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US Presidents shake hands with scumbags all the time. It's part of the job description. The one who looks like he's trying not to cry at the terrible visage of John Kerry is Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, to give his full, made-up Africanized name: Teodoro Nguema is not a nice man. The only good thing anyone can say about him is that he's a much nicer person than his uncle, whom he killed to take power in Equatorial Guinea. While Francisco Nguema was a flamboyant supervillain who ordered men dressed as Santa Claus to machine-gun his opponents in a sports stadium while Mary Hopkin's Those Were The Days played on loudspeakers, his nephew, after he pulled a Hamlet, proved to be a boring, run-of-the-mill corrupt autocrat. Teodoro Nguema personally steals the majority of his nation's GDP. The people of his country suffer from diseases that are trivially preventable like polio. The country isn't poor; it has a miniscule population and produces almost as much oil as Libya. The government is just laughably corrupt and awful. In a right and just world, Equatorial Guinea would be invaded by a stronger, somewhat less corrupt neighbor and have its entire government fed to sharks feet-first on live TV. But if you do that sort of thing there would be gigantic hue and cry in the UN defending the rights of Equatorial Guineans to be arbitrarily jailed and tortured by a man who steals all their mineral wealth. Here is Teodoro Nguema looking upset to be shorter than Michelle Obama, who could probably kick his ass: And here he is again with Secretary of State Rice: Here is President Obama with Gurbanguly Mälikgulyýewiç Berdimuhamedow: Berdimuhamedow is a megalamaniac, but he's got goddamn nothing on the previous president of Turkmenistan. Saparmurat Niyazov, who ruled until 2006, named the month of January after himself, and had a golden statue of himself that rotates to face the sun built, was definitely setting the standard for eccentric despots. Again, his successor is just sort of run of the mill oppressive and corrupt, but the US plays nice with him because it needs bases in Turkmenistan to support operations in Afghanistan. Here's Nixon meeting with Mobutu: Most won't remember, but Mobutu was a darling of the Western press early in his reign. Presumably this is because journalists were just as fucking stupid back then as they are now, although their writing was considerably more polished at that time. The man on the left is Robert Mugabe, who was when this picture was taken already notorious for using child soldiers. The man on the right who looks like he wants to get on his knees and gag himself unconscious is of course, the Peanut Farmer. Three years after this picture was taken Mugabe was ordering mass rapes and ethnic cleansing. Here's the shrub with Islam Karimov: Karimov is notable, among other things, for having people executed by boiling them to death. I could go on. My point is, Ruhollah Khomeini called the USA the Great Satan, and the USSR the Lesser Satan. And we fucking earn it. So suck it Russia! We're the biggest Satan in the world!

The depression of both Type 59 （100mm gun）and 59-2(105mm) is -5°. Here is a data sheet：

We're playing the Will-The-President-Sit-Across-The-Table-With-An-Evil-Dictator game again? Cool. Because I can remember in 2008 when candidate Obama said he'd sit at the same table with the leader(s) of Iran and Republicans lost their shit and Democrats said it made Obama an honest broker and a diplomat. Sen. McCain wasted part of two Presidential debates on the subject. It's like the media recycles the same tired narratives.

No absolutely not. More people need to realize this.

I got so many damned questions...

Today is Link Wray's birthday. Link Wray was an all-American classic who helped shape the art of rock guitar. He is also noteworthy for having written a song that was banned from the radio despite not having any lyrics. That, I feel, takes real talent:

It's in Spielberger's book as well, but not much more than "Hitler ordered research into a 75mm L/100". And for some reason a Panther 75mm L/100 is listed in the list of equipment destined for the Eastern Front, but there's no amount listed.

FNSS AFV's P.S. Next week i will be at İDEF 2017 fair in İstanbul will share all the pics and brochures i can get my hands on

T-34, much balance.

Turns out the end mill doesn't like cutting the plate out from the stock material, so going to need to think of another way to cut it out. This'll be the last step before it's done with the CNC machine. My present idea is drilling a bunch of holes along that path to make the bit's job easier, but I suppose there may be other ways as well. Taking off .05" per pass the current way is no bueno, regardless of feed rate. Machine is limited to 4k RPM and I can't really go bigger than my 3/8" endmill since I've only got so much space to work with.

Are we still ragging on BSM?

US supercarriers have modest point defense systems, but they are going to traveling as part of a strike group that contains at least one aegis cruiser. Smaller navies which can only deploy smaller strike groups have thicker defenses mounted on the carriers themselves. INS Vikrant has short and long range SAMs, 76mm autocannons and 30mm CWIS, for example. The tradeoff is that the Nimitz/Gerald R. Ford class carriers utterly dwarf all other carriers in sortie generation rate. The Nimitz class can surge to 230 sorties per day for four days and sustain 120 sorties per day for extended periods. The Navy was initially optimistic that the Gerald R Ford class could manage a 33% increase in sortie generation rate, but some newer sources are saying that it will only manage a 25% increase, at least initially. The surge rates for the Queen Elizabeth class and the Charles de Gaulle are something like 120/day and 100/day respectively. So even going all out, the next biggest non-US carriers can't even match a Nimitz's sustained sortie generation rate, much less a Gerald R Ford's. Kuznetsov and her kin are lower still. Not sure about the new Vikrant. There appears to be an economy of scale that heavily favors really big carriers. The US supercarriers appear to roughly match the best of their smaller peers in terms of maximum sorties per day per tonne of displacement, and appear to pull far ahead in terms of sustainable sorties per day per tonne of displacement (the figures for the CDG's latest cruise in Syria are not flattering, 12/day or something). On top of that, the US supercarriers are a few knots faster than all the other carriers. In short, giant, nuclear-driven American firepower for the win.

The musical scene of Northern Europe has long been tinged with anti-clericalism. Who could forget the spate of arson attacks conducted by the Norwegian black metal movement on churches? In one instance, they burned down the church and then took a picture of it to use for their album cover! But of course, that was peanuts compared to what came before it. Norwegian black metal musicians committed a few arsons and a few murders here and there. Their antecedents were far more extreme, far more violent, and so brutal that there is simply no comparison. Here they are; the great ancestors of contemporary metalheads showing you how it's done. Those are emissaries of the Pope, and they're throwing them out of a window. Why? Because they think the Pope fucking sucks, that's why, and because they're about to kick off a war of massive and unholy bloodshed: To this day, some of the cathedrals of Europe are still scarred by this centuries-old uprising: Who were these madmen? Who were these devotees of Satan, who tore out the faces of the Saints and burned women and children alike? Who were these dark-hearted apostles of blackest, darkest, blackest, coldest evil? Motherfucking Lutherans, that's who. And now we are going to listen to Lutheran music, because Lutherans make modern Satanists look like a bunch of limp-dicked, palsied weaklings when it comes to destroying the Church and causing bloodshed.

I'm not sure which of you people told me to watch The Expanse, but it was a good idea. Just finished Season 1. (Now I just gotta find somewhere to get season 2 for free)