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.