to Rhaenyra — his niece, if his claims are to be believed — as the "one true queen," a dangerous move in the Aegon II-controlled King's Landing.

"The blood of the dragon runs through these veins, and yes, men would take my head for it," Ulf says. "A Dragonseed must watch his own neck when he has no white-cloaked guardsmen to do it for him."

Ulf eventually shuts up after saying that his "nephew," Prince Jacaerys Velaryon, is the rightful heir to the Iron Throne. Coincidentally, that's the moment that Aegon II walks in with his entourage — and Ulf is quick to call out an "All hail the King!"

Ulf becomes a dragon rider in 'Fire and Blood'

In "Fire and Blood," Prince Jacaerys issues a challenge in a bid to make use of the unclaimed dragons during the war: Any man able to successfully mount a dragon without a master would be richly rewarded. Some of those men were "seeds" — bastards who had Targaryen blood in their veins.

Ulf successfully bonded with Silverwing, the former mount of Queen Alysanne, the sister and wife of King Jaehaerys. During that time, he was referred to as "Ulf the White" or "Ulf the Sot," referencing his white hair and drinking habit. Eventually, he came to be known as Ulf White.

Ulf fought alongside other dragon riders like Hugh Hammer in the Battle of the Gullet, a pivotal sea battle during the war. "Fire and Blood," citing the historical record left by the dwarf Mushroom, recounts that both Hugh and Ulf celebrated after the violent battle, with Ulf declaring that they should become lords.

Ulf and Hugh were several times denied entry into nobility. Rhaenyra shut down a potential marriage between Ulf and the daughter of Lord Stokeworth, after killing the lord for betraying her. She also denied Daemon's proposal of granting Storm's End, the seat of House Baratheon, to Ulf, after the Baratheons sided with Aegon II during the war.

In the book, Ulf and Hugh betrayed Rhaenyra

During the war, Ulf, Hugh, and their dragons Silverwing and Vermithor, were sent to the town of Tumbleton to defend it from Lord Ormund Hightower, who was advancing toward King's Landing. During the battle, however, the two defected and attacked the town instead.

According to Mushroom's historical account in "Fire and Blood," Ulf descended into hedonism, raping multiple women in Tumbleton each night and constantly drinking. Though Prince Daeron, Alicent and King Viserys' youngest son, had named him the Lord of Bitterbridge, he coveted Highgarden, the seat of House Tyrell. He and Hugh refused to advance on King's Landing until they were rewarded sufficiently, and the lords under Prince Daeron conspired to kill them.

But the fight came to Tumbleton when Addam Velaryon (previously Addam of Hull), another dragon rider, attacked the city on his dragon Seasmoke. Ulf was drunk and asleep during the battle, during which Hugh, Daeron, and Addam all died. When he awoke, he agreed to march on King's Landing, and said that he should be instilled on the throne after they conquered it.

Shortly after, Hobert Hightower killed Ulf — and in the process, himself — through a poisoned cask of wine.

"House of the Dragon" season two airs Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on HBO and is streaming on Max.

• Russian forces reportedly used a deadly 3.3-ton glide bomb for the first time earlier this month.
• Video footage appeared to show the FAB-3000 M-54 destroying Ukrainian targets in Kharkiv.
• The new massive bomb's destructive capability and range make it a dangerous threat to Ukraine.

The Russian Aerospace Forces are using a new munition in Ukraine that might change the situation on the ground.

In June, Russian aircraft deployed for the first time the FAB-3000 M-54 glide bomb. Weighing thousands of pounds, the munition can prove quite destructive for Ukrainian military and civilian targets. Ukrainian outlets reported the use of the glide bomb against Ukrainian troop concentration points in Kharkiv Oblast in eastern Ukraine.

Although the bombing itself appears to have been inaccurate, the FAB-3000 M-54's destructive capability is such that even munitions that do not hit their specific targets can be deadly because of their greater destruction radius. The fact that this is a glide bomb and it can be released outside the range of Ukrainian air defenses makes the munition even more dangerous.

"Russian forces used the new FAB-3000 M-54 bomb with a unified planning and correction module (UMPC) to strike Ukrainian positions in Kharkiv Oblast for the first time, representing a new Russian capability with a high potential for destruction if Russian forces continue to be able to use such weapons uninhibited," the Institute for the Study of War assessed in a recent operational update on the war.

Ukrainian Air Force officials, however, noted that they couldn't provide a final estimate on the exact type of munition used by the Russian Aerospace Forces.

The FAB-3000 M-54 is a conventional, or "dumb," bomb that can be converted into a glide munition with the addition of the UMPC.

In March, Russian officials first announced the mass production of FAB-3000 M-54 munitions. Previously, the Russian military had trouble attaching the heavy munition, which weighs almost 7,000 lbs, to tactical aircraft. However, Russian technicians seem to have found a solution.

"The fact that Russian forces have figured out how to launch FAB-3000s is a significant development and will increase the destructive potential of Russia's ongoing glide bomb attacks against Ukrainian forces and infrastructure," the Institute for the Study of War added.

As the conflict continues, the Russian Aerospace Forces have increasingly been relying on guided and unguided glide bombs to hit Ukrainian targets. These munitions are released from long distances and travel or glide to their targets while the aircraft launching them is safely away.

"Russian forces have already increased guided and unguided glide bomb use against Ukraine, particularly in Kharkiv Oblast, to devastating effect, and should Russian forces be able to launch massive barrages of FAB-3000s (or even heavier guided glide bombs), they will be able to cause even more widespread damage to Ukrainian frontline positions and critical infrastructure," the Institute for the Study of War stated.

The performance of the Russian Aerospace Forces

The Russian Aerospace Forces have largely failed in the conflict so far. When it comes to air superiority, although more numerous and with better quality, Russian aircraft have not established control over the skies. Ukrainian pilots have been putting out a stalwart resistance, and there are also too many antiaircraft systems of all ranges on the battlefield.

When it comes to strategic strikes, they have faired only slightly better. Relying on a combination of stand-off and glide munitions, Russian aircraft have been targeting Ukrainian critical infrastructure and urban centers.

However, the questionable quality of these munitions, in conjunction with the powerful — but depleting — Ukrainian air defenses, have largely ensured that these strikes haven't been as consequential to the course of the war as the Kremlin would want.

Finally, in terms of close air support, the Russian Aerospace Forces have done better but their performance is still far from altering the battlefield.

Using fixed- and rotaty-winged attack aircraft, the Russian military has been able to gain tactical superiority during some times and in specific areas of the contact line. But beyond causing some additional casualties to the Ukrainian forces, Russian tactical aviation hasn't made a difference.

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• The immunity decision will delay and diminish Jack Smith's two Trump prosecutions, experts predict.
• In the documents case, Trump can claim that "declassifying" them,  back in DC, was an official act.
• In the J6 case, he can seek immunity for allegations involving talking to another federal official.

It's been a pretty bad day for Special Counsel Jack Smith.

Both of his prosecutions of Donald Trump — the Mar-a-Lago documents case in Florida, and the insurrection case out of Washington, DC — will be delayed and diminished by Monday's United States Supreme Court's immunity decision, legal experts predict.

The SCOTUS decision found that former presidents are presumptively immune from prosecution for acts they took while in office. It leaves it to lower courts to decide whether Trump conspired to overturn the 2020 election.

That review of the insurrection case — by the DC Circuit Court of Appeals and, likely, the Supreme Court once again — will take many months.

Meanwhile, Trump can be expected to use his new immunity superpowers to also challenge the documents case, including by reviving his claim that he somehow "declassified" the papers back in DC, in what was an "official" act.

"With the January 6th case, the one that was at issue here, this makes it absolutely clear there's no way this is going to trial before the election," said Cliff Sloan, a Georgetown University law professor and constitutional law expert.

"For the Florida case, the decision has no direct impact," noted Michel Paradis, an attorney who teaches national security and constitutional law at Columbia Law School.

"But it is likely to disrupt and complicate the prosecution, in so far as there will be a new round of arguments on how the Supreme Court decision affects the transportation of documents, etc.," he said.

Sloan said that it's possible that Trump's attorneys make new arguments in the classified documents case based on the SCOTUS ruling, but explained, "It'll be more difficult because the core of that case has to do with actions he took when he was no longer president with regard to classified documents."

Still, Trump can now argue that before he left office, he somehow "declassified" the documents, an official act that now cannot be challenged.

Prosecutors say Trump broke federal law when he took documents with him from the White House to Mar-a-Lago, his Palm Beach, Florida, estate and private club.

The Florida litigation will be all the more complicated, Paradis added, "because the Supreme Court also held that you can't inquire into a president's 'motives' for taking any official act. And so precisely how that will work is up in the air at the moment."

According to Monday's decision, "In dividing official from unofficial conduct, courts may not inquire into the president's motives."

The court continued, "Such a 'highly intrusive inquiry would risk exposing even the most obvious instances of official conduct to judicial examination on the mere allegation of improper purpose."

Circling back to the January 6 case, one of that indictment's allegations is almost certain to now be challenged as an official act for which he is immune from prosecution, said Paradis.

Trump is accused of trying to pressure his acting attorney general and the Justice Department to overturn the 2020 presidential election results. Those discussions "are readily categorized" as official acts, Monday's decision states.

This is true even if Smith's claims are correct, and Trump's efforts were improper, the decision said.

"Because the President cannot be prosecuted for conduct within his exclusive constitutional authority, Trump is absolutely immune from prosecution for the alleged conduct involving his discussions with Justice Department officials, the decision said.

"Other allegations — such as those involving Trump's interactions with the vice president, state officials, and certain private parties, and his comments to the general public — present more difficult questions" that will now be argued over, the decision also states.

"The biggest difficulty will be proving that something is not an official act," noted Paradis.

"The way the Supreme Court set up the new rule is that most everything the president does is 'presumptively immune,'" he said.

"It then falls to the prosecution to show that the 'presumptively' official act was in fact 'unofficial.' However — and this is where Justice Barrett broke with the majority — prosecutors can't inquire into the president's motives and are also largely prohibited from inquiring into the president's communications," he added.

"So you have to show what the president intended while being forbidden from proving what was in his mind," Paradis said.

By that new measure, any communication Trump has with another federal official is, for all practical purposes, immune from prosecution, he said.

In its decision, Sloan said, the Supreme Court was "unwilling to say that even a single allegation in the indictment" against Trump over his over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election "was an example of an unofficial act."

"It was willing to say some things were clearly official acts, but it was unwilling to give a single example of something that was unofficial," said Sloan, adding, "Courts would have to sort out what's official and what's unofficial, and if it's official, what kind of official action is it?"

"In addition to everything else, it's a kind of complicated structure, is very unpredictable, and it just puts it in the hands of courts to make these judgments," Sloan said.

• The Houthis have stepped up their attacks and intimidation efforts with their drone boats.
• In their latest messaging, the rebels shared a new video of a previously unseen system in action.
• The uptick comes as the US Navy lacks an aircraft carrier in the region.

The US Navy is in the middle of changing up its forces in the Middle East. An aircraft carrier that spent months in the counter-Houthi fight heads home, leaving a gap as another one makes its way toward the region to take over.

It has been over a week since the US last had an aircraft carrier on station in the Red Sea, meaning the Pentagon can't depend on the routine combat air patrols and immense firepower having a carrier in the region has provided over the past seven months.

The Houthis have been stepping up drone boat operations, employing small watercraft that can be packed with explosives and detonate on impact. These weapons can be used to strike merchant vessels and cause catastrophic damage, which has already been the case in at least one instance in recent weeks.

Drone boats are not a new capability for the Houthis. They have employed them in years past and throughout their ongoing campaign of attacks on merchant vessels and commercial shipping lanes.

During the first few months of the year, US airstrikes in Yemen destroyed the drone boats nearly every time the Houthis tried to send them into the water. But in June, the Iran-backed rebels managed to launch well over a dozen crafts — far more than they had in any previous month. Last month, one of the Houthi drone boats struck a commercial vessel, the MV Tutor, for the first time since the campaign began in November.

In the June 12 attack, the Houthis used a small, slow-moving boat staffed with two dummies, appearing to disguise the crude-looking weapon as a common fishing craft. Hours after the initial strike, the rebels hit the Tutor with a missile, causing it to later sink.

More than a week after the Tutor attack, on June 22, the Dwight D. Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group, which spent more than seven months battling the Houthis, finally left the region to head home, bringing with it the carrier Ike and dozens of fighter aircraft.

The Ike's eventual replacement — the Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group — won't arrive for some time. And in the meantime, the Houthis appear to be taking advantage of the decreased US Navy air patrols and employing more drone boats.

United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations, an element of the British Royal Navy, has reported multiple incidents over the past few days that appear consistent with such attacks.

On June 27, for instance, UKMTO cited one threat as a "waterborne improvised explosive device," and on June 30, it said a merchant vessel was approached by "a mixture of fast boats and smaller kayak-type boats," adding that "some were observed as uncrewed."

On June 30, the Houthi rebels revealed what they said is a highly advanced drone boat that can travel at speeds of 45 nautical mph and deliver an explosive payload of up to 3,300 pounds. The group claimed to have used the drone boat in a June 23 attack on the MV Transworld Navigator and published footage purporting to show the unmanned craft strike the much larger merchant vessel.

Business Insider was unable to immediately verify the Houthi claim. US Central Command said at the time that the Transworld Navigator was hit by a "suspected uncrewed aerial system" and did not mention a drone boat.

In the June 30 video, the Houthis also showed the drone boat going through various maneuvers and training exercises. At one point, rebels can be seen manually operating the craft before they dive off the side into the water and allow it to be remotely piloted.

The newly revealed drone boat is far more sophisticated-looking than the one that struck the Tutor and appears notably larger than unmanned crafts that the rebels publicized and tested earlier in June, underscoring the different capabilities that the Houthis have in their arsenal.

Experts have said that the uptick in drone boat attacks and the Houthis' newfound success in striking commercial vessels with such weapons indicates that they're learning from their many months of attacks and are able to adjust their operations accordingly.

• A Florida man admitted to shooting a Walmart drone last week, law enforcement officials said.
• For the past decade, gun owners have been shooting at UAVs — in violation of Federal regulations.
• Now, as more retailers use drones, armed Americans may add further complication to delivery by air.

Retailers have had to solve a long list of technological, regulatory, and commercial challenges in order to offer deliveries by drone.

But one complication remains especially difficult to predict: US gun owners.

In the latest episode, the Lake County Sheriff said last week that Dennis Winn admitted to shooting a Walmart drone with a 9mm pistol as it flew near his home in Florida.

According to the arrest affidavit, Winn told officers he had prior experience with drones flying over his house and believed the aircraft to be surveilling him.

He then went inside, got his gun from a safe, came out, and fired one shot at the drone, which was roughly 75 feet in the air, the affidavit said.

"I then told him that he had struck a Walmart drone," the Sheriff's deputy said in the affidavit. "The defendant looked in disbelief and questioned, 'Really?'"

The Sheriff's Office said a bullet hole was found in the payload area of the drone after it flew back to a nearby Walmart.

The office said Winn was taken into custody and faces three charges, including "shooting at an aircraft."

In the past decade, some US gun owners have shot at unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, but what many may not realize is they are committing a serious crime in the eyes of the federal government.

The Federal Aviation Administration doesn't distinguish between a small drone and a jumbo passenger jet when it comes to attempts to sabotage commercial aircraft: shooting at one is a felony, punishable by a fine and up to 20 years in prison.

Even though the FAA has held this position since 2016, the message doesn't seem to have gotten through to some people. The agency only recently started allowing unmanned commercial aircraft to fly beyond the operator's direct line of sight.

In the past two years alone, incidents in North Carolina, Florida, and California made headlines when individuals with guns targeted drones — two of which belonged to law enforcement.

As more retailers use drones, armed Americans pose a potential complication to deliveries by air.

Two years ago, when Amazon was rolling out a test of its drone delivery service in California, The Washington Post reported that one man at a local archery shop joked that it was "Target practice!"

Now Walmart is expanding its use of drones beyond the initial test markets, where the company says it has conducted over 20,000 safe deliveries. The retail giant's goal is to have the "largest drone delivery footprint of any US retailer."

And Walmart isn't alone. Earlier this year, DoorDash announced a drone delivery test with a Wendy's restaurant in Virginia, and several Chick-fil-A restaurants have tested the tech in recent years as well.

Perhaps if drones become common enough, people will simply stop noticing — or shooting — them.

Democrats are scrambling to control the damage after Biden's poor debate performance. The president says he will stay in the race despite calls to step aside.