As parvusimperator settles into his new work digs, he’s been a bit more free with the article-sharing. Maybe we’ll get back onto a once-a-week routine, instead of this recent every-two-weeks one.

Discord Shout-Outs

• Our readers on the Discord (link’s in the sidebar) have come through with some fascinating stuff lately.
• boomerang-pigeon shares some archival documents from Bovington, on British tank development in the early Chieftain era.
• Kilo Sierra shows off some pretty woodworking.
• NATO/OTAN translates some R&D budget line items for the PLAN’s Type 076 LHD.
• It’s cool stuff. If you like what you read here, you should come on by.
• I have a few things in mind for alternate chat systems, if Discord ever decides to clamp down on tiny defense-affairs communities.

Defense

• Declassified Trump administration Pacific plan – I think it’s extremely unlikely that history will look kindly on Trump, but at least in the realm of foreign policy, I think that’s a bit unfair.
• Master Chief Douglas Healey’s recollections from his time aboard USS Long Beach – A delightful read.
• In the same vein, an interview with a Rhino backseater
• Big Navy’s plans to stop failing at shipbuilding – “the Navy will move forward by designing hulls around fielded systems with room for upgrades […]” Shocked Pikachu face! You mean that thing we’ve been pushing here for about as long as we’ve been writing defense commentary?
• UK Land Power: learning from how our allies’ armies are organized – Where “we” are the British, for the duration of the article. Like many articles written from a given nation’s point of view, it’s scathingly critical of that nation, and less so of that nation’s peers. Still interesting, and a pretty good overview of the organization of NATO armies.
• CDR Salamander, leader of the Paint Your Frickin’ Ships party – I’d vote for him, but I suspect there’s not much home in 2020s American politics for the kind of Southern gentleman who keeps a subscription to Garden & Gun.
• Pantsir Heist: America nabs one from Libya – Moscow notes that this is not actually much of an intelligence coup, because we’ve been able to get our grubby hands on the UAE’s Pantsirs.
• Speaking of which, Biden freezes F-35 sales to the UAE – Repeat after me: not everything your political opposites do is bad.
• Boeing and LockMart unveil their helo for the Blackhawk replacement program – It looks like something out of Call of Duty: coaxial rotors with a pusher.

Science and Technology

• Windows 10 bug causes NTFS corruption when viewing a certain file’s icon – It’s fixable corruption, but nevertheless, quite the bug.
• Electrodynamic tether testbest satellite to launch soon – Much as it sounds like witchcraft, “A satellite which can maneuver by running an electric current through a wire passing through a planet’s magnetic field” is a well-established concept.
• A transgalactic travel guide – How far can we go, given how fast we can go?
• CollapseOS: an operating system for After the End – I explicitly disagree with the guy’s prediction about the global supply chain collapsing by 2030, but it’s still interesting.
• CDR Salamander on Elon Musk – Mostly talking about how Musk’s style of leadership is explicitly anti-institutional, in the sense that he isn’t afraid to tear down rules when the rules are dumb.

gestures The World and Such

• Everything is Broken – COVID has convinced me of nothing so thoroughly as the utter decay of Western institutions generally.
• The Michael Scott Theory of Social Class – “The first major speech pattern between the characters is Posturetalk. Posturetalk is everything said by Michael, Dwight and Andy, to anyone: the staff, the execs, or each other. Everything they say is some form or another of meaningless, performative babbling. This is the language of living inside a construct; where your entire world lives within arbitrarily drawn boxes, and you have nothing concrete to attach to. It’s the only language that Michael knows how to speak.”
• In happier news, Redditors are screwing over hedge funds with a short squeeze on Gamestop – Are there any good guys in this story? Well, maybe the Redditors doing it for the lulz, but that’s about it, and even they aren’t the most sympathetic characters. Here’s a Twitter thread on the same topic.
• The new national American elite – Used to be that regional elites competed for national leadership. Now there’s an elite monoculture, and like most monopolies, it’s led to corruption and decrepitude.

Grab Bag

• A classic of the filk music genre – Filk: what happens when musically-inclined fans get together at science fiction conventions. This one could be a folk anthem for the Imperium of Mankind.
• A joke from Russia, badly translated: “The police reported a few hundred protestors on Sunday, and a few thousand were arrested.”
• A remark from a Russian wag, recounted third-hand: “In every joke, there’s a little bit of joke.”