Scolopax

Top image is a flamethrower.  It appears similar to the LPO-50/Type 74, but different enough.  Not sure on any name.

The next entry in the CoD series being titled "Call of Duty: WW2" just sounds ...bad.

That is more interesting:

 

Fox gave Bill O'Reilly the boot

I can only speak for newspapers since that is what I worked at. Television news has something similar where producers are the ones who do all the work of actual journalism and they get good looking people to be in front of a camera in order to say lines.
 
But newspapers are an actual technologically sophisticated entity that involves a team of individuals working like an orchestra to transmit bales of paper that comes in 500 pound rolls into little folded sheets with writing and pictures on them that are delivered to your doorstep. And as such, a lot of different tasks have to be accomplished by differently trained individuals who have various deadlines to hit.
 
At smaller publications, many of these are performed by one overworked and underpaid and soon to either quit or get fired or move to another job employee. But at larger publications, there are different departments. And we're not just talking the sports department or the photographers but a variety of ad staff who are trying to sell ads. And you have the ad production people with the graphic arts knowledge to make the ads. Classifieds team. Legals team, which are in charge of putting together the legal notices that appear in papers. Secretaries. Security guards. A newspaper librarian. And going in the opposite direction, you have various copy editors, assistant editors, editors of various departments (sports editor, photo editor, etc). You'll have the news editor who is in overall control of the news reporters. And a managing editor who oversees the entire creative department. And that person will report to the publisher who oversees the financial running of the paper (ad sales, distribution, liaisoning with owner/investors).
 
Getting to the original topic. Graphics designers are essentially Arts majors. Your average news reporter will not possess the skills to also be a graphic designer. They're basically English majors. And even if they did have the skills, they don't have the time or the inclination. Their job is to pound out stories, get them written by various deadlines, and make any factual corrections to the story that is needed. Afterwards, a block of text is directed towards the newspaper layout team (copy editors and various department editors) who then produce each section of the paper. News. Local. Sports. Editorial/columns. Lifestyle for instance. Each department will be producing little mini-newspapers that go together when they are sent down to the printing department. In the old days, this was all done manually with linotype, which are big contraptions which had molten lead which were formed into letters and words which were then transferred in trays to the press. I was involved with the final days of offset printing where one would physically print off a dummy of the paper, where you would physically cut and piece news stories together along with photos and headlines and the masthead and whatever.
 
This dummy paper would then be taken to the print shop where it would be... umm... printed. It involved a fucking HUGE camera which took giant negatives which were transferred onto transparencies which were fed into the printing press and I never really got into it in too much detail because the whole thing stank and spit ink and the guys working there looked the sort who paid for sex a bit too frequently.
 
Graphics design programs like Pagemaker and Indesign and whatnot allowed you to do all that work on a computer which sped up the tempo and you no longer needed to print off paper dummies but could just send off the digital file to the printers who could do whatever it is they did with it.
 
At a daily newspaper, generally the deadlines for stories which occurred that day are the late afternoon, early evening. Sports department is a bit later since baseball games frequently end at 10 or 11 pm and a hole in the paper is held for those sort of stories. So the reporter is done with their story like at 4pm to 7 pm and is gone home or is drinking or sleeping with an intern at the mayor's office. The people who are putting together the actual paper are working into the evening. And those are your assistant editors and copy editors and the sort who are forced to work late nights. One can imagine their quality. This is usually when the graphics stuff is getting finalized. Photos and infographics and things like that. So you can see the reporters don't really have a chance to talk and work with that department. 
 
Sometime around 11 pm to 1 am (depending on the size of the paper) the paper is "put to bed" as far as the editorial team is concerned and  a final product is delivered to the printing room. At that point the printing press fires up (actually it has already fired up and is printing the classified ads and sections of the paper with earlier deadlines like Lifestyles and the Editorial section). Front page news goes through, local section and then sports. Sometime at 3 am or thereabouts, the papers, folded, bundled and stacked by automated machinery (assuming it didn't break down) get sent to distribution where they are loaded onto trucks which deliver them to grocery stories, paper machines and your doorstep or post office box.
 
Now the world that I described is essentially one that existed up until the mid-2000s. The hey day of newspapers were in the 1990s where newspapers in major metro areas would sell for a half billion dollars or more. Now the only reason newspapers can stay in business is because many of them are selling their real estate assets to pay the bills. Or they become a vanity project like Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com buying the Washington Post so he can use it to smash his enemies.
 
Now newspapers still go through the same dance that I mentioned. But now they have webpages where newsrooms are in a constant race to give away their product for free by posting it online as quickly as possible with almost zero fact checking of articles that way consumers aren't forced to buy newspapers and which makes it so they no longer have to deal with pesky things like making revenue from advertisements or classified ads.
 
As such, you run into instances where mistakes are made on the newspaper's webpage which are run by the webpage goons who no doubt spend most of the day masturbating to anime. I never had much experience with that world. And when I did, the guys smelled of stale semen and despair. 
 
So if you are interested, you too can go to school to become a journalist where, if you're lucky and the right sort of minority, you can be hired and exploited for five years until financially you are no longer able to endure the work schedule and quit. Whereupon you'll be replaced by another indistinguishable ethnic sounding byline. 

The US State Department and other US government organs believed their own propaganda.  Remember this?



The US government is filled with aging Baby Boomers who feel considerable nostalgia about the social uprisings that defined their generation.  They also feel guilt about not having participated in them more vigorously, and wish to vicariously participate in such uprisings elsewhere.  They became convinced that the entire Arab world was filled with hip, Western-educated young people who aspired to live in shiny, Western-style democracies instead of shabby, corrupt dictatorships.  With a little help from their friends in Washington DC, they could make their dreams a reality!  Yes we can!
 
Also, once the revolution was complete there were going to be some shady oil deals and whatnot to sweeten the deal for some of the people involved.  The first batch of diplomatic cable leaks have alluded to some of these.  But this isn't to say that the US government started all this chaos to get their hands on oil.  They're simply not that rational.  The horrifying thing about US foreign policy is that the US is so overwhelmingly powerful, and so completely insulated from the consequences of its actions, that the primary goal of US foreign policy is to posture and to gain advantage in US domestic politics.  If you live outside the US, you are just a puppet on a string, dancing to a solipsistic and insane tune played by the blind idiot god of America.  Unless you live in Russia or China and to a lesser extent India.  They have nukes and they're not afraid to tell the US government to shove it.  Everywhere else?


 
So, the Democratic Party and their extended network of allies in the State Department and elsewhere decided to prove their purity and support for Democracy by assisting in the overthrow of secular dictatorships throughout the Middle East.  This was, in retrospect, and also a the time, obviously a bad idea.  While these countries did have large numbers of hip, westernized youth who were tired of the corruption and economic stagnation of their homelands, these countries had even larger numbers of Islamists who were older, better-funded, better-organized, and far better at playing the game.  The results were entirely predictable; the young, cool, hip protesters who basically wanted to turn the entire southern coast of the Mediterranean into LA were quickly displaced and cowed into silence by barbarians who want to dynamite the pyramids and conquer all of their neighbors so they can have them as rape-slaves.  Also, I want to point out that that last sentence sounds like a breezy, poetic exaggeration but it's actually literally true.
 
This happened pretty quickly; it was obvious that Islamist elements were wearing the pants only a few months into the Arab Spring movement.  But the US government does not let mere facts stop it.  Instead of quickly pulling support and walking away while pretending nothing happened at all, the US government decided that if Islamists had taken over pro-Democracy protests, Islamists must be the true face of Democracy in the Middle East.  Seriously; that's how come you get retarded buzzfeed articles like this one lamenting the suppression of the Muslim Brotherhood.
 
Very quickly, a number of governments that managed not to implode decided that if Uncle Sam was going to act all retarded and shit, they might as well do their best to make sure that it was directed at their enemies.  These countries, chiefly Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and Israel, formed a surprisingly effective alliance of strange bedfellows that aimed at exporting their domestic political problems and at sticking it to the Persians.  Saudi Arabia has a long history of religious radicalism, and an almost equally long history of exporting those radicals so they can get killed by airstrikes from civilized countries.  Qatar is a Salafist country that is looking very nervously at their own 20% Shia minority and what's going on in Yemen and Iraq.  Turkey is run by a knuckle-dragger who stays on top because his opponents are completely retarded, and who needs displays of foreign military might to keep his base satisfied with his lack of internal success.  Israel's Likud government has a precarious hold on power and opposes an Iranian ally and long-standing rival.
 
So, by making sure that a bit of money got into the right pockets, this coalition has kept the mostly Islamist opposition in Syria fed and armed.  Propaganda in the US, funded by the Saudis and powered by boomer egos, has mainly kept the public from realizing that this is exactly the sort of anthill that the US does not need to stick its dick into, although they have remained opposed to large-scale deployment of ground forces.
 
The biggest losers are, of course, the mainly secular, hip, westernized youth for whose benefit this idiotic operation was started.  And yes, I'm sure they would grit their teeth and side with Assad if any of them haven't been killed.

Situation in Koreas:

Look, I'm a patriotic American, and this sort of video makes me happy.  You see, as a patriotic American, I have long believed that my country makes the best propaganda.  Tremendous.  Huge.  The best, believe me.  Bigly.

This video is an excellent example of how to do propaganda.  Good propaganda consists mostly of statements that are true.  You don't make up your own facts, you make up your own interpretations of those facts.
 
So, while most of what Klein says is basically true (and the things that he says that are wrong might be honest mistakes; in 2015 less of the truth had leaked out), the overall story is slanted.  And not even obviously slanted; a lot of his big-picture stuff is also essentially correct.  His breakdown of the factions and their foreign backers is pretty accurate, for instance.

For instance, he describes US aid to the rebels as starting in 2013.  While it is true that the US was not providing the rebels weapons prior to this date (at least not in large amounts), they were providing food and medical supplies since 2011.  So it isn't like the Obama Administration was responding to outrages by the Assad regime; they had been materially supporting the rebellion almost since the start.  Maybe from the very start, if you believe that the CIA was involved with the earliest stages of the revolt back when it was still part of the greater Arab Spring movement (I think that this is a reasonable, but unproven guess).
 
The bit about how Assad released prisoners to "tinge the opposition with extremism" is a clever bit of spin.  I paused when I heard that, because it sounds like retarded comic book villain logic.  "Hahahahahaha," said Assad, "I will increase the rebels manpower by releasing extremist prisoners even though I am near Qatar and Saudi Arabia, two countries well-known for supporting extremists!  The prisoners I release will definitely not call their jihadi friends from those two countries!  I am so smart!  Mwuhahahaha!"
 
...Yeah, I couldn't see that happening either.  Here's my take on what was actually going on:

Prior to 2011 Syria was actually helping the USA in the Global War on Terror.  Mostly, Syria was used as a CIA black site where people that the US intelligence apparatus scooped up disappeared into.  So Assad generally releasing prisoners in 2011 sounds to me like Assad realizing that the honeymoon was over, and shutting down the CIA's black site because he didn't need that in his country anymore.  Also, I strongly suspect that a lot of the stories about torture and extrajudicial executions happening in Syrian prisons prior to the revolution were aided and abetted by the CIA.
 
So now Assad is getting criticism from the US government for torturing and killing people, which he was doing because the US government asked him to.  Lovely.  If you want to get ahead in international politics, I have three words for you.  Don't.  Trust.  Jonathan.
 
Anyway, in 2013 there was a sarin gas attack that was allegedly by the Syrian government.  I say "allegedly" because aside from the perpetrators of the attack, nobody is still quite sure who did it.  Either this attack was the result of ongoing incompetence by Assad's military (who, let's face it, are generally incompetent with the exception of individual formations) because there were all sorts of things that needed gassing way more than civilians, or a false-flag intended to build support in the USA for the war (Seymour Hersh alleges that this is the case), or even a simple mistake (it's possible that pesticide storage got hit, and some pesticides are chemically very similar to sarin and in large amounts produce almost identical poisoning).

Anyway, the usual story that gets spun is that Obama backed down from a US military intervention in Syria because the US public was tired of war and because Obama is a pussy.  This is partially true, mostly the part about him being a pussy.  Truth is though, the US has been engaged in a massive air campaign over Syria since 2014.  They just haven't been hitting the Syrian government.  On top of that, since at least 2013 the US has been supplying Syrian rebels with weapons, so the usual media line that gets peddled in the West that the US is aloof or relatively uninvolved in the conflict is bullshit.
 
Klein's video's account of the origins of DAESH aka ISIL aka ISIS aka Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad is really the low point of the video.  He's way, way, obviously factually off.
 
ISIS didn't form in 2014 in Syria.  It formed in 1999 in Iraq, although it didn't come to the attention of US intelligence until the mid 2000s, and was only able to make a serious nuisance of itself by about 2012.  The idea that ISIS didn't engage the Syrian government is also laughably wrong; look at the siege of Deir ez Zor, but that was something that was commonly repeated in Western media as late as 2015.
 
He also repeats the claim that Russia didn't bomb ISIS in 2015.  This isn't really true; about 10% of the initial Russian air campaign was directed at ISIS, memorably some of the early kaliber cruise missile strikes.  Again, this was a narrative that the media has quietly withdrawn, since Russian air support was instrumental in defeating ISIS in Palmyra and holding the line in Deir ez Zor.
 
His main thesis, that the war is a mess with no obvious end in sight, was a reasonable one in late 2015.  His characterization of the players is pretty skewed, however.

As of now, the Assad government is slowly but definitively winning.  Russian air support, re-training and re-equipment of large portions of the SAA, and several key victories (notably Aleppo) have given them the initiative.

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.
 
 
 
 
 
 

Fair enough.  I definitely get the impression that, as usual, the rebels waited until they thought that the SAA and allies were over-extended on other fronts before launching this Hama offensive.
 
Russia claims that the recent "chemical attack" was the result of an airstrike hitting a rebel stockpile of chemical weapons.
 
Something that a lot of news media do not understand is that it's very difficult to assign these sorts of chemical attacks.  In the case of the alleged 2013 Ghouta chemical attack, for instance, it is entirely possible that the mass poisoning was caused by the leakage of organophosphate insecticides.  These chemicals produce symptoms very similar to nerve gas poisoning, and indeed they are very chemically similar (sarin is basically people-strength pesticide*).  Some early reports noted that agricultural supplies were stockpiled in the area nearby the 2013 Ghouta mass poisoning, and to the best of my knowledge the possibility that the poisoning was caused by agricultural pesticides was never ruled out.
 
Something that conspiracy theorists do not understand is how difficult it is to identify targets in war.  In the 1991 Gulf War, more Coalition casualties were caused by friendly fire than by the Iraqis.  Many of the outrages in the Syrian conflict could very easily have been caused by mistakes and are not necessarily deliberate acts.
 
Also, the idea that these rebels have gotten their hands on nerve agents should give serious pause and consideration.  These are people who have locked women in cages and put those cages on top of buildings to use as human shields.  They have traded manpower and weapons with ISIS.  They also have access to a weapons-dealing network that spans at least the Mediterranean, and terror attacks from Europe to India that were previously thought to be the actions of lone wolves were later shown to be coordinated from ISIS-held areas in Syria and Iraq.  If these people have nerve gas, that's very, very bad.



*If there is ever a war with very large scale use of nerve agents, it will probably devastate the agriculture in the area where it is fought for a few years.  The nerve agents will kill people, and they will also kill all the bees, butterflies, mites, earthworms and other creatures that make a healthy, fertile soil ecology possible.

Stolen from tank-net ( http://www.tank-net.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=14200&page=206 )
 

Al-Zarrar

Al-Zarrar

Interesting post on Tanknet about a VK group discussing the pros and cons of various tanks in the Ukraine conflict:
 

"How do we make ZSU vismod Sensei?" 
"Get that tall table from the lobby."

http://www.airforcesmonthly.com/2017/03/07/have-israels-new-f-35s-seen-combat/
 

RQ-170
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If the poor were disenfranchised, you would have the advantage that only people representative of national economic interests would vote.

I can see this breaking in two obvious ways.  The first is that there would always be some party that would attempt to reform the system by enfranchising the poor, and thereby using them as a vote bank to ensure their corrupt hegemony into the future.  In the United States, this is called "The Democratic Party."

The other way this could break is that everyone who wasn't poor would oppress and abuse the poor, and they could expect no repercussions for their actions.  A permanent labor underclass would form, and the economy would stagnate, as the artificial prominence of cheap manual labor would distort prices and disincentive efficiency.  This was also tried, it was called "The Confederate States of America."

Pz 68 M0911 also known as Pz 68ET is a upgraded Pz 68, it got up armored and also recieved a 120mm gun though it never got accepted into service.
It was produced in 1984 and had a combat weight of 42.000 kg, it also apparently could carry 56 120mm rounds (44 in the hull and 12 on turret floor) and 5200 rounds for its 7,5mm Panzer Maschinengewehr 1951/71. 
It retained the MTU MB 837 Ba-500 of the Pz 68 which delivered 660hp and its APU.
 

 

 

 

 

Since the A-10 debate has come up it is time once again for my favorite interview.
 

T-72 Ural added,