Short one this week.

Defense

• Tico heads to the scrappers
• Is a Biden win a win for China? – This guy says ‘yes’.
• Speaking of China, they have a new rifle! – It has one of those foregrip-bipods, at least in the press photo.
• 1,000 miles in ten minutes: the Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon – Speedy. (The article gives its speed in Mach first, but I’ve always hated Mach number speed measurement without an altitude to go with it.) ARRW, or ‘Arrow’. You know, American military procurement people, if you want to call a missile the Arrow, you can just call it Arrow. You don’t need an acronym. Ask the British about BRIMSTO—I mean, Brimstone.
• Friend of a friend: Japan to sell arms to Vietnam

Science and Technology

• Security researchers find UEFI malware in the wild – Rootkit alert!

Boogaloo?

• Some dudes in Michigan made a really bad plan to kidnap the governor – Want your opsec to be better than theirs? Here’s a primer on codes and encryption.
• CityLab: there’s no such thing as a dangerous neighborhood, only dangerous people whose actions are generally constrained to a small geographical area – Headline paraphrased. Sure, I’m making fun of it a bit, but it does pretty clearly show that broadly-targeted gun bans are ineffective at actually reducing crime, and not narrowly tailored to fit the state’s interest in doing so in the first place, so there’s that.

Grab Bag

• Japan’s lost generation: 2020 update – Among the entertainments I permit myself to consume is My Hero Academia, and I see some fascinating (intentional?) parallels between that franchise’s villains and some of the descriptions of the generation in question in the article.
• Here is a 114-foot, 7400hp yacht… with an 800nm range? – That’s because it was originally the tender for a much larger yacht, in case its owner wanted to pop from Cannes to Corsica for lunch.
• October match #1 – It’s a little disappointing after September match #2, but that’s the way it goes in this sport.

It’s late, so the commentary won’t be as inspired as usual.

Update: actually, it’s early, and I forgot to hit publish last night, so here you are.

China

• The New York Times never met a Communist dictator whose propaganda they wouldn’t happily publish – Certain US Senators still beyond the pale, as far as I can tell.
• Nobody really likes China – Hmmm. I wonder why.

Coronavirus

• You’ve heard about R, but what about k? – R is the average number of cases each new case generates. k is a measure of how clustered those cases are. COVID-19 spreads in clustered (it seems).

Defense

• Turkey and France face off over Armenia-Azerbaijan
• US Navy now shipping a new EW system
• Rods from God, the cheap version – That is, a C-17 dropping pallets of (mock) JASSMs.
• Macron says Europe should stop buying American arms – And buy French ones, presumably.
• India test-fires long-range supersonic anti-sub missile – Parvusimperator and I used this story to gripe about how awful US missile procurement has been over the past three decades.
• Haenel MK556 won the G36 replacement contest because it was cheap – Shocker.
• Her Majesty’s Death Ray: the AIM-9L in the Falklands! – Fun fact from within: some of the Sea Harrier pilots in the task force had fewer than ten hours in that jet’s cockpit prior to the fight. Ten hours into a DCS module and I can barely even start the thing reliably.

Science and Technology

• Physicists build circuit that generates electricity from graphene – That is, from the thermal motion of graphene at room temperature. They seem to have sussed out a way to make the thermodynamics work out. I wish the article said something about what kind of voltages they’re generating—how far away are we from, say, a useful sensor-with-BLE chip that lasts forever? Because that would be handy.
• Airbus and the hydrogen-fueled airliner of the future – Parvusimperator’s jokes about exploding airlines aside, it seems to me that some kind of liquid fuel is going to be required for aviation until such time as we start flying fusion jets around. Synthetic Jet-A seems more likely to me, though.
• Otto Aviation reveals the Celera 500L – Thanks to laminar flow, it gets similar fuel mileage to my car, and cruises at 460 miles per hour on (coincidentally) 460 cruise horsepower out of a 6.3L turbodiesel.

Sport

• Honda to quit F1 – It’s not the first time Honda’s quit F1 after not doing as well as they would have hoped.
• In Japan, they can’t do IPSC because nobody’s allowed to have guns, but they can do IPSC Action Air – This guy subscribed to me on Youtube, and I find the idea of a competitive shooting community in Japan oddly fascinating for some reason. The guy in the linked clip is shooting an Open gun, compensator and everything. Even without the compensator, I bet it would shoot just as flat.
• Speaking of match videos, here’s one of mine – With third-person footage and full-fat, non-airgun bullets¹.

Grab Bag

• Which US states are poorer than the UK, in terms of GDP per capita? – South Carolina, Idaho, and Mississippi. That’s all. I wouldn’t have guessed, and GDP per capita doesn’t even account for tax burden.

Autumn is now fully upon us here in western PA, and with the long, dark evenings comes more time for inside pursuits like writing. I have a biggish 2020 USPSA season wrap-up in the pipeline, along with some other revolver-related content (what can I say, I have a one-track mind), and parvusimperator has a few intriguing drafts going too.

War in the East: Azerbaijan and Armenia kick it off

• A quick outline from Sunday
• A web of major power backers quickly emerges – Pakistan and Turkey at least are in on the Azeri side. Russia and India are backing Armenia. France has spoken out against Turkey.
• Turkey denies shooting down Armenian Su-25
• At least the US has practiced this a bunch of times – Atropia and Limaria, classic combatants in American wargames, correspond almost exactly to Azerbaijan and Armenia. Unfortunately, the DCS Caucasus map doesn’t get quite far enough east and south.

Defense

• Tim Taylor’s Chinook – About an extra 5,000 horsepower. Nice. Also, here’s a picture of a King Stallion carrying a Chinook; I don’t think I realized they were comparable in size, an embarrassing admission from the blog’s resident rotorhead.
• The Sparrowhawk: a drone-launched drone – General Atomics says it can be recovered in flight, too.
• Danes choose Elcan SpecterDR as their new daylight rifle scope – I don’t remember if parvusimperator ever got rid of his Elcan, but he sure does/did like it for what it was.
• Pentagon proposals for a 500-ship navy – The War Zone calls them ‘highly questionable’.
• In choice between CH-53K and CH-47, Germany chooses ‘neither’ – Germany will have to get by with its existing liftscrewers.

Pretty Pictures

• A polished P-38

The ‘Rona and Associated Cultural Phenomena

• We still don’t know if COVID is small-droplet airborne or large-droplet sneezeborne – Seems like we should have figured that out by now.
• Yurts and heat lamps: outdoor dining in the New York winter – Around here, a lot of restaurants are opening back up at 50% indoor capacity, which I guess is fine? Our county is doing pretty well, and since we’re currently creatures of the suburbs, it’s not like there are many community cases floating around.
• Meanwhile, in LA, faceless kitchens-in-a-strip-mall pretend to be a dozen different delivery-only brands at once
• Maryland man jailed for one year for throwing a party – I’ve heard the term ‘midwit’ bandied about on Twitter, and don’t really like being that deliberately inflammatory, but I’m having a hard time thinking of a better word for the kind of person who celebrates a state governor imprisoning someone for organizing a peaceable assembly.

Science and Technology

• This comet has an aurora – Not like ours. Maybe an aura is more accurate than an aurora?
• Relevant to the below category: how to disappear in a smart city – If anything, the author does not show sufficient dedication to the idea. She doesn’t seem to have quite decided that true disappearance requires leaving your phone behind.
• D-Wave releases an next-gen quantum annealing chip – Interesting technology, but I keep on hearing that whenever D-Wave makes a quantum leap (ha), classical hardware and algorithms catch up pretty quickly.

China

• Xinjiang-tested, now Tibet-applied: China’s reeducation camps arrive in a second region
• Indian geostrategist: China is paying a high price for provoking India – Parvusimperator, succinctly: “Good. Fuck ’em.”
• CCP rewrites the Bible: Jesus chooses to stone the sinner woman to teach respect for the law – ‘To hell with that’ is less an expression of disgust and more an observation, in this case.
• ‘China feels increasingly like North Korea,’ says WaPo reporter
• We’re not making any friends among the ChiComs this week, are we? Well, see parvusimperator’s earlier comment.

Guns Etc.

• I’ve been looking for a good glove I can use for revolver work: matches on hot days, and practice generally, when the cylinder quickly gets too hot for reloads – Parvusimperator shared this review. They look pretty good. I don’t actually need a ton of dexterity, since I only ever wear one on my left hand, and that hand’s only jobs are playing support on the two-hand grip, holding the (potentially hot) cylinder during reloads, and thumbing the ejector.
• The logic error behind the gun debate – I have noticed this in talking to my largely-lefty college friends. At least it’s less awkward than explaining the colors of USPSA targets.
• Remington chopped up, sold off – Ruger bought Marlin, which seems like a good match. I look forward to a Ruger-brand lever gun.

Decision 2020

• Larry Correia, ex-tax accountant, opines on the Trump tax leak – “On the other side, you know damned good and well that the IRS has sent their most fearsome auditor against him. This man sold his soul to the devil, and then fined the devil for failing to list that soul as a depreciable asset.”
• The debate in pictures – Well, one picture. … more a meme, really.

Grab Bag

• As ever, the revolutionary vanguard comprises dumb rich kids
• A generalist lockpicking kit – I’m not good enough with my picks to really make much use of this information, but it’s nevertheless good information.
• Ever thought, “Man, the Niven-Pournelle novel Footfall was a great alien invasion story; I wish I could play it in game form?” – Well, the Terra Invicta kickstarter has you covered. I haven’t chipped in yet, but I’m excited for it.

Any thoughts on what we should do for the upcoming 100th edition of What We’re Reading?

WuFlu

• Is SARS-CoV-2 a product of gain-of-function research? – Gain-of-function research being the head-scratching idea that it’s somehow wise or worthwhile to turn viruses which can’t infect humans into viruses which can, to, I dunno, see if it can be done? Cue Ian Malcolm quote.
• In that tweet, a guy called Peter Daszak is quoted on the subject of enhancing ‘SARS-related CoVs’, back in November 2019 – Here he is in Boston Magazine, identified as president of an organization that funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology, vehemently denying that research at that institute which involved identifying spike proteins that could cause bat viruses to infect humans and making new viruses from them could have possibly caused a human outbreak of a bat coronavirus in Wuhan.
• Elsewhere in that Twitter thread, there’s some speculation that virologists who (rightfully, it seems to me) consider gain-of-function research to be an awful idea aren’t speaking up for professional reasons; who wants to be remembered as the person who caused the entire world to ban their field of research? Besides people with a sense of perspective, or, you know, morals.

Defense

• Experts: “Next war likely to be fought differently than last war” – Really staking out a bold position there, guys.
• Big Army bows to defense contractor pressure, will not be entering its own vehicle into OMFV Redux – Shame. It would have been nice to have a first-party design. We’ve gotten away from that for some reason, and it seems like it was a strictly superior way to do business in hindsight.
• Marines now building ‘littoral regiments’ with an eye on taking Chinese airfield-islands – Parvusimperator’s remark, lightly paraphrased because I can’t be bothered to find it in the internal chat backscroll: “I love the Marines’ small-unit stuff, but I scratch my head at their strategy.”

3D-Printed Guns

A special topic! There have been exciting developments in the field.

• “Mom, can we have Mauser Broomhandle?” – We have Mauser Broomhandle at home. See the link to finish the joke.
• You’ve seen 3D-printed ARs, now with reinforcing U-bolts, but what about a 3D-printed AK? – Receiver is gloriously chunky, for strength to match iron soldiers of motherland.
• Want an illegal suppressor without having to deal with the fed-bait of ordering a fuel filter housing from China? – Here’s a version you can print, just add your own entirely innocent hardware. I don’t advocate 3D-printing illegal things, but I do certainly advocate knowing how.

Non-3D-Printed Guns

• Karl of InRange TV making every effort at fairness in re: a volley-fire .22 WMR revolver – Unrelated to the topic at hand, I find myself less enthused with InRange’s match videos now that I’ve had a few years to get used to USPSA. The InRange-style 2-gun match, with its excessive reliance on physical challenges and punitive par times, is not as interesting to me as it once was.
• T̶h̶r̶o̶w̶b̶a̶c̶k̶ ̶T̶h̶u̶r̶s̶d̶a̶y̶ Wayback Wednesday: Steyr’s scout rifle, an American Rifleman review from 1998 – The second gun I bought was a Mosin carbine, which I proceeded to turn into a scout-ish rifle. I still like it, although I haven’t had any of my rifles out to the range in quite some time now. I should have a go at the 550-yard plate at my new range with the K31, though.
• The price of Remington’s ammo plants, its most valuable asset: $65 million – Blast. That’s a bit steep for just the two of us. Maybe they’ll sell primers? I could really use some small pistol primers.
• From the ads in USPSA magazine: the Gill Arms GPR 9M, a striker-fired pistol with… innovations? – At least, I think they’re innovations. For one, the passive safety is that the striker is locked out of line with the primer until the trigger is pulled. For another, the magazine tapers in two different places, which is evidently better for reliability? Not having $800 to spend on a random pistol, I can’t say if any of that is true. Even if I did have the $800, I don’t see any for sale.

Other Science and Technology

• Watch an internal combustion engine turn into an external internal combustion engine – It looks like a runaway to me. Turbo springs a leak, and suddenly your engine has a bunch more fuel, and therefore starts spinning faster, and the cycle continues until the engine escapes.
• Why is the world becoming more allergic to food? – The story doesn’t actually answer the question in the headline, but does suggest that eating trigger foods at a young age stops food allergies from developing.
• A teenager with an integrated circuit fab in his parents’ garage – He doesn’t have a clean room, so contamination means he can’t get much below 10µm feature size, but he could pretty conceivably make simple, 70s-era microprocessors. That’s wild.

History

• Want a document on the Maus tank from Allied researchers? – Here you go. I even put it in the Many Words Google Drive, so you don’t have to deal with a stupid 100-second download delay and a speed cap at 60 kilobytes per second.
• How chunky is the P-47? – This chunky. The original Twitterer stole my joke, so you get this instead.
• The Record of Proceedings of the Board of Inquiry into the loss of USS Thresher is now available, in only lightly-redacted form

Decision 2020 Etc.

• Princeton says racism is embedded in the structures of the university; DOE opens investigation – “… such an admission from [Princeton president] Eisgruber raises concerns that Princeton has been receiving tens of millions of dollars in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” Inject the schadenfreude into my veins, please.
• Portland sees surge in shootings after mayor disbands PD’s gun crimes unit – Whoever could have seen this coming?

Grab Bag

• Fake Counterstrike cheats that sabotage the player using them – Brilliant. Hopefully not staged.
• Chinese propaganda or canny realpolitik? You decide – It’s a (paywalled) story on the topic of why China as she is now might be preferable to a democratic China. (If you are offended by paywalls, consider this extension). One of the arguments is, “A democratic China might be less patient in dealing with Hong Kong and Taiwan,” which seems to me to be definitively missing the point of the Hong Kong protests, and plausibly missing the point of Taiwan’s continued preference for independence. Would Taiwan care so much if its putative motherland were a democratic state with a bunch of guaranteed freedoms? I am not qualified to say.
• Fun approaches that make me want Flight Simulator (2020) – St. Bart’s, in the Caribbean.
• A poker cheating scandal story – With no solid evidence that there was actually any cheating happening, although a good bit of probabaility and circumstantial evidence suggesting it did.

Buckle up. We’ve got a lot to cover this week, and (because I submitted more articles than parvusimperator) a myriad of topics.

China

• China’s hacking sprees give it the ability to (probably) identify US spooks
• China: data is the oil of the 21st century

Defense

I got almost all the way through the week’s articles before I had to start a defense section.

• Greece is buying Rafales – Standoffs with the perfidious Turk have convinced it of the need for modernization.
• CG Haenel’s MK556 gets the nod to replace Bundeswehr G36en – This has been discussed some on the Discord, which is linked in the sidebar for those of you who are reading this but have not yet popped in over there.
• USAF announces they’ve built and flown a full-scale prototype of the Next-Generation Air Dominance fighter – Unusually loose-lipped for the Air Force!
• … shortly after someone on Twitter reported a bunch of sightings of a strange triangle-shaped airplane? – They’re almost certainly unrelated, but I thought the timing was fun. Lots of speculation among people who don’t follow the defense industry all that closely that maybe the F-35’s massive budget is actually a slush fund for other projects.

Science and Technology

• Story of the week: potential biosigns detected on Venus – Phosphine, a chemical which is rapidly degraded into its component bits by UV light (during the press briefing, they said a lifetime of a few thousand seconds is believed to be accurate), is present in moderate quantities in the upper atmosphere of Venus. Planetary scientists spent a few years trying to puzzle out non-biological processes which could create phosphone, and came up empty. My money’s still on some bit of novel high-temperature/high-pressure chemistry. Anyway, I need to pop over to Twitter and goad Musk into sending a probe.
• Do masks actually work against the wuflu? – I think the data is more up in the air than Mr. Berenson’s Tweet suggests, but at the same time, the point about Taiwan, Japan, and testing is worth bearing in mind.
• Deep sea mining and the race to the bottom of the sea – We’ve explored almost none of the extremely-deep ocean. Should we start mining it and potentially destroy all those ecosystems? I have not yet fully formed an opinion.
• The ISS is getting moldy – On the inside, which is great news for fans of old-feeling science fiction but not so great news for fans of long-term space habitats. NASA is working on ways to kill ’em.
• NASA to investigate 3D printing for rocket part production – Good for small-batch rocket production, perhaps, but come, let us reason with one another. If you take Elon Musk at 10% of his word, he’s still going to build hundreds of rockets, which translates to thousands of engines. At that scale, it seems like a factory, with fancy tooling and all, makes fiscal sense, and small-batch rocket production does not make sense.
• Another cosmological problem surfaces: the universe might be too spread-out
• But wait, there’s more: a disc galaxy at the very edge of the observable universe looks way older than it should – C’mon, dark-matter-as-the-luminiferous-ether-of-the-21st-century guess! Turn out to be correct!

History

• High-resolution imaging of the wreck of the Hornet on the sea floor – Way to go, Petrel.
• Alternate uses of the V8-powered air raid sirens: turning fog into rain – The noise is so intense that it vibrates the fog particles together until they precipitate out, a quintessentially American solution to a problem the British solved by lighting bonfires instead. I believe it could also kill birds at a pretty substantial distance for, you know, a siren.

Guns

• It’s a match video week – I’m getting a little tiny bit faster now, it seems like, but one thing holding me back is accuracy troubles. A good proportion of the problem is with me: I have a bad habit of trying to actively control muzzle rise with my hands, which leads to shots pushed low or pulled right if my hands tense prior to the shot breaking. Some of the rest might be with grips; I could probably stand to have some slightly larger ones so there’s more room for my off hand. The only problem is that a lot of the alternatives are really perishingly ugly.
• Kalashnikov makes a smart shotgun, but not the way you’re thinking – It has a wee computer in the stock, a screen, and a video camera built in.
• Restoring an old Smith & Wesson semi-auto](https://www.glocktalk.com/a/s-w-5906-restore.118/) – Restoration continues here. We appreciate good craftsmanship here at the Soapbox.
• Remember that SIG P320 lawsuit about people accidentally shooting themselves in the leg? Here’s a good potential explanation – It seems to explain the strange, nearly-disengaged-sear problems described in that lawsuit.

Grab Bag

• Will mass political violence happen in the US? – This guy says ‘no’. I don’t know if I quite agree, but I do hope he’s right.
• 737 crew from Lithuania’s Klasjet fails basic airmanship test
• Old but good: nobody knows how many US federal laws there are
• Cal Fire: “The smoke is too bad for helicopters.” National Guard: “Ha!” – The SF Chronicle takes a deep dive into the High Sierra helo rescue.
• The New Yorker braces itself: how Trump could win
• A modest proposal: permanent daylight saving time – Please, yes. I hate driving into work in the dark and then driving home from work in the dark.
• The ISO standard political ad
• A tale of water rights and subdevelopments in the southwestern desert – I sure am glad to live in a place where water literally falls from the sky, although this summer it has been admittedly less than I would typically prefer.
• Donald Trump, …Nobel Peace Prize candidate? – First Serbia and Kosovo, now peace in the Middle East? I confess that’s not the sort of thing I very much expected out of a Trump administration.

While drafting these, I keep on forgetting I’ve already shared match videos, and have to go dig them out later. Oops.

Defense

• The new British carriers have always looked a bit fat to me – They may not be true carriers with catapults and arresting gear, but having two of them does count for something.
• An EC-135 at Mildenhall in 1991 demonstrated that airliner-form-factor aircraft have quite a bit of thrust to spare at light loads
• Charles de Gaulle and Izumo, to the same scale – The year is 2028. The War of the South China Sea is heating up. In a Mitsubishi warehouse, engineers pull the tarps off an angled flight deck attachment for Izumo…
• Big Army to field a ground-launched strike SM-6 – It’s similar in concept, I suppose, to the ADATS—one missile, multiple missions. Too, ‘medium-range strike’ conflicts much less with ‘air defense’ than does ‘anti-tank’—the tough thing about ADATS is that using the missiles on tanks feels like a waste, or at least it did when I gamed it out in Armored Brigade.
• US looking for a NATO-like alliance in the Pacific
• Apaches to sling Spike NLOS missile – It’s the hi in a hi-lo setup, with the lo being JAGM… except JAGM, the less-capable missile, is also the more expensive one. In the time since the JAGM project started, the UK developed and deployed Brimstone… and then Brimstone 2.
• India tests hypersonic scramjet vehicle? – Welcome to the club!
• China has a space plane; here’s where it lands
• For light ambush-protected vehicles, Thales charges Australia double what the American option would have cost – Cost disease: not just an American malady.

Guns

• Shocker! Gun sales skyrocket in regions struck by rioting
• Analyzing the circuit split on magazine bans – In which John Roberts is a squish on guns.
• Chrono trip coming up – These .38 Short Colts are better for USPSA revolver than full-length .38 Special—they flop less in the moon clips, and eject rather than partially. I just need to find a load that a) makes power factor and b) does not blow up.

Science and Technology

• In China, GitHub is a bastion of free speech – Because GitHub is HTTPS-only, China can’t ban repositories individually, and China’s technology industry has enough clout to keep the Party from banning GitHub altogether.

Riots etc.

• Al Sharpton: “latte liberals” want to defend the NYPD, average black people recognize the need for police – Something about stopped clocks and right twice a day.
• Latte liberals give homeless men the bum’s rush – Unlike in Hank Scorpio’s utopia, they will not be allowed to go at their own pace.

Grab Bag

• Eternal Brexit – The article didn’t quite pay off the title—in particular, it seems to insinuate that Brexit is, rather than being eternal, likely to come to some sort of conclusion as the EU tires of the whole process.
• The planning of US physician shortages – It’s because think tanks in the 80s concluded that there would be a glut of physicians, and people made plans based on that.

Two weeks and a short post is what you get when both of your hosts are on the road and/or occupied in such a way as to prevent a great deal of reading.

Coronavirus

• Manhattan commercial landlords peering over the precipice – My boss was just saying the other day how maybe it’s time to start looking for a smaller, cheaper office.
• Speaking of New York institutions collapsing under coronavirus-related strain, the MTA is losing $200 million a week – … how? Amtrak’s projected losses for 2020 in its entirety are $700 million.

Defense

• Chinese submarine enters cave facility: satellite photos – A man in a golden suit met it there, as guards in nondescript, unmarked uniforms proceeded to unload gold bars from its cargo hold. Part of this entry is fiction.
• Everything old is new again: French star-fort-FOBs in Mali
• Ski Jump Super Bug: coming soon to an Indian carrier near you?
• SHORAD Stryker looking pretty good – The upside to having a cheap, badly armored AFV chassis is that it’s a great base to stick other crap on top of, cf. M113.
• Did we fly a U-2 over China’s naval exercises? – We can neither confirm nor deny, etc. etc.
• SINKEX footage!

Guns

• Video from my first USPSA major match – Not only as a shooter, but also as staff. It was a good time. Probably a bit late for any other ones this year, but that’s fine—I have some gear updates to work on anyway.
• Making a heavyweight Glock – An older video, especially considering Mr. Humble Marksman has since moved on to a Beretta.
• Busting PMAG durability myths – … by shooting one that sat loaded for twelve years.

Grab Bag

• The wildest insurance fraud scheme Texas has ever seen – This dude has lived an extremely interesting life, which is his stated goal.
• The Air and Space Museum is working on digitizing a bunch of amazing color photos of WW2 – Color photography always makes history seem more real to me.
• Say what you like about the ChiComs, but they sure can do good propaganda – It’s a bunch of drones making a 3D light show in the sky.
• Cracking the scratch lottery code – An oldie, but a goodie.
• Remember the 1970s, and the left’s domestic terror campaign back then? – Good to be reminded that urban violence is nothing new.

We’ll call it a biweekly-what-we’re-reading this time.

Your correspondent writes to you from the New Mexico countryside, watching the scrubland give way to thin forest as the Southwest Chief wends its way toward Chicago.

Random Thoughts

• One of the set of frequently-wrong ‘thought leaders’ on Twitter (Yglesias, maybe?) had the shocking realization that, although Chicago started as a rail hub, it’s now mainly a large city on the basis of network effects. Like, you know, every city.
• The Planes of Fame museum in Chino, CA is worth a visit, if you’re into airplane museums. They have the only airworthly A6M with an original Nakajima engine.

WuFlu

• How to test every American for the coronavirus every day – The short version: spit test strips at a low, low price per unit. As accurate as PCR testing? No, but much easier to mass produce. It would cost a few billion dollars, but you can find that behind the sofas on Capitol Hill, and the economic benefits would be massive.

Defense

• Royal Australian Regiment looking into 60mm platoon mortars – I’m on board with the idea.
• Not new, but Australia has a procurement decision-making framework that seems to be working pretty well – Better than the American system of, “Start the project and cancel it before completion seventeen times in a row,” certainly. Parvusimperator’s TLDR of the Australian framework: “If there’s an obvious choice, skip the competition, buy the obvious choice, and move on.”
• We’re selling the Qataris the AMRAAM-ER – That’s an AMRAAM seeker on an ESSM body. Next up: Washington, DC.
• Whither the MiG-35? – The Drive suggests the answer is, “Onto the scrap heap alongside a bunch of other modernization projects, in favor of more Flankers.”
• Bell reveals V-280 naval variants
• Also, gunships – I dunno. As a rotorhead flight simmer, I still think I prefer a proper helicopter.
• Strykers with lasers on their heads
• The Bruce Krulak Center speculates, by means of essay contests, on ways the USMC might vanish
• USAF working hard on the F-16’s new AESA
• Also, the F-16 is getting pylons with built-in MAWS and countermeasures systems – That’s a pretty clever place to stick the sensors, given that your average F-16 is pretty crowded already.
• Drone swarms! – For EW purposes, among other things. It’s a nifty plan.
• Flying the YF-23 – And its fancy flight control system.
• To replace the BMP-2, Hungary selects the Lynx – Which might, in turn, make the Lynx more attractive to the Aussies and their Land 400 program.

Guns

• Testing rifle muzzle brakes – The methodology is ingenious. Parvusimperator has some additional thoughts, which I believe he’s turning into a full post.
• Parvusimperator and I saw, in the latest issue of the USPSA magazine, a review of a custom-fit earplug guy. Unfortunately, he isn’t coming this far north this year. Fortunately, I ran across Decibullz, a silly name for a mold-your-own-earplugs solution. I haven’t had very good luck with in-ear protection beyond you classic orange foamies, but I’m hopeful that a custom fit and the so-called percussive filters will a) serve more comfortably for a full day of shooting, and b) let me hear things while still blocking shooting noise. There will be a review to come.
• Duncan v. Becerra opinion – The train wending its way toward Chicago originated in the greater LA area, where my wife and I spent some time quarantining with her family, who are also people of the gun, and you can bet this was a topic of excited conversation.

Grab Bag

• Beirut blast in pictures – Yes, we’re a bit slow off the mark on this story, but that’s the downside of the biweekly timeline.
• Tracing the path of the Rhosus, whose load of ammonium nitrate, abandoned 7 years ago, caused the explosion
• Italian explosives expert suspects that it was more than just ammonium nitrate – Bring your own Google Translate.
• Hong Kong turned into your average mainland Chinese city real quick, after the passage of that national security law
• The story that actually frames it in those terms – It’s been a while since I’ve put one of these together, okay?
• NY billionaires vote for Democrats, find themselves targeted by Marxists – Parvusimperator, a native of the Empire State, requested a tiny violin.
• Hollywood executives getting canned at an alarming rate – Well, alarming if you’re a Hollywood exec, I guess. There is very little sympathy for them in our internal chat; certainly, there’s more for the ordinary salaryman who gets laid off.
• Google kills off business-to-business products too

If I call it ‘Weekly What We’re Reading’, maybe I won’t have to feel so bad about missing Wednesdays.

Coronavirus

• Why aren’t we talking more about ventilation? – Your correspondent has been banging the ‘malaria in the literal sense’ drum with increasing intensity over the past few weeks.
• Cuomo to wealthy New Yorkers: “Come back to the city! I’ll buy you a drink!” – … in what bar?

Defense

• Last of the 29 Palms Abrams moves on – Pour one out. They’re bound to Barstow, and then on to Sierra Army Depot, where they’ll be mothballed.
• India’s Rafales arrive – India has some special features not found on Ye Standard French Rafale.
• How Britain cut its Harrier force to zero in two months – i.e., not a happy story.
• Video of the week: Rheinmetall’s 130mm test
• A TFB interview with leaders of the NGSW program on same
• IAI and Singapore Technologies Engineering form Proteus Advanced Systems – They’re selling an export version of the Gabriel 5, for which STE provides parts. Singapore, notably, is in the market for a Harpoon replacement.
• Two diagrams and a lot of technical Russian – It’s the T-14/T-15 reversible hull patent! Parvusimperator notes the chassis is an earlier design, with only six road wheels per side.
• Britain Used To Be So Cool, historical photo edition – It’s the Royal Navy at Spithead, on the occasion of Elizabeth’s coronation. (Cor, she’s been around a while, hasn’t she?)
• Poland agrees to pay most costs for US troop presence – Poland remembers 1939. And, as ever, American troops in Europe are a tripwire more than anything—both a deterrent and a way to get the American population behind an overseas adventure.
• USAF’s THPMOR system to see field tests – USAF calls it ‘THOR’, but that leaves out ‘Power’ and ‘Microwave’.
• Raytheon and Rafael collaborate for an Indirect Fire Protection Capability stopgap – Iron Dome! American Iron Dome!

Science and Technology

• SpaceX finally successfully hops a Starship prototype – This one is SN5, and I believe they blew up the preceding four. Accidentally, that is.
• Chicago has a deep underground stormwater control tunnel – 30 stories down. Chicago has a long history of absurd engineering feats to keep from flooding itself, whether with rainwater or sewage. There was a great 99 Percent Invisible on the subject, before every episode turned into progressive preaching.

Guns

• Gun owners aren’t coming to save protesters in cities – For a number of blazingly obvious reasons.
• The Care and Feeding of Your Revolver with Jerry Miculek – As a Ruger shooter, I feel like I have the right as well as the obligation to note that a number of these are things you shouldn’t do to your Smith & Wesson revolver.
• Los Angeles DA’s husband charged for what the Missouri lawyers did – This seems to me to be a sort of comeuppance. It may well get tossed out in court on the same grounds—California is, to my deep and utter surprise, a Castle Doctrine state.
• Trijicon sues Holosun – It’s a patent thing. Here are the exhibits referenced in the complaint.
• EOTech going private – It was at first, then it was purchased by a large, public defense contractor, now it’s getting spun off and sold to American Holoptics.

Grab Bag

• Tim Keller with a Biblical critique of secular ideas of social justice – I see an awful lot of the students I once had during my brief stints in student ministry falling prey to this ideology, so I intend to dig into this more deeply sometime.

Missed a Wednesday again. Oops.

Books

• Celestial Matters, a science fiction novel where the science is that of ancient Greece.

China Watch

• Three Gorges Dam under rapidly-mounting flood pressure, again – And more rain is coming. Is there much danger of a collapse? On the one hand, I don’t think so. On the other hand, I heard somewhere that there have been an awful lot of evacuations from the regions just downstream of the dam.
• What happens if it breaks? – Well, tens or hundreds of millions of people die, famine strikes China, and the Third World War probably breaks out. No big deal.

Defense

• India to buy… Caracal carbines?
• Egypt buys Su-35s – To go with their MiG-29s, Rafales, and potentially-in-the-future Eurofighters. Now all they need are some American planes to complete the trifecta.
• Pentagon’s UFO unit to release some files – Probably not any especially interesting ones.
• Two men and a bot: tank crew of the future? – I can see how image recognition and ballistics computation might allow AI to play gunner. I’m not sure exactly how it breaks down in practice, and the article doesn’t seem to say outright.
• War between Greece and Turkey a real possibility? – If the potential of even more devastating floods in China wasn’t enough…
• Ethiopia claims the upper Nile, building a dam and preparing to fill it
• HMS QE’s hangar deck, overlaid on a top-down drawing – “Bloody small,” quoth parvusimperator.
• Japan’s Super F-15 one step closer to reality – Including cruise missile support, a cockpit upgrade, a new radar, and other features. Will it hold 22 missiles like the F-15EX? I hope so; that kind of missile spam is the essence of Japan-ness.

Games

• Star Wars Squadrons hands-on from PC Gamer – parvusimperator and I both cut our teeth on the X-Wing games of the end of the last millennium and the start of this one, and we’re both going to withhold judgment on this one until we’ve seen it in action. That said, there are reasons for cautious optimism.
• 12 minutes of Star Wars Squadrons in-game footage – It looks… pretty good. All the debris and huge space constructions to fly around inside are, together, something of a space flight sim trope, but it looks pretty much like Modern X-Wing Alliance otherwise.
• Computers: ha ha, we’re better at chess than you. Humans: oh yeah? – 5D Chess with Multiverse Time Travel! (Granted, the computer is pretty good at it.) It’s chess, except with two time dimensions (and an unused spatial z-axis counting as the fifth dimension from the title). Talking about games sounds like describing the plot to a Terminator movie.
• MS Flight Simulator 2020: Ars Technica hands-on – The PC Gamer hands-on was similarly effusive. I don’t do much flight simming presently, with summertime pursuits weighing heavily upon my time, but man, do those clouds look good.

Science and Technology

• Everything apparently has wave-particle duality? – I never so much as suspected.
• Against environmental pessimism – Did you know that the Earth has more tree cover today than it did 35 years ago?
• Discussed on Discord: a combination air conditioner/synthetic oil plant – As ever, the difficulty is input power.
• What’s going on at Intel? Why is their 7nm process so late and so disastrous?

Guns

• The P320 FCU project is getting pretty cool – Hopefully they get all the accidental-discharge problems worked out.
• New owners for H und K – A Luxembourgish holding company with a French name.
• A new barrel alloy promises twice the life of 416 stainless
• Gun-printing Twitter with an electric, solenoid-actuated semi-auto pistol
• Another revolver match video – Picking up speed again. The first two matches, I was slow but inaccurate. The third match, I was slow and accurate. This time out, I was faster but inaccurate again. Hopefully I can get it all put together.

History

• FBI motivational posters from World War 2 – Some of them aren’t particularly motivational.