I swear I’m not trying to turn this into a monthly feature—there’s been a lot going on, and news items (that we read and share in our links channel) have been following a drought or flood pattern.

Projects

• The Glockblaster 3D, which I mentioned way back in… wow, February… is almost done. Expect a series of posts following the build later in the year.

Defense

• Above the fold: Australia ditches France, returns to the Anglosphere for its subs and Pacific security arrangements – The Aussies are going nuclear! It’s a miracle it took as long as it did, because…
• … it was too expensive, and can’t do enough – Ouch.
• The French, ever those masters of grace and forgiveness, recalled their ambassadors from the US and Australia – Not the UK, though, because, to lightly paraphrase an actual official explanation, the French expect perfidy from those English dogs, and don’t think it’s worth any stern measures.
• The new bloc is called Aukus, which is an awful name – At least it doesn’t include New Zealand. Aukusnz? Just doesn’t work. Looks like it should include Poland, with that cluster at the end.
• Boeing rolls out Qatari F-15s – The inspiration, evidently, for the F-15EX.
• Coaxial rotorheads rejoice: Ka-52M gets a contract from Russia – The Ka-50, I’ve always said, is a traditional attack helicopter with two crew, except the two crew are in different airframes. The Ka-52 is a lot less exotic, although there aren’t a lot of serious attack helos with side-by-side seating. Perhaps because the coaxial rotors impose a speed limit already, so optimizing for low drag is less important.
• System tests of Rapid Dragon under way – Turning every cargo plane into a potential missile truck is a nice little force multiplier. I wonder if shanghaied commercial cargo planes could do the job? I don’t know how many of them have tail ramps, though.
• Why the Afghan army fell so quickly before the Taliban – Written by an Afghan general.
• USAF experimenting with antiship JDAMs – Which is quite the trick, considering JDAMs are for hitting a specific coordinate, rather than a specific moving object. Seems like a seeker swap. Possibly some munition networking.
• Military jetpacks now heading to Southeast Asia – It’s actually a different jetpack than the one the Royal Navy tested a while back.
• Team Bullpup crushed: Tavor to be retired – It lasted about ten years.
• Taiwan’s new corvettes have better a better ASuW fit than most major surface combatants – They are creatures of their time and place, I’ll say that.
• SoKor tests sub-launched ballistic missiles – Launched from a diesel boomer. Does South Korea secretly have the bomb, I wonder? We’re not upset, if so; just play nice with Japan.
• Officially retired, F-117s now play stealth aggressor – The Drive reports.
• Losing Small Wars: a boots-on-the-ground officer type reflects on the increasing centralization of Big Army command
• Israel working on stealthy fuel tanks for its F-35s – Israel: world leader in range extension.
• Germany working on Type 212CD: a stealth submarine – It goes like this: passive sonar doesn’t work as well as it used to, because submarines are all so quiet. So, active sonar is on the way back. Active sonar can be defeated by shaping, just like radar. That leads to strangely angular boats.

Science and Technology

• ASML is the most important company you’ve never heard of – Unless you know about microchip manufacturing. It’s a fascinating dive into their history and their cutting-edge extreme ultraviolet lithography machines. (They’re the only ones in the world who can make them.)
• Extremely outdated news: SpaceX standing down from Starlink launches
• Less outdated news: SpaceX launches first satellites with laser interlinks – The laser interlinks dramatically increase the capability of the constellation. It used to be that you had to talk to a satellite that could talk to you and a ground station. Now, traffic can bounce around in space until it gets to a satellite that can relay it to a ground station. A reporter asked Ol’ Musky, “How does transmitting into a country without a local downlink work on the regulatory side?” Musk replied: “They can shake their fist at the sky”. I like it.
• Today, on Techbros Reinvent: the timeshare
• Ig Nobel prize winner: when moving a rhinoceros by helicopter, is it better to carry it right-side up in a sling, or upside down, tied by the legs? – The answer may surprise you.

Guns

• Stop worrying about overpenetration
• Nine years after it was developed, semiauto SCARs finally get the non-reciprocating charging handle
• I took second-place Revolver at a USPSA major match – I’m conflicted about the implied bragging here. There aren’t a lot of matches where a high finish in Revolver is worthy of it. I did lose by a mere 5% to a grandmaster-level shooter at this one, however, and beat a guy who stomped me early this year.
• Does a light trigger increase accuracy? – I mean, obviously, yes, duh, but here’s some data to back it up.

The Rona

• A travelogue with a twist – Which I’ve spoiled, by putting it in this category. Part 2, part 3.
• Australia, penal colony past and future – “People in South Australia will be forced to download an app that combines facial recognition and geolocation. The state will text them at random times, and thereafter they will have 15 minutes to take a picture of their face in the location where they are supposed to be. Should they fail, the local police department will be sent to follow up in person.”
• Turns out there were Americans funding the Wuhan bat virus institute after all

The Economy, Stupid

• How I became an inflation crank – Where ‘I’ is the author of the piece. Yours truly has been an inflation crank for a few months already.
• Millennials aren’t poorer than their parents
• Is Chinese construction megacorp Evergrande finally going to collapse? – It hasn’t yet, at least, since this story started popping up a week or two ago.

Grab Bag

• Everyone loves a good museum heist story
• Is conventional wisdom on educational spending wrong? – Freddie de Boer, tax-and-print-and-spender (by his own admission!) says ‘yes’, if you consider throwing money at the problem the conventional wisdom.
• Graf Zeppelin returns to New York in 1929, flying through a celebratory aerial smoke screen – One of the coolest videos I’ve seen in a long time.
• Also in cool videos: helmet cam around Spa-Francorchamps
• This year, two cars split the F1 safety car job: the usual Merc, and now an Aston Martin… – …which sounds way, way better than the actual race cars. Oh, and Zandvoort’s a pretty cool track.

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.

Reloading press update: I’m looking now at a Dillon XL750, which seems to hit the right balance between price, size, and capability.

Projects

• Lots of stuff around the house.
• Parvusimperator remarks that he’s been engaged in planning the plan for a committee to lay out the vision for the forthcoming plan for architecting a future project. $GOVERNMENT_CONTRACTOR life!
• The Glockblaster 3D project I wrote about earlier in the year is nearly done. I need to write a progress update. I’ve been sharing more frequent, less formal updates at a semi-private forum for a collection of centrist and right-leaning tech enthusiasts. It’s a pleasant place, and if you find the tenor of the less politically neutral grab bag pieces agreeable rather than aggravating, you might like it there too.

Defense

• How do you say ‘The Cardinal of the Kremlin’ in Mandarin? – Largely confirmed now, I think?
• James D. Hornfischer, of The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors, passes away at 55 – That rates a pour one out.
• It has been 76 0 years since American aircraft flew combat missions from a foreign carrier – Smart money on it being a British ship both times.
• China kills Apple Daily – Hong Kong’s generally anti-CCP paper of record, not some Cupertino-focused news outlet.
• RN destroyers to go from 48 VLS cells to 72 – These are for MBDA Sea Ceptors, which frees up the Sylver cells for Aster 30s exclusively. A nice little upgrade for a previously underarmed destroyer.
• Japan’s deputy PM… guarantees Taiwanese independence? – Or at least indicates that the feeling in the Japanese government is that an invasion of Taiwan is sufficient grounds for Japan to call going to war with China self-defense.
• Also, random tech people (not defense news followers) on Twitter are starting to recognize that Japan is pretty clearly turning to a more expeditionary doctrine.

Science and Technology

• Sagitarrius A*: not a black hole after all? – Observations suggest it might be a clump of dark matter. I, of course, am on record as a dark matter skeptic (or rather: dark matter strikes me as an ugly math hack), so I’m doubtful.
• Amazon’s Lumberyard engine is now Open3D, an open-source engine – I hope it doesn’t entirely knock the wind from Godot’s sails.

Guns

• 3D printers have led to all kinds of wacky ideas in firearms design – This one fires from a rigid toroidal belt.
• I have accumulated some Ruger knowledge, which I should lay out in text form. It’s on my Youtube channel, along with this year’s match videos so far, for now.

Grab Bag

• It took three-point shooting an awfully long time to catch on in the NBA – For the same reason, broadly, that it took baseball front offices so long to start actually looking at representative statistics.
• de Blasio prepares to depart the New York mayor’s office, broadly disliked – Of course, the nation still doesn’t know who won, because the New York elections board is perhaps the most incompetent agency of an already all-embracingly incompetent city government.
• Whither the ticker-tape parade? – Maybe not the ticker-tape parade exactly, but the mass celebration of major accomplishments? Somehow, I doubt we’ll see a series of nationwide parades on the return of the first person to walk on Mars, and that’s the phenomenon the article wonders about.
• Japanese zoning laws are simple and sensible – I’m not sure if I consider those Japanese qualities or not.
• Culture wars are long wars – Fought on the scale of generations.

I’m thinking about getting a progressive press to make my USPSA reloading go a bit faster. Any recommendations? I’m thinking about waiting for that Frankford Arsenal FX-10 jobber to go on sale before I make a final decision.

Fishbreath’s Story of the Week

• If you stare into the machine-learning ad segmentation market, the machine-learning ad segmentation market stares back – AI-driven market segmentation for advertising doesn’t just learn from the world, it shapes it. It puts you into a bucket (which may not even exist organically). It shows you content relevant to that bucket. You become more a part of that bucket.

Defense

• Iran’s big AOR catches fire, sinks – They just commissioned another one, though.
• Big Army tips Oshkosh for Stryker 30mm cannon – Unmanned turret, with up to six brigades possible. A $942 million deal, if it goes all the way.
• Swap the barrel, and your 7.62 NATO gun can be a 6.8 TVCM one – Wonder if maybe we’re finally going to start seeing non-metallic cases take off? Wonder if they’re cheaper than brass for reloaders.
• Another bit on how McDonnell-Douglas’ culture ruined Boeing – It’s a little more complicated than that, but that’s why we put links to the full stories.
• Navy’s tanker drone makes history: refuels a manned aircraft for the first time
• The first B-21 bombers are in production and will soon be ready to test – Ground testing, in advance of flight testing. Also, “B-21 Raider” sounds very 1930s.
• Hyundai’s SoKor baby carrier isn’t so baby anymore – It’s basically HMS QE, but with Made In Republic of Korea stamped on the side. The Drive has more.
• Hyundai also pushing their IFV on Europe – Content warning: Norwegian.
• Drone fries other drones with microwaves
• Hawaii F-22s scramble on FAA request – But nobody’s saying why, and the FAA’s statement is hilariously vague. So I guess it’s aliens again.
• To distract you while we memory-hole the above story, here’s a photo of an F-22 wing tank storage facility – Or maybe it’s a set from a Bond flick. Hard to tell.
• Space Force moves at orbital speeds, builds and launches satellite in four months – That’s pretty good speed, especially as GPS

The ‘Rona

• The lab leak theory is now running in that noted right-wing conspiracist rag, Vanity Fair – Also, Jon Stewart apparently did a bit on it. Mainstreaming what I’ve kind of thought for a year now.
• Half of US enhanced pandemic unemployment benefits may have been paid out fraudulently – Good to know we’re getting value for our tax dollar.

Guns

• The true distance of a typical gunfight – A careful examination of the evidence suggests that it’s… the 3-5 yards that you hear as the received, unsourced wisdom.
• Biden admin’s ATF nominee lost a service weapon after leaving it in a car

Grab Bag

• Baseballers, robbed of steroids, turn to sticky substances – Or would a better headline be, pitchers get back at batters? Either way, rules are being broken, and authorities are turning a blind eye.
• Doctors afraid to use race-based statistics in diagnosis and treatment
• Master and Commander (film) to get a prequel – Well well! That’s good news. Somehow I suspect Russell Crowe may not be playing the title role again, if it’s a prequel.
• FBI builds fake encrypted-comms app to lure in criminals – I’ve always been a little suspicious of honeypots like this as a policing tactic.
• Princeton’s classics department drops Greek, Latin requirements – … isn’t that the whole point?
• Remember Dimming Betelgeuse earlier this year? – Or whenever that was? Turns out it was just dust, and the star isn’t going to obligingly go supernova and give us something cool to look at in the sky.

According to WordPress, I missed numbering one of these 113. The auto-post-numberer adds a ‘-2’ to duplicate names, so if I hadn’t renamed this one, it would have been 112-2-2.

Anyway, on to the news. Or, in some cases, the olds.

State-Sponsored Hijacking in Belarus

• Ryanair 4978 receives a fake bomb threat from Belarussian authorities, backed up by a MiG-29 – Because a dissident was on board.
• The UK, ex-EU, appears to be growing a pair – I think the EU later joined the UK in doing something similar.

Defense

• MLOK SA80 – How modern of them!
• Amphibious MC-130J is a dumb way to make a seaplane – It’s a C-130 floatplane, and it looks as silly as it sounds.
• Also on the shopping list, a high-speed VTOL plane
• Elbit strikes back on its BMS security
• I heard you like drones, so I put drones in your drones – Along with self-defense options from General Atomics, an article on how to keep drones relevant in a peer-on-peer conflict. By which The Drive seems to mean a conflict between peers with developed anti-drone capabilities, given how effective they were in the Armenia-Azerbaijan dustup.
• AReS is a strike HARM – I think? It’s not super-clear. Anyway, it launches from a shipping container, and might have more stages than the ‘one’ of the HARM.
• Beijing knows exactly what it’s saying when it rebuffs Washington’s request for high-level military talks – You might need paywall eliminator for this one.
• LockMart goes woke – At least in its executive training.
• Ronald Reagan, forward-deployed in Japan, will make a patrol to the Middle East to cover the Afghanistan withdrawal – Somehow, that feels like a bad idea to me, like the kind of bad idea people put in the history books under ‘reasons the war started’.

Science and Technology

• The story of the microwave, alternate edition: mini-documentary – Featuring the world’s best-preserved centenarian (or near-centenarian; I forget).
• Install a Russian keyboard to prevent ransomware attacks – Seriously. Russian hackers try to avoid hitting Russians, because they don’t want to attract the attention of local law enforcement, so they use ‘has a Russian keyboard’ as a proxy.
• Motorcycle airbag vests as a service – Sorry, you missed your payment! Now your airbag vest thing no longer works. On the one hand, I guess fair is fair. On the other hand, not everything ought to be sold on a subscription model.
• David Hilbert and the Fifth Roots of Unity – Mathematicians have answered one of Hilbert’s Big Questions, about constructions analogous to roots of unity for number systems beyond the rationals.

Guns

• Ammo shortage will stretch out for years, say manufacturers – On the other hand, I’ve heard anecdotes that primers are getting easier to find.
• H und K patents some manner of compact handgun – Little late to the party.
• New guns are hard to make – Gun Jesus tells you why.

Grab Bag

• Naming the elements in Chinese is really hard
• The word ‘lox’ has meant ‘salmon’ for 8,000 years
• Professional distance runner: a job for Ethiopian immigrants – Not a snide headline; actually just a description of the story.
• Amazon abandons arbitration clause in its terms of service – … because enterprising lawyers managed to make the process of filing for arbitration efficient enough that it started hitting Amazon’s bottom line. It’s like when Tom Brady plays the Ravens—just root for injuries.
• The Harmonica Yokocho is a 30,829 square-foot section of Tokyo supporting 100 shops, restaurants, and bars – I keep on telling you, the cyberpunk future is now.
• Things are rough for Boeing in the wake of removing the engineers from control and running the company like any other corporate behemoth – I mean, in the wake of the 737 MAX safety scandal.

Another two-week gap, but happily, I don’t think we have very much breaking news to turn into yesterday’s news.

Projects

• For some reason, my 3D printer is still having a devil of a time with miniatures (after having worked perfectly previously). Maybe it’s the nozzle. I plan to switch it back to a larger nozzle, with which to print some more Little Wars bits and bobs, before I eventually go back to miniatures.
• If you’ve been following the video half of my content production, you will have noticed the revolver reliability problems. I think I’m finally almost done with that. We’ll see sometime next week, most likely, when Bowen sends me the Ruger double-action revolver bushing tool I ordered.

Defense

• Why do F-16s carry wingtip AMRAAMs? – Reduces wing flutter.
• NATO exercise in the Black Sea includes all littoral countries except Turkey and Russia – Except for the two largest, most important countries with a Black Sea border, everyone was there!
• China builds villages inside Bhutan – Has been for five years.
• Why Kiribati and Kanton matter – Salamander points out that the great circle route from San Diego to Brisbane goes within 30 miles of the island of Kanton. Guess who wants to rebuild an airfield there?
• Army’s new fitness test fails 7% of men, 44% of women – Dog bites man more than man bites dog, to use the news analogy.
• The French generals wrote a second letter
• DTR writes some ad copy for Hanwha and Rheinmetall – Some pretty pictures.
• Iraq’s F-16 fleet may fall to the greatest enemy of all – Lack of maintenance. Lockheed contractors are on the way out.
• Strike Eagle ships JASSMs
• While the F-15EX will carry an oversized air-to-air missile
• Old experiments sadly abandoned: helicopter operation from submarines – The nice thing about having so much obsolete hardware around after the Second World War is that we could use some of it to experiment with random things like troop carrying submarines with a helicopter deck.
• The Long Range Hypersonic Weapon has a range of 1,725 miles
• Australia drops Elbit’s Battle Management System
• Perennial Soapbox favorite DCS is good enough for VR training Warthog pilots – There was a recent A-10C Block II or whatever in DCS. Maybe this is why?
• Army joining us in the 21st Century and building modularity into tank computer systems
• Biden administration caves to Kremlin on a Russian pipeline – Shortly before a German election likely to scupper the project anyway, but still.

Non-Breaking News

• Oh yeah, something did happen – The Colonial Pipeline thing!
• There was a state of emergency
• Why is there no shortage in Pittsburgh? – Because we have at least three major sources of fuel—pipelines from the Gulf, the Midwest, and the East Coast.
• Krebs on Security looks at the criminals behind the pipeline ransomware attack
• Colonial Pipeline paid $5 million ransom, part of the $90 million the crime gang took in before shuttering

Iron Dome

• Palestinian rocket attacks are bad for Israel… – … but they do make for good Iron Dome in action footage.
• Also good for long-exposure photography
• IDF dupes gullible media by reporting a ground invasion of Gaza, which drives fighters into tunnel systems, which Israel then bombs

Grab Bag

• The mysterious case of the Masters pimento cheese sandwhich – Augusta National fired a caterer, who kept the recipe secret. The next caterer, at great personal difficulty, figured out the secret ingredient. The club then fired that caterer.
• Patents filed: the Glock Rifle? – On the one hand, it’s literally just patent filings at this point. On the other hand, it’s pretty detailed patent filings.
• Historical photo: lowering a 16″ naval gun into a furnace to finish it
• Neural implant lets person type by imagining writing – Curiously, the implant requires retraining every few weeks. I wouldn’t have expected that.
• Progressive prosecutor presides over homicide spike – Water still wet, sky still blue.
• Are plate tectonics critical to life? Scientific American investigates

A bit late on the draw this week: work has been ridiculously busy, as has been the pattern lately.

I did at least fix the occasional ‘your IP address has been blocked’ message you might have been seeing: that page was getting cached as the homepage when spammers visited. It’s not fixed in the sense that the anti-spam plugin and the homepage play nice, but I turned off the anti-spam plugin and cleared the cache, so it looks solved from your perspective, non-logged-in readers.

Onward!

Defense

• NSM box launchers on unmanned trucks: the future of Marine aviation – The second part is maybe unwarranted snark, but they have been talking about giving up the baby carriers just at the point when baby carriers get useful with F-35s, haven’t they?
• Private aggressor aircraft provider Top Aces, not satisfied with having the coolest job in the world, now have the coolest Skyhawks – AESA, IRST… I wonder if you can stick AMRAAMs on?
• Oh, they also own 29 F-16s – I repeat: coolest job in the world.
• The technical alignment chart – These keep getting more niche… and I am on board.
• FNH builds a new lightweight machine gun – The “EVOLYS”. Just rolls off the tongue. It has some neat features, though, which I won’t spoil.
• Belgian farmer moves rock, expands Belgium – The former border dated back to the Treaty of Kortrijk (1820). “We should be able to avoid a new border war,” said the mayor of the neighboring French village, displaying an alarming lack of certainty. If the farmer doesn’t return the stone, the case goes to the Belgian foreign ministry, which would then summon a Franco-Belgian border commission inactive since 1930. European history is hilarious sometimes.

Sport, Motor, Formula

• After the 2014 rules changes, Mercedes F1 had an ‘idle mode’ to keep from destroying the field by too much – Relevant meme. The current team boss denies it, but then, of course he would.

China, Coronavirus, and Other Related Topics

• Here at the Soapbox, we like to demonstrate our editorial independence by honking off the Chinese government at every opportunity.
• The Chinese property market looks to me like some kind of scheme, perhaps one shaped like a three-dimensional triangular solid – Deposits from new buyers are being used to finish old construction, claims a guy on Twitter.
• Brazil rejects the Russian vaccine, which contains a replicating cold virus – Oops. Well, my Made in Russia Soviet Union pocket watch stopped working in pretty short order, and also, I spent enough time in Russia to develop an appreciation for all the nuance of на ремонт, so I can’t claim I’m totally surprised that something made in Russia would be of less than the best quality.
• It only took a year, but we finally figured out how COVID spreads! – Respiratory droplets. Shame that the lesson (avoid large groups in poorly-ventilated spaces) is now almost irrelevant, thanks to the widespread availability (in the US, at least) of vaccines.
• The lab leak hypothesis: increasingly likely – Not to say it was engineered, but any sober or even slightly tipsy examination of the evidence has to allow the possibility.
• Contractor with the PA health department leaks PII for 72,000 people – I don’t think I’m one of them, at least.

Twilight of the West

• We also like overwrought headings under which to sort articles.
• 20 French generals, 80 officers, and 1,000 men signed an open letter expressing concern over ‘mortal dangers’ that face the Republic – They don’t quite call for a coup. Quite.
• A Day in the Life: South African armored car driver – The armor holds. Late breaking: dashcam footage!
• Eviction moratoriums: both sides – For a commie rag, the Washington Post is slightly more sympathetic to the landlord side than I would have guessed.

Grab Bag

• Excavator shoveling slag – It’s the most metal thing I saw last week. … don’t forget to tip your waiters and waitresses.
• Ars Technica slobbers all over Invincible, the Amazon animated superhero series, which is good but not quite as good as the ArsTech review says – Issue 1: ‘fun’ is the wrong word for it. It’s very rarely fun in the traditional superhero sense, and when it is, it’s quickly interrupted by ultra-gory realism. Issue 2: the voice cast is extremely uneven, because there aren’t a lot of people in it with serious experience doing voice work. (J.K. Simmons is, as always, worth the price of admission.) Issue 3: there’s an attempt at young adult drama, which is deeply tonally inconsistent with the rest of the show, and mostly just drags.