One month into 2020 already. Goodness.

Upcoming features for February include a continuation of parvusimperator’s Cadillac Gage commentaries (probably), a holster review (my wife has been pushing me to carry more often), and, of course, the continued exploits of our fictional French Navy for Thursday wargaming.

Wuhan Coronavirus

• How bad is it? Well, if you compare it to SARS… – Behind this link: charts and graphs of the SARS outbreak.
• Zerohedge: was this coronavirus an artificial creation?
• Also Zerohedge: Wuhan coronavirus can maybe survive on surfaces for several days? – Good thing I haven’t ordered anything from AliExpress lately.
• Cohort data! – The Lancet with an article on a particular group of coronavirus patients, and the outcomes therefrom. The short version: 16% died.
• More cohort data! – Also The Lancet. The short version: 11% died.
• Two deaths now reported outside of mainland China
• Press X to Doubt: how bad are the real numbers, not the sanitized ones for the world to see? – Taiwan News, which I’m sure has no axe to grind with the PRC, claims to have a screenshot showing Tencent’s epidemic tracker website indicating that the number of deaths is almost 25,000, rather than almost 500. That’s a big cover-up. China may be good at big cover-ups, but I don’t think covering up 24,500 excess deaths is plausible.

Defense

• On flying aircraft carriers – Wee drone aircraft, granted. Click through and scroll down for a to-scale drawing of Lockheed’s Cold War-era CL1201 flying aircraft carrier concept next to a 747.
• Un schéma du hangar de Charles de Gaulle
• US Navy to remember lessons from the Thresher as it embarks upon digitization
• US Navy remembers maritime patrol aircraft are awesome, adds weapons and missions to the Poseidon
• France builds their own maritime patrol aircraft, of course – For all their failings, I give the French massive credit for maintaining almost complete military-industrial autonomy.
• Historical sidebar: the Cold War strike cruiser – Basically, an American Kiev.
• Fitz returns to sea – A sad chapter in her history now closed.

Guns

• Virginia residents respond to gun control laws by buying a ton more guns – An appropriate course.
• Remington to shutter DPMS and Bushmaster divisions? – Or, rather, have they already done?

Science and Technology

• Fixing Apollo 14: the hack that saved that moon landing – Also featuring a deep dive into the architecture of the Apollo Guidance Computer.
• Some very preliminary NTSB statements on the Kobe Bryant helicopter crash
• With the Starliner failure, Boeing and NASA face a bit of a dilemma – Namely, will NASA let Boeing continue the sequence of test flights as planned despite its failure to reach the Space Station and perform the docking maneuver the failed test was designed to carry out? The added wrinkle: the next planned test flight is manned.

History

• Yet another first-hand account of communism – You can’t have too many of these.
• Straight from the pages of Tinpot Dictator Quarterly: defense industry ads from the 1970s and 1980s

Grab Bag

• What happened to the Iowa caucus results? – And how are they going to steal the primary from Bernie? (Not that I really care how one part of the left screws over another part of the left, as long as it suppresses left-leaning turnout.)