The weeks seem to get longer and longer every day.

Books

• Parvusimperator finished the French Rifle Book from Headstamp Publishing, and speaks very highly of its content and production values. He’s now reading First In, Last Out, a history of South African artillery in the latter days of the Cold War.

Time-Sensitive

• There’s a SpaceX launch livestream today at 1:40 p.m. ET – They’ve missed the last two landings-at-sea, so there’s even a chance of fireworks.

La Corona

• The hemoglobin-attacking theory seems to be pretty well debunked – Never let it be said we don’t walk back claims when we’re obviously wrong!
• Some doctors write in favor of hydroxychloroquine, zinc, and azithromycin as an early-stage coronavirus treatment protocol
• What’s going on in Japan? – Why did its numbers look so good at first, and why do they look more average now?
• CDC’s bad coronavirus tests were contaminated with coronavirus – I can see how that would cause trouble, yeah.

Defense

• Need to fortify a house? Here are some handy tips
• USAF working on palletized weapons systems – Use those C-130s to carpet-bomb the poor sods who can’t shoot back, save your better bombers for bigger tasks, I guess.
• A look at the Alfa-type submarines’ reactors
• Raytheon gets the LRSO missile nod
• Vortex gets the nod for the Army’s next-gen-squad-weapon sight – It has a rangefinder and ballistic computer built in.
• Armatas in Syria: Russia sends the newcomer overseas for field testing
• Inside the AUTEC – That is, the shadowy submarine training range near the Bahamas. (At this rate, maybe you should just subscribe to The Drive’s RSS feed instead of ours.)
• Russia gives up on cruiser-sized nuclear destroyer and destroyer-sized frigate projects
• The Losharik affair provides insights into Russia’s Arctic ambitions

Guns

• The guns of the SOG – From Vietnam.
• The guns of the International Sniper Competition… 2019 edition – All of our local matches have been canceled too.
• Extreme precision shooting: 0.025-inch groups – That’s not a typo. It’s actually 25-mil groups. I wonder if there are any warehouses around that we could put a big shooting range into.
• The Gunwerks SKUHL dangerous game rifle is moderately pretty – Some nice receiver engraving, at least, and the cost of entry is well below the bigger names in the field at $8000 for a base-model gun.
• Biden’s gun control agenda is out – It’s exactly what you’d expect.
• Rail-mounted tactical light and gun camera – We like the idea of it as a USPSA addon—splitscreen gun camera and hat camera, maybe.

Sport

• Gronk comes back to football – But he wants to go to Tampa Bay with his boy Brady.

Grab Bag

• On randomized controlled trials: a joke article
• A randomized controlled trial on the preceding paper’s subject
• Cleaning the battlefields of the Second World War: recovery tanks and scrap heaps – Picture-heavy. Very cool.
• It’s time to build – But we seem to be unable to do so. Why is that, the author wonders?
• Xi fears manufacturing exodus – I say there’s maybe a 25% chance that big supply chain changes happen.
• Huawei and COVID
• A PIT maneuver at 130mph ends with a surprising 50% survival rate for the participants
• US newspaper business in its final death throes? – Parvusimperator and I are divided on this one. He doesn’t like Gannett, which is the main player in the local newspaper industry. I hold that Gannett or no, local newspapers are basically the only useful media outlet left in the world. I’m sure there’s massive corruption in the government of, say, Pittsburgh, but there’s nobody around to hold their feet to the fire, because we have exactly one daily print newspaper, and there’s no competition for the first scoop.
• How is COVID going to hit the autonomous car industry? – Hard, is my guess.