I’ve been trying to sell a light horror story on and off for a year or two, and have had nibbles but no luck. It’s one of my best, and I want to get on to writing more in the same universe. I’m thinking about serializing it over at Many Words Main instead, and going for a once-per-week update schedule again. Thoughts?

Defense

• Broke: invading for oil – Woke: invading for lithium. (Nobody has been invaded for lithium yet, but it seems like it’s gonna happen at some point? Maybe?)
• The Navy’s UFO patents went through internal review, and there was a demo – It has to be a psyop, right? Or did some random scientist actually invent the future all in one go?
• Big Army gets over Not Invented Here bias, takes Israeli, Serbian, and Swedish self-propelled howitzers to Yuma for a shootout – We like Archer, but it’s a bit spendy.
• Want radar ground surveillance planes? The UK is selling its Sentinels – … for parts, though, so it’s a bit of a DIY project.
• Russia’s Predator knockoff fired its first guided missiles – Possibly the Russian laser-guided rockets? They’re pretty nifty for precision attack, as any DCS player will tell you, although the issue I have is usually running out of gas before running out of munitions. The DCS JF-17 has a 20-rocket laser-guided pod, and one pod per external fuel tank is about the right ratio.
• Japan joins the Church of Long Range, developing a 2000-km anti-ship missile

The ‘Rona

• Craft distillers hit with $14,000 fee for making hand sanitizer – Happily, after a loud and deserved outcry, the FDA (poster child for libertarianism in 2020) reversed course.

Science and Technology

• A very large amount of social science is based on surveys, and is thus garbage that doesn’t say anything valid – Story checks out.
• Large natural language models like GPT-2 and GPT-3 memorize personal information – Makes sense.
• Reading computer code isn’t the same as reading natural language – It uses similar, but not identical, parts of the brain as does doing crosswords or solving math problems.
• A variety of corn from Mexico grows aerial roots that support a microbiome which makes nitrogen – That is, it’s self-fertilizing corn.
• NASA’s Commercial Crew program was a great deal – Even counting the Starliner entry, which makes SpaceX look worse by averaging.
• “Now that the Arecibo radio telescope is gone, we should replace it with a radiotelescope on the far side of the moon” – I like the guts in the presentation of this idea. A far-side-of-the-moon observatory sounds awesome to me.

Guns

• Polymer80 raided by BATF – On the one hand, boo BATF. On the other hand, under the bogus constructive possession rule they’ve somehow managed not to have slapped down in court, an 80% frame plus all the tools and parts to turn it into a gun could well count as a firearm. Happily, the Firearms Policy Coalition is on the case.
• ATF also tried to push stricter regulations on pistol braces, which a loud and FPC-backed comment campaign seems to have shut down for now.
• The St. Louis prosecutor who campaigned on prosecuting the McCloskeys got booted from the case for impropriety – Up yours, lefty DA.
• IPSC history: minutes of the Columbia Conference, which founded IPSC and eventually led to our current USPSA – It’s an attachment in a thread at Enos, so I think you’ll probably need an account there to view it?

Grab Bag

• Jason Whitlock writes for Outkick the Coverage now? – Or maybe he just wanted to say something that most sports outlets would have regarded with about the same attitude as a block of plutonium.