It looks like The Sunday Papers are here to stay.

Defense

• Kongsberg still has a sub-launched NSM in the works – I’m still iffy on the range, or lack thereof.
• What can SEWIP do? A tour of the Navy’s new electronic warfare system, with Northrop Grumman’s Mike Meaney
• Twitter favorite John Hayward points out the ways in which our Afghanistan nation-building program was doomed from the start – A Twitter favorite of mine.
• [Another view of the same problem, from within the boots of someone who spent time on the ground there]
  (https://amplifiedbeing.com/2021/08/15/what-just-happened/)
• The Northern Alliance is asking for weapons again – Everything old is new.
• In Australia, the Boxer has a turret problem – “Overweight and unprotected from missiles”.
• Guest bloggers at CDR Salamander’s talk about an operational model for a China-countering Navy – The short version is, stop robbing Peter to pay Paul in re: up-tempo carrier deployment cycles.
• Big Army’s first laser weapon enters testing – The Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office is building a platoon of SHORAD laser Strykers, further cementing the Stryker’s place as the M113 of the 21st century.
• The Beeb does some good work for a change: a deep dive into the Russian mercenary organization Wagner, courtesy of a tablet left behind on a battlefield
• South Koreans now dislike China more than Japan – It’s a generational shift, but nevertheless a good one for the forces of freedom and democracy in the Far East.

Science and Technology

• Google creates time crystals with a quantum computer – I’m not quite up on the science here, but I think a time crystal is a construct that oscillates between two states without any energy input.
• SpaceX stacks Starship and Super Heavy for the first time – History books of the future: Space Age, Information Age, Space Age 2.
• Billionaires team up to strip-mine Greenland for electric car batteries
• Mathematician-comedians David Cox and Steven Zucker met as Princeton grad students, and spent five years rifling through unsolved problems so they could write a joint paper – They created an algorithm they called the Cox-Zucker machine.
• A past story, updated: that insect apocalypse that was in the news some time ago is probably nothing
• Disney now making stuntman robots – That seems bad, from a machine apocalypse perspective.
• In less scary robotics news: farm robots that scoot around fields and zap weeds with lasers – Can I get one for my lawn? … Can I make one for my lawn?
• This guy on Youtube has several hours of videos on the Champlain Towers South collapse, laying out the evidence and discussing possible causes of the disaster – Highly recommended. While I’m usually a ‘give me an article’ guy, he makes excellent use of the medium, with annotated photos in real time.

COVID

• Prepper, libertarian-ish guy, and Ars Technica founder (since departed) Jon Stokes is starting to get worried about COVID again, which is maybe a canary. He’s a fairly clear-eyed dude. We’ll keep you updated.
• Plastic barriers probably don’t help – Ventilation is the COVID-killer, which is why airplanes are quite safe despite what you’d think. Plastic barriers can interfere with ventilation.

History

• The pilot’s training manual for the B-25 – Full of technical detail, but also an interesting segment on how to be the commander of a bomber crew.
• Farewell to Bourgeois Kings – An essay on how the world is changing. Is this the end of managerial-class bureaucracy, in the same way that the 1800s were the death of monarchy?

Grab Bag

• Bacon to disappear from California, thanks to new regulations – Couldn’t happen to a nicer state!
• University of Iowa officials who violated free exercise rights for a campus Christian group will not get qualified immunity
• Second-largest mortgage lender in the US will start accepting Bitcoin later this year – That seems like a good reason to get some crypto into the portfolio somehow…
• Black vultures are less considerate than their red-headed cousins; sometimes eat livestock before it’s dead – Now, Indiana farmers can kill ’em and hang them in effigy, which the article remarks is a successful method to deter future predation.

Oh dear, it’s been quite a while, hasn’t it?

With the increasing business and attendant busy-ness at work, I’m considering making this week’s tongue-in-cheek change a permanent one. We picked Wednesday for the What We’re Reading back when we had a post from me on some Saturdays and a post from parvusimperator most Tuesdays and Thursdays. It made a lot more sense when Tuesday through Thursday was a solid block of content. Now that that condition no longer holds, I don’t know if I have much reason to carry on trying to carve 45 minutes out of my Wednesdays to whip this up, when Sunday is a whole lot more open.

Projects

• I did buy a new reloading press. It’s a Dillon XL750, and I quite like it.
• The revolver technique content I promised is delayed, because we had a pipe leak and the attendant plumbing and remediation work to contract out and do, respectively.

Defense

• PacFleet commander says he has a duty to prevent seizure of Taiwan – This came shortly after the remarks by a Japanese official that an attack on Taiwan would be a threat to the national security of Japan.
• Outline detection in the ENVG-B – Through the medium of a Blackhawk on the ramp.
• Poland could buy Abrams
• Poland is buying Abrams – Use Google Translate. It looks like they’re getting some of the mothball fleet, upgraded to SEPv3.
• Poland is also buying Patriot – Bit of a spending spree recently. There have been whispers of Russia looking to build permanent bases in Belarus. Perhaps that has Poland looking over its shoulder a bit nervously.
• Evaluating the Dutch CV90 MLU – It has even more of the ‘looks like a tank’ problem than the Bradley does. Parvusimperator remarks that the Aussies ruled out the CV90 Mark IV on cost grounds.
• CDR Salamander: culture is upstream of everything – Is the Navy too risk-intolerant? Are its incentives improperly aligned? Contra Betteridge’s Law, the answer to those questions is ‘yes’.
• Thresher‘s crew may have survived for hours, according to new documents – Bubblehead Twitter was extremely doubtful.
• Drone-defeat system demoed aboard M80 Stiletto
• The XF108: a 50s interceptor with a rotary missile launcher
• US Navy wallpapers over F-35C shortages – “Instead of two squadrons per air wing with 10 tails, the Navy will now field a single squadron with 14 tails.”
• Afghans fleeing Taliban advances seek refuge in Turkey
• Point Blank Enterprises takes an OMFV phase 2 slot – The other entrants: Rheinmetall, BAE, GDLS, and Oshkosh.

Science and Technology

• A Chemical Hunger: why are people so fat these days? – A review of the evidence in favor of chemical contaminants being the cause. Particularly compelling: county-level maps of obesity are very similar to maps of watershed catchment area. A long read: it has at least eight parts at the time of writing.
• Should social media platforms be regulated like common carriers? – Eugene Volokh argues that some kind of common carrier-like regime may be correct. We have a fair bit of editorial independence here, because we’re not beholden to Big Tech, but there are plenty of ways we could still get shut down given a substantial enough pressure campaign.
• China seizes UK’s largest microchip manufacturer – Barely even hyperbole, that headline.
• China also cracks down on its equivalent to US big tech – Content warning: a pundit who is, in my experience, frequently wrong. That said, I think he’s right on this one: China isn’t hitting companies that make tangible things, just its domestic software industry. Which is dumb, given that a domestic software industry helps encourage the development of the software engineers you need to make tangible tech, but central planners never got high marks for making good decisions.
• Big earthquake in Alaska – Right next door to the Cascadia fault, where we should be expecting the next Big One.

Grab Bag

• The Atlantic, without a punching bag in the White House, is in dire straits – I can rouse myself to care about enough to laugh, and to suggest that maybe if they concerned themselves more with speaking truth to power no matter who holds it, rather than being in the tank for one team. We don’t really hide our politics here, but I like to think that we’re equal-opportunity hard on targets in our core area of operation, defense affairs.
• The Beale Ciphers: America’s most famous buried treasure? – And, on balance, likely a hoax.

The ‘Rona

• Much more than you wanted to know about lockdown effectiveness – Courtesy Scott Alexander.