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.