Issue #99! Thank you for following along for the two-ish years we’ve been sharing what passes for our reading list. I’ll maybe try to do something big for the next one of these—going back and finding predictions might be fun.

Books

• I’m in the middle of Brian Enos Practical Shooting Beyond Fundamentals, and finding it useful. He’s gotten past the Zen-iest bits at the beginning, and some of his notes on grip and sight focus have stuck with me. Hopefully they pay off at the range.
• Parvusimperator is probably reading things too.

Defense

• What we’re selling to the UAE, in the brief period between now and when US Middle East policy goes back to ‘what failed novelists in the early 2010s though would be cool’ – F35s, Reapers, and an awful lot of air-launched munitions.
• Canada’s next frigate is a hull wrapped around VLSes – An unspecified number of Sea Ceptors (possibly 24, quad-packed in six midships VLS cells), a 32-tube Tomahawk-length Mk 41, and the increasingly-popular Naval Strike Missile box launchers.
• Italy is building effective ships at a pace the US should mimic, if we’re serious about holding the Western line against China in the 21st century: Salamander – In a quiet, workmanlike fashion, the Italians are over there building good ships.
• China to build An-225s – I think, in an older post where I planned some Luchtbourgish air landing forces, I worked out that an An-225 can plausibly fit six BMP-3s.
• A patent on non-explosive reactive armor – It’s basically rocket fuel.
• Nagorno-Karabakh War 2020 ends: Azerbaijan wins – The big takeaway? The vulnerability of ground forces to loitering munitions and drones. Also, that sentence (… fragment) is very nearly word-for-word ripped from a book of War in the Future™ sci-fi I had as a teenager.
• Photos: a B-1 carries a JSOW externally

Science and Technology

• We might get a negative leap second – This will, of course, blow up a large amount of computer timekeeping infrastructure, because we computer people didn’t think of that.
• Arecibo radio observatory to be decommissioned – Sad to lose an awesome piece of engineering as well as a big radio observatory, but Arecibo was also the biggest active radar dish in the world too, which will leave us still more vulnerable to alien invasion.
• There are now three COVID vaccines in the home stretch. AstraZeneca’s, which is (probably; sample sizes are awful small) less effective than the first two candidates to pull out of the final corner, is also substantially cheaper ($3 per dose against $20+) and requires no more cold storage than a minifridge, and AstraZeneca says they can manufacture about 1.5 billion double-dose courses in 2021, against a few hundred million of the others.

History

• The truth behind the Rolls Royce vs. Packard-build Merlin debate – The story, as ever, is slightly more complicated than the ‘Packard laughs at Rolls-Royce, saying, the design is too hand-fit to work in a factory’ version I have hitherto been fond of telling.
• The AGM-122 Sidearm – It’s a hoot in the DCS Harrier.

Grab Bag

• Violence in Minneapolis surges; cops quit en masse – Whaaaaaaa? Whoever could have predicted this?
• Bengals QB Joe Burrow blows out a knee – The poor guy. The Bengals did not do a great job keeping him safe.
• America’s invisible pot addicts – This is one of those places where a clearly bad policy (aggressive enforcement against a relatively harmless drug) yielded whiplash to an opposite but also bad policy (pot everywhere!).
• China’s one-child policy: a brief history – Also, a tragic history, ultimately.
• Ever wanted to play a game of H. G. Wells’ classic Little Wars, but balked at spending a factory Glock’s worth of your hard-earned money on antique toy cannon? Well, I’m working on a 3D-printed option.

I’m a few weeks late in mentioning this, but Parvusimperator no longer works in the office next to me. He’s moved on to greener pastures; he requested I not say exactly where, but I will remark that you’d recognize the name.

Defense

• Armenia loses – Azerbaijan’s ties to Turkey, with its F-16s and native drones, proved too much to overcome. It is also another indictment of the West; after Armenia spent a lot of effort escaping the orbit of Russia, Europe and the US did exactly nothing in terms of material aid. Expect some soul-searching in that part of the world, and some wondering whether co-religionists in Russia will be better allies than democracies in Europe.
• On a lighter note, the tank alignment chart – I think I am an Or Purist—as long as it’s in one of the pure columns, I think ‘tank’ is appropriate.
• Taiwanese citizens panic on news of Biden’s election – Say what you like about Trump, but his first term featured some big successes in the foreign policy realm that a Biden administration is not likely to continue.
• Big Army officially selects the SM-6 as its Mid-Range Capability missile – It seems like a slightly odd choice for a ground-to-ground missile, but two thumbs up for buying something already in service.
• Northrop Grumman to replace the Reaper with something stealthy and autonomous – Fun. Reaper would have been a good name for a stealthy second-generation drone, but alas, it’s already taken.
• Video of the week: Hellfire seekers searching
• Biden to start war with Brazil? – A tongue-in-cheek summation of a rumor that a Biden administration will name certain countries ‘climate outlaws’.
• Moltke’s Matrix of Officer Attributes – It generalizes well to other fields, too.

Science and Technology

• Spanish scientists in China are making promising … human-money chimeras?! – For the love of God, China, crack down on this sort of thing! What good is it being a bunch of commie dictators if you aren’t going to use that power?

Guns

• A USPSA range officer died after a competitor dropped a gun, which went off on striking the ground.
• It was a Shadow 2, which was dropped on the hammer; here’s a test of a similar scenario – There are two kinds of dropped-gun discharges: the hammer-strike ones like this, and inertia-related ones, where the change in velocity on hitting the ground either trips a sear (a la recent P320 troubles), or drives a floating firing pin into the primer against spring tension (usually only with lighter firing pin springs, extended firing pins, or both).
• Here’s an eleven-page thread on the Enos forums about same
• Here are some examples of other dropped-gun discharges from Tactical Life

Grab Bag

• Stock exchanges relocating to Texas? – Data centers, at least; New Jersey (where the data centers are based now) wants to implement a one-cent financial transaction tax.
• The New York Times has always been a liberal rag with purported good intentions, but now the second half is going away
• On Big Tech censorship – That’s why we’re (largely) independent of Big Tech here at the Soapbox.
• On the collapse of empires – A chilling vision of things to come, to quote Kent Brockman. Morlock is one of those folks who I don’t always agree with, but who always makes me think (like Putin, to my SPBGU professors circa 2010). Unusually for that crowd, he comes at me from the neoreactionary direction, rather than the center-left one. Anyway, go for the chilling vision of things to come, stay for the astrophysics metaphors.

If you’re the kind of person who looks at the URL bar, you might have noticed we went from a URL ending in 95 to one ending in 95-2 to one ending in 97. Getting real close to that centennial now.

Defense

• 492nd Fighter Squadron has some fun with nose art for Halloween – Yes, it’s been a little bit since we did a What We’re Reading.
• Pour one out for HMS Bristol, the Royal Navy’s biggest surface combatant – I think, at least.
• Inside the Special Boat Service, or at least as far inside as The Drive can get
• Japanese F-35s train with USS America – Japan’s F-35As, however, not their Bravos. That would be a bit too on the nose, having American F-35Bs fly off of their not-carriers, and flying their own off of our pseudo-carriers.
• Integrating AI into tanks: ATLAS and how it works – Kind of like a batman. “I say, Jeeves, what would you recommend for that T-80?” “Why, sabot, I should think, sir.” “Jolly good.”

Games

• Lawsuit claims EA’s loot boxes are an illegal gambling system – Alas, only under the laws of Canada.

Science and Technology

• Inertia demonstrated by dust on a tennis racket – High-speed cameras are the best.
• The Starlink Terms of Service require you to recognize that Mars is a free planet and that Earth-based governments have no authority or sovereignty over Martian affairs – Baller move.
• The Starlink terms of service are attached to the Starlink public beta, which provides service comparable to low-tier fiber at a slight premium – Suddenly, living in the country and working remotely is a whole lot easier. Except when it rains.
• Right to repair: a rare gleam of bipartisan agreement – It’s not left vs. right, it’s the people vs. the cyberpunk megacorps.
• A funeral for Google Play Music – Guess it’s time to get that lifetime Plex Pass so I can host a lesser service myself.
• Weirdo bubblehead slang – There’s a lot of it.
• What it’s like to be locked out of your Google account – I really ought to run some preparedness drills and make sure there’s nothing in my Google account that I can’t get at some other way.

Guns

• Glock 26 Grandmaster Tony Wong speaks – He’s a very unusual character, the epitome of ‘the gun doesn’t matter’, and probably not giving super-useful advice in the same way that Usain Bolt probably isn’t going to be able to teach the average joe how to run that fast. Talent matters.
• Kimber flees North Cuomostan for greener pastures – Troy, AL.
• Shooting drill of the week: The Challenge

Grab Bag

• Sidewalk vaults and true obsolescence – I shared this story instead of the one about the New Yorker who fell through a sidewalk into an abyss of rats.
• COVID was great for the Cannonball Run – What a story this is.

Decision 2020

• There is, at the time of writing, still an election on.
• Class in America is divided by this question: do you shower before work, or after?