If I call it ‘Weekly What We’re Reading’, maybe I won’t have to feel so bad about missing Wednesdays.

Coronavirus

• Why aren’t we talking more about ventilation? – Your correspondent has been banging the ‘malaria in the literal sense’ drum with increasing intensity over the past few weeks.
• Cuomo to wealthy New Yorkers: “Come back to the city! I’ll buy you a drink!” – … in what bar?

Defense

• Last of the 29 Palms Abrams moves on – Pour one out. They’re bound to Barstow, and then on to Sierra Army Depot, where they’ll be mothballed.
• India’s Rafales arrive – India has some special features not found on Ye Standard French Rafale.
• How Britain cut its Harrier force to zero in two months – i.e., not a happy story.
• Video of the week: Rheinmetall’s 130mm test
• A TFB interview with leaders of the NGSW program on same
• IAI and Singapore Technologies Engineering form Proteus Advanced Systems – They’re selling an export version of the Gabriel 5, for which STE provides parts. Singapore, notably, is in the market for a Harpoon replacement.
• Two diagrams and a lot of technical Russian – It’s the T-14/T-15 reversible hull patent! Parvusimperator notes the chassis is an earlier design, with only six road wheels per side.
• Britain Used To Be So Cool, historical photo edition – It’s the Royal Navy at Spithead, on the occasion of Elizabeth’s coronation. (Cor, she’s been around a while, hasn’t she?)
• Poland agrees to pay most costs for US troop presence – Poland remembers 1939. And, as ever, American troops in Europe are a tripwire more than anything—both a deterrent and a way to get the American population behind an overseas adventure.
• USAF’s THPMOR system to see field tests – USAF calls it ‘THOR’, but that leaves out ‘Power’ and ‘Microwave’.
• Raytheon and Rafael collaborate for an Indirect Fire Protection Capability stopgap – Iron Dome! American Iron Dome!

Science and Technology

• SpaceX finally successfully hops a Starship prototype – This one is SN5, and I believe they blew up the preceding four. Accidentally, that is.
• Chicago has a deep underground stormwater control tunnel – 30 stories down. Chicago has a long history of absurd engineering feats to keep from flooding itself, whether with rainwater or sewage. There was a great 99 Percent Invisible on the subject, before every episode turned into progressive preaching.

Guns

• Gun owners aren’t coming to save protesters in cities – For a number of blazingly obvious reasons.
• The Care and Feeding of Your Revolver with Jerry Miculek – As a Ruger shooter, I feel like I have the right as well as the obligation to note that a number of these are things you shouldn’t do to your Smith & Wesson revolver.
• Los Angeles DA’s husband charged for what the Missouri lawyers did – This seems to me to be a sort of comeuppance. It may well get tossed out in court on the same grounds—California is, to my deep and utter surprise, a Castle Doctrine state.
• Trijicon sues Holosun – It’s a patent thing. Here are the exhibits referenced in the complaint.
• EOTech going private – It was at first, then it was purchased by a large, public defense contractor, now it’s getting spun off and sold to American Holoptics.

Grab Bag

• Tim Keller with a Biblical critique of secular ideas of social justice – I see an awful lot of the students I once had during my brief stints in student ministry falling prey to this ideology, so I intend to dig into this more deeply sometime.