Autumn is now fully upon us here in western PA, and with the long, dark evenings comes more time for inside pursuits like writing. I have a biggish 2020 USPSA season wrap-up in the pipeline, along with some other revolver-related content (what can I say, I have a one-track mind), and parvusimperator has a few intriguing drafts going too.

War in the East: Azerbaijan and Armenia kick it off

• A quick outline from Sunday
• A web of major power backers quickly emerges – Pakistan and Turkey at least are in on the Azeri side. Russia and India are backing Armenia. France has spoken out against Turkey.
• Turkey denies shooting down Armenian Su-25
• At least the US has practiced this a bunch of times – Atropia and Limaria, classic combatants in American wargames, correspond almost exactly to Azerbaijan and Armenia. Unfortunately, the DCS Caucasus map doesn’t get quite far enough east and south.

Defense

• Tim Taylor’s Chinook – About an extra 5,000 horsepower. Nice. Also, here’s a picture of a King Stallion carrying a Chinook; I don’t think I realized they were comparable in size, an embarrassing admission from the blog’s resident rotorhead.
• The Sparrowhawk: a drone-launched drone – General Atomics says it can be recovered in flight, too.
• Danes choose Elcan SpecterDR as their new daylight rifle scope – I don’t remember if parvusimperator ever got rid of his Elcan, but he sure does/did like it for what it was.
• Pentagon proposals for a 500-ship navy – The War Zone calls them ‘highly questionable’.
• In choice between CH-53K and CH-47, Germany chooses ‘neither’ – Germany will have to get by with its existing liftscrewers.

Pretty Pictures

• A polished P-38

The ‘Rona and Associated Cultural Phenomena

• We still don’t know if COVID is small-droplet airborne or large-droplet sneezeborne – Seems like we should have figured that out by now.
• Yurts and heat lamps: outdoor dining in the New York winter – Around here, a lot of restaurants are opening back up at 50% indoor capacity, which I guess is fine? Our county is doing pretty well, and since we’re currently creatures of the suburbs, it’s not like there are many community cases floating around.
• Meanwhile, in LA, faceless kitchens-in-a-strip-mall pretend to be a dozen different delivery-only brands at once
• Maryland man jailed for one year for throwing a party – I’ve heard the term ‘midwit’ bandied about on Twitter, and don’t really like being that deliberately inflammatory, but I’m having a hard time thinking of a better word for the kind of person who celebrates a state governor imprisoning someone for organizing a peaceable assembly.

Science and Technology

• This comet has an aurora – Not like ours. Maybe an aura is more accurate than an aurora?
• Relevant to the below category: how to disappear in a smart city – If anything, the author does not show sufficient dedication to the idea. She doesn’t seem to have quite decided that true disappearance requires leaving your phone behind.
• D-Wave releases an next-gen quantum annealing chip – Interesting technology, but I keep on hearing that whenever D-Wave makes a quantum leap (ha), classical hardware and algorithms catch up pretty quickly.

China

• Xinjiang-tested, now Tibet-applied: China’s reeducation camps arrive in a second region
• Indian geostrategist: China is paying a high price for provoking India – Parvusimperator, succinctly: “Good. Fuck ’em.”
• CCP rewrites the Bible: Jesus chooses to stone the sinner woman to teach respect for the law – ‘To hell with that’ is less an expression of disgust and more an observation, in this case.
• ‘China feels increasingly like North Korea,’ says WaPo reporter
• We’re not making any friends among the ChiComs this week, are we? Well, see parvusimperator’s earlier comment.

Guns Etc.

• I’ve been looking for a good glove I can use for revolver work: matches on hot days, and practice generally, when the cylinder quickly gets too hot for reloads – Parvusimperator shared this review. They look pretty good. I don’t actually need a ton of dexterity, since I only ever wear one on my left hand, and that hand’s only jobs are playing support on the two-hand grip, holding the (potentially hot) cylinder during reloads, and thumbing the ejector.
• The logic error behind the gun debate – I have noticed this in talking to my largely-lefty college friends. At least it’s less awkward than explaining the colors of USPSA targets.
• Remington chopped up, sold off – Ruger bought Marlin, which seems like a good match. I look forward to a Ruger-brand lever gun.

Decision 2020

• Larry Correia, ex-tax accountant, opines on the Trump tax leak – “On the other side, you know damned good and well that the IRS has sent their most fearsome auditor against him. This man sold his soul to the devil, and then fined the devil for failing to list that soul as a depreciable asset.”
• The debate in pictures – Well, one picture. … more a meme, really.

Grab Bag

• As ever, the revolutionary vanguard comprises dumb rich kids
• A generalist lockpicking kit – I’m not good enough with my picks to really make much use of this information, but it’s nevertheless good information.
• Ever thought, “Man, the Niven-Pournelle novel Footfall was a great alien invasion story; I wish I could play it in game form?” – Well, the Terra Invicta kickstarter has you covered. I haven’t chipped in yet, but I’m excited for it.

Any thoughts on what we should do for the upcoming 100th edition of What We’re Reading?

WuFlu

• Is SARS-CoV-2 a product of gain-of-function research? – Gain-of-function research being the head-scratching idea that it’s somehow wise or worthwhile to turn viruses which can’t infect humans into viruses which can, to, I dunno, see if it can be done? Cue Ian Malcolm quote.
• In that tweet, a guy called Peter Daszak is quoted on the subject of enhancing ‘SARS-related CoVs’, back in November 2019 – Here he is in Boston Magazine, identified as president of an organization that funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology, vehemently denying that research at that institute which involved identifying spike proteins that could cause bat viruses to infect humans and making new viruses from them could have possibly caused a human outbreak of a bat coronavirus in Wuhan.
• Elsewhere in that Twitter thread, there’s some speculation that virologists who (rightfully, it seems to me) consider gain-of-function research to be an awful idea aren’t speaking up for professional reasons; who wants to be remembered as the person who caused the entire world to ban their field of research? Besides people with a sense of perspective, or, you know, morals.

Defense

• Experts: “Next war likely to be fought differently than last war” – Really staking out a bold position there, guys.
• Big Army bows to defense contractor pressure, will not be entering its own vehicle into OMFV Redux – Shame. It would have been nice to have a first-party design. We’ve gotten away from that for some reason, and it seems like it was a strictly superior way to do business in hindsight.
• Marines now building ‘littoral regiments’ with an eye on taking Chinese airfield-islands – Parvusimperator’s remark, lightly paraphrased because I can’t be bothered to find it in the internal chat backscroll: “I love the Marines’ small-unit stuff, but I scratch my head at their strategy.”

3D-Printed Guns

A special topic! There have been exciting developments in the field.

• “Mom, can we have Mauser Broomhandle?” – We have Mauser Broomhandle at home. See the link to finish the joke.
• You’ve seen 3D-printed ARs, now with reinforcing U-bolts, but what about a 3D-printed AK? – Receiver is gloriously chunky, for strength to match iron soldiers of motherland.
• Want an illegal suppressor without having to deal with the fed-bait of ordering a fuel filter housing from China? – Here’s a version you can print, just add your own entirely innocent hardware. I don’t advocate 3D-printing illegal things, but I do certainly advocate knowing how.

Non-3D-Printed Guns

• Karl of InRange TV making every effort at fairness in re: a volley-fire .22 WMR revolver – Unrelated to the topic at hand, I find myself less enthused with InRange’s match videos now that I’ve had a few years to get used to USPSA. The InRange-style 2-gun match, with its excessive reliance on physical challenges and punitive par times, is not as interesting to me as it once was.
• T̶h̶r̶o̶w̶b̶a̶c̶k̶ ̶T̶h̶u̶r̶s̶d̶a̶y̶ Wayback Wednesday: Steyr’s scout rifle, an American Rifleman review from 1998 – The second gun I bought was a Mosin carbine, which I proceeded to turn into a scout-ish rifle. I still like it, although I haven’t had any of my rifles out to the range in quite some time now. I should have a go at the 550-yard plate at my new range with the K31, though.
• The price of Remington’s ammo plants, its most valuable asset: $65 million – Blast. That’s a bit steep for just the two of us. Maybe they’ll sell primers? I could really use some small pistol primers.
• From the ads in USPSA magazine: the Gill Arms GPR 9M, a striker-fired pistol with… innovations? – At least, I think they’re innovations. For one, the passive safety is that the striker is locked out of line with the primer until the trigger is pulled. For another, the magazine tapers in two different places, which is evidently better for reliability? Not having $800 to spend on a random pistol, I can’t say if any of that is true. Even if I did have the $800, I don’t see any for sale.

Other Science and Technology

• Watch an internal combustion engine turn into an external internal combustion engine – It looks like a runaway to me. Turbo springs a leak, and suddenly your engine has a bunch more fuel, and therefore starts spinning faster, and the cycle continues until the engine escapes.
• Why is the world becoming more allergic to food? – The story doesn’t actually answer the question in the headline, but does suggest that eating trigger foods at a young age stops food allergies from developing.
• A teenager with an integrated circuit fab in his parents’ garage – He doesn’t have a clean room, so contamination means he can’t get much below 10µm feature size, but he could pretty conceivably make simple, 70s-era microprocessors. That’s wild.

History

• Want a document on the Maus tank from Allied researchers? – Here you go. I even put it in the Many Words Google Drive, so you don’t have to deal with a stupid 100-second download delay and a speed cap at 60 kilobytes per second.
• How chunky is the P-47? – This chunky. The original Twitterer stole my joke, so you get this instead.
• The Record of Proceedings of the Board of Inquiry into the loss of USS Thresher is now available, in only lightly-redacted form

Decision 2020 Etc.

• Princeton says racism is embedded in the structures of the university; DOE opens investigation – “… such an admission from [Princeton president] Eisgruber raises concerns that Princeton has been receiving tens of millions of dollars in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” Inject the schadenfreude into my veins, please.
• Portland sees surge in shootings after mayor disbands PD’s gun crimes unit – Whoever could have seen this coming?

Grab Bag

• Fake Counterstrike cheats that sabotage the player using them – Brilliant. Hopefully not staged.
• Chinese propaganda or canny realpolitik? You decide – It’s a (paywalled) story on the topic of why China as she is now might be preferable to a democratic China. (If you are offended by paywalls, consider this extension). One of the arguments is, “A democratic China might be less patient in dealing with Hong Kong and Taiwan,” which seems to me to be definitively missing the point of the Hong Kong protests, and plausibly missing the point of Taiwan’s continued preference for independence. Would Taiwan care so much if its putative motherland were a democratic state with a bunch of guaranteed freedoms? I am not qualified to say.
• Fun approaches that make me want Flight Simulator (2020) – St. Bart’s, in the Caribbean.
• A poker cheating scandal story – With no solid evidence that there was actually any cheating happening, although a good bit of probabaility and circumstantial evidence suggesting it did.

Buckle up. We’ve got a lot to cover this week, and (because I submitted more articles than parvusimperator) a myriad of topics.

China

• China’s hacking sprees give it the ability to (probably) identify US spooks
• China: data is the oil of the 21st century

Defense

I got almost all the way through the week’s articles before I had to start a defense section.

• Greece is buying Rafales – Standoffs with the perfidious Turk have convinced it of the need for modernization.
• CG Haenel’s MK556 gets the nod to replace Bundeswehr G36en – This has been discussed some on the Discord, which is linked in the sidebar for those of you who are reading this but have not yet popped in over there.
• USAF announces they’ve built and flown a full-scale prototype of the Next-Generation Air Dominance fighter – Unusually loose-lipped for the Air Force!
• … shortly after someone on Twitter reported a bunch of sightings of a strange triangle-shaped airplane? – They’re almost certainly unrelated, but I thought the timing was fun. Lots of speculation among people who don’t follow the defense industry all that closely that maybe the F-35’s massive budget is actually a slush fund for other projects.

Science and Technology

• Story of the week: potential biosigns detected on Venus – Phosphine, a chemical which is rapidly degraded into its component bits by UV light (during the press briefing, they said a lifetime of a few thousand seconds is believed to be accurate), is present in moderate quantities in the upper atmosphere of Venus. Planetary scientists spent a few years trying to puzzle out non-biological processes which could create phosphone, and came up empty. My money’s still on some bit of novel high-temperature/high-pressure chemistry. Anyway, I need to pop over to Twitter and goad Musk into sending a probe.
• Do masks actually work against the wuflu? – I think the data is more up in the air than Mr. Berenson’s Tweet suggests, but at the same time, the point about Taiwan, Japan, and testing is worth bearing in mind.
• Deep sea mining and the race to the bottom of the sea – We’ve explored almost none of the extremely-deep ocean. Should we start mining it and potentially destroy all those ecosystems? I have not yet fully formed an opinion.
• The ISS is getting moldy – On the inside, which is great news for fans of old-feeling science fiction but not so great news for fans of long-term space habitats. NASA is working on ways to kill ’em.
• NASA to investigate 3D printing for rocket part production – Good for small-batch rocket production, perhaps, but come, let us reason with one another. If you take Elon Musk at 10% of his word, he’s still going to build hundreds of rockets, which translates to thousands of engines. At that scale, it seems like a factory, with fancy tooling and all, makes fiscal sense, and small-batch rocket production does not make sense.
• Another cosmological problem surfaces: the universe might be too spread-out
• But wait, there’s more: a disc galaxy at the very edge of the observable universe looks way older than it should – C’mon, dark-matter-as-the-luminiferous-ether-of-the-21st-century guess! Turn out to be correct!

History

• High-resolution imaging of the wreck of the Hornet on the sea floor – Way to go, Petrel.
• Alternate uses of the V8-powered air raid sirens: turning fog into rain – The noise is so intense that it vibrates the fog particles together until they precipitate out, a quintessentially American solution to a problem the British solved by lighting bonfires instead. I believe it could also kill birds at a pretty substantial distance for, you know, a siren.

Guns

• It’s a match video week – I’m getting a little tiny bit faster now, it seems like, but one thing holding me back is accuracy troubles. A good proportion of the problem is with me: I have a bad habit of trying to actively control muzzle rise with my hands, which leads to shots pushed low or pulled right if my hands tense prior to the shot breaking. Some of the rest might be with grips; I could probably stand to have some slightly larger ones so there’s more room for my off hand. The only problem is that a lot of the alternatives are really perishingly ugly.
• Kalashnikov makes a smart shotgun, but not the way you’re thinking – It has a wee computer in the stock, a screen, and a video camera built in.
• Restoring an old Smith & Wesson semi-auto](https://www.glocktalk.com/a/s-w-5906-restore.118/) – Restoration continues here. We appreciate good craftsmanship here at the Soapbox.
• Remember that SIG P320 lawsuit about people accidentally shooting themselves in the leg? Here’s a good potential explanation – It seems to explain the strange, nearly-disengaged-sear problems described in that lawsuit.

Grab Bag

• Will mass political violence happen in the US? – This guy says ‘no’. I don’t know if I quite agree, but I do hope he’s right.
• 737 crew from Lithuania’s Klasjet fails basic airmanship test
• Old but good: nobody knows how many US federal laws there are
• Cal Fire: “The smoke is too bad for helicopters.” National Guard: “Ha!” – The SF Chronicle takes a deep dive into the High Sierra helo rescue.
• The New Yorker braces itself: how Trump could win
• A modest proposal: permanent daylight saving time – Please, yes. I hate driving into work in the dark and then driving home from work in the dark.
• The ISO standard political ad
• A tale of water rights and subdevelopments in the southwestern desert – I sure am glad to live in a place where water literally falls from the sky, although this summer it has been admittedly less than I would typically prefer.
• Donald Trump, …Nobel Peace Prize candidate? – First Serbia and Kosovo, now peace in the Middle East? I confess that’s not the sort of thing I very much expected out of a Trump administration.

While drafting these, I keep on forgetting I’ve already shared match videos, and have to go dig them out later. Oops.

Defense

• The new British carriers have always looked a bit fat to me – They may not be true carriers with catapults and arresting gear, but having two of them does count for something.
• An EC-135 at Mildenhall in 1991 demonstrated that airliner-form-factor aircraft have quite a bit of thrust to spare at light loads
• Charles de Gaulle and Izumo, to the same scale – The year is 2028. The War of the South China Sea is heating up. In a Mitsubishi warehouse, engineers pull the tarps off an angled flight deck attachment for Izumo…
• Big Army to field a ground-launched strike SM-6 – It’s similar in concept, I suppose, to the ADATS—one missile, multiple missions. Too, ‘medium-range strike’ conflicts much less with ‘air defense’ than does ‘anti-tank’—the tough thing about ADATS is that using the missiles on tanks feels like a waste, or at least it did when I gamed it out in Armored Brigade.
• US looking for a NATO-like alliance in the Pacific
• Apaches to sling Spike NLOS missile – It’s the hi in a hi-lo setup, with the lo being JAGM… except JAGM, the less-capable missile, is also the more expensive one. In the time since the JAGM project started, the UK developed and deployed Brimstone… and then Brimstone 2.
• India tests hypersonic scramjet vehicle? – Welcome to the club!
• China has a space plane; here’s where it lands
• For light ambush-protected vehicles, Thales charges Australia double what the American option would have cost – Cost disease: not just an American malady.

Guns

• Shocker! Gun sales skyrocket in regions struck by rioting
• Analyzing the circuit split on magazine bans – In which John Roberts is a squish on guns.
• Chrono trip coming up – These .38 Short Colts are better for USPSA revolver than full-length .38 Special—they flop less in the moon clips, and eject rather than partially. I just need to find a load that a) makes power factor and b) does not blow up.

Science and Technology

• In China, GitHub is a bastion of free speech – Because GitHub is HTTPS-only, China can’t ban repositories individually, and China’s technology industry has enough clout to keep the Party from banning GitHub altogether.

Riots etc.

• Al Sharpton: “latte liberals” want to defend the NYPD, average black people recognize the need for police – Something about stopped clocks and right twice a day.
• Latte liberals give homeless men the bum’s rush – Unlike in Hank Scorpio’s utopia, they will not be allowed to go at their own pace.

Grab Bag

• Eternal Brexit – The article didn’t quite pay off the title—in particular, it seems to insinuate that Brexit is, rather than being eternal, likely to come to some sort of conclusion as the EU tires of the whole process.
• The planning of US physician shortages – It’s because think tanks in the 80s concluded that there would be a glut of physicians, and people made plans based on that.

Two weeks and a short post is what you get when both of your hosts are on the road and/or occupied in such a way as to prevent a great deal of reading.

Coronavirus

• Manhattan commercial landlords peering over the precipice – My boss was just saying the other day how maybe it’s time to start looking for a smaller, cheaper office.
• Speaking of New York institutions collapsing under coronavirus-related strain, the MTA is losing $200 million a week – … how? Amtrak’s projected losses for 2020 in its entirety are $700 million.

Defense

• Chinese submarine enters cave facility: satellite photos – A man in a golden suit met it there, as guards in nondescript, unmarked uniforms proceeded to unload gold bars from its cargo hold. Part of this entry is fiction.
• Everything old is new again: French star-fort-FOBs in Mali
• Ski Jump Super Bug: coming soon to an Indian carrier near you?
• SHORAD Stryker looking pretty good – The upside to having a cheap, badly armored AFV chassis is that it’s a great base to stick other crap on top of, cf. M113.
• Did we fly a U-2 over China’s naval exercises? – We can neither confirm nor deny, etc. etc.
• SINKEX footage!

Guns

• Video from my first USPSA major match – Not only as a shooter, but also as staff. It was a good time. Probably a bit late for any other ones this year, but that’s fine—I have some gear updates to work on anyway.
• Making a heavyweight Glock – An older video, especially considering Mr. Humble Marksman has since moved on to a Beretta.
• Busting PMAG durability myths – … by shooting one that sat loaded for twelve years.

Grab Bag

• The wildest insurance fraud scheme Texas has ever seen – This dude has lived an extremely interesting life, which is his stated goal.
• The Air and Space Museum is working on digitizing a bunch of amazing color photos of WW2 – Color photography always makes history seem more real to me.
• Say what you like about the ChiComs, but they sure can do good propaganda – It’s a bunch of drones making a 3D light show in the sky.
• Cracking the scratch lottery code – An oldie, but a goodie.
• Remember the 1970s, and the left’s domestic terror campaign back then? – Good to be reminded that urban violence is nothing new.