Blistex posted:

In Korea guys being deployed on exercises never touched their MREs because there was always a granny or two would would drive their ATVs with a cart behind full of food that they would sell.

quote:

It didn’t matter where you were In a little wood – out miles in the hulu, coming down the drive you’d hear beep beep and everybody would drop everything because you had to be first in the queue at his stall to get his butties and whatever else he had in his van.

CIGNX posted:

I found a video of pigs being thrown into a pit to be buried (but not burned alive, jesus christ). Here's a link to a screencap of it, since it's pretty

https://imgur.com/ocaqBP3

That is... a lot of pigs

Mr Luxury Yacht posted:

Maybe it's an army thing because I vaguely recall the one PLAAF ration he ate was fine if a little boring.

Grand Fromage posted:

It doesn't take that much room. I wasn't equipped for months but since I lived in an earthquake prone area of China I had a couple weeks of water and MREs stashed in a closet.

Blistex posted:

Wife's cousin in Jilin City was approached by a pair of "not cops" in blue raincoats, respirator, rubber boots, goggles and gloves armed with a "Type 97" assault rifle and told to show his ID. He did so, explained that he was allowed to go get some essential supplies, and continued on his way.

He's stopped again by similar guys (not cops, not doctors, possibly Chengguan) and they check his ID and send him on his way. He notices that their apparel is very similar, but different. Off the shelf brand raincoat (still blue) and their masks are a different colour. This time he gets a better look at their Type 97 rifles and sees that they are airsoft (he was in the PLA for a stint and before that was an avid airsofter).

He sees another pair walking down a street a few hundred meters away, and heads towards them to get a look. Same story, but these guys are armed with an even cheaper airsoft version of the Type 97, like a 90% plastic version.

Now he's really curious.

He walks towards a shopping mall that's a little out of his way, and there is a pretty big presence there. At this point it's become clear that they have been pulling extra bodies from whatever agency has some spare manpower, and have given them instructions on what to buy to create a "uniform uniform". Some people are wearing yellow kitchen rubber gloves, while some are wearing latex. He even saw some who were wearing the disposable plastic ones like people wear at Subway, and throwing them away after every interaction. Also the "weaponry" has gotten ridiculous. The PLA soldiers who are in uniform with masks and gloves are using (pinned) Type 97s that are used for training and are unable to fire Automatic, while some of the no-names out and about have obviously raided a local airsoft store because their loadout is hilarious (he was a gun nut, joined the PLA, and left after he realised that they don't actually train soldiers to fight). Some of the weapons he saw. (all airsoft, with crude attempts to paint or cover the orange tips)

H&K MP5s
AK-47s
G-36s
Some obviously fictional shotguns
An MG-42!!!
And tons of AR-15 variants.

Overall he says that the officials in Jilin City seem to be doing a good job at keeping people from bunching up, making sure they are wearing protection, and keeping stores orderly and free of people rushing to try and clean shelves.

GotLag posted:

The British Army of the Rhine had Wolfgang The Bratty Man:


Edit: with more and better pictures:
https://www.flamesofwar.com/hobby.aspx?art_id=5307

Humphreys posted:

drat that is a cool piece of military history I knew nothing about! I would love to find 3D files to print my own scene for an upcoming modelers show.

I would blow Dane Cook posted:

https://twitter.com/globaltimesnews/status/1224569239253569538

MetaJew posted:

Baronjutter posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjbSCEhmjJA
Good video on China getting extreme hurt feelings with a low-tier past-his-prime MMA guy started beating every single traditional martial arts master in China. It's all very sad and pathetic.

Baronjutter posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjbSCEhmjJA
Good video on China getting extreme hurt feelings with a low-tier past-his-prime MMA guy started beating every single traditional martial arts master in China. It's all very sad and pathetic.

Baronjutter posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjbSCEhmjJA
Good video on China getting extreme hurt feelings with a low-tier past-his-prime MMA guy started beating every single traditional martial arts master in China. It's all very sad and pathetic.

LifeSunDeath posted:

While I don't think it was a useful exercise, in taekwondo they would make us do blindfolded fighting sometimes...the difference was we would actually get the poo poo knocked out of us.

Despera posted:

I think the path of transmission was batshit->civet->human for what its worth

I would blow Dane Cook posted:

https://twitter.com/globaltimesnews/status/1224569239253569538

Kharnifex posted:

The Korean mre's seem pretty interesting, given how lame and sameish Korean food is in general

Shaocaholica posted:

The thermal farts are fake. They look fake AF and people have debunked it.

LifeSunDeath posted:

This is the only chinese food I really like: Mapodofu. I could eat it every drat day.

LifeSunDeath posted:

Mapodofu. I could eat it every drat day.

BrainDance posted:

Hell yeah. That and a bunch of 狮子头 are impossible not to like.

Grand Fromage posted:

Korean food is good but sameish isn't wrong. It gets old real quick when you live there.

In my experience it then sneaks back up on you and you become even more into it than you were at first. But there was a solid year where I barely ate it and the thought of another pile of boiled red stuff was out of the question.

Vincent Van Goatse posted:

Don't eat bats anyway because they eat lots of insects and that's good for agriculture.

quote:

Wuhan Mayor Zhou Xianwang has so far shouldered much of the blame for the deadly coronavirus outbreak, blame that he recently shifted over to Beijing in a highly unusual move for a Chinese official.

Following a disastrous press conference on Sunday, Zhou was interviewed on Monday by CCTV. In the interview, he admitted to having failed to disclose information to the public in a timely manner during the preliminary stage of the virus outbreak.

However, Zhou charged that as a local official, he did not have the authority to reveal such information without first getting authorization from higher up, in what certainly appears to be a shot aimed straight at Beijing.

“As a local government official, after I have the information, I have to get approval before I can make it public,” Zhou said.

He noted that after China’s State Council held a meeting to recognize the coronavirus as a Class B infectious disease, his administration was quick to make decisive moves, including putting Wuhan in virtual lockdown.

After describing how his role in the crisis had been misunderstood, Zhou went on to portray himself as a sort of martyr, effectively offering up his own head to assuage public anger.

“Maybe we’ll go down in history with a bad reputation for locking down the city to keep the virus inside,” Zhou said. “But as long as it helps to contain the spread of the virus, Wuhan Party Secretary Ma Guoqiang and I are willing to take whatever responsibility, including resignation.”

At the end, Zhou deigned to give himself an 80 out of 100 for how he was handling the interview.

Many netizens were not happy with that grade, continuing to heap scorn on Zhou. It remains to be seen if Beijing will respond by handing him a failing grade or if he’ll continue to be kept around to throw underneath the bus.

quote:

Wuhan’s mayor blamed higher-ups. A senior disease control official blamed layers of bureaucracy. A top government expert blamed the public: The people, he said, simply didn’t understand what he told them.

As China grapples with a mysterious coronavirus outbreak that has killed at least 490 people and sickened thousands, the country’s 1.4 billion people are asking what went wrong. Senior officials are engaging in an unusually blunt display of finger pointing.

So many officials have denied responsibility that some online users joke that they are watching a passing-the-buck competition. (It’s “tossing the wok” in Chinese.)

The Chinese people are getting a rare glimpse of how China’s giant, opaque bureaucratic system works — or, rather, how it fails to work. Too many of its officials have become political apparatchiks, fearful of making decisions that anger their superiors and too removed and haughty when dealing with the public to admit mistakes and learn from them.

“The most important issue this outbreak exposed is the local government’s lack of action and fear of action,” said Xu Kaizhen, a best-selling author who is famous for his novels that explore the intricate workings of China’s bureaucratic politics.

“Under the high-pressure environment of an anticorruption campaign, most people, including senior government officials, only care about self-preservation,” Mr. Xu said. “They don’t want to be the first to speak up. They wait for their superiors to make decisions and are only accountable to their superiors instead of the people.”

The Chinese government appears to be aware of the problem. The Communist Party’s top leadership acknowledged in a meeting on Monday that the epidemic was “a major test of China’s system and capacity for governance.”

Growing numbers of people are questioning the government’s decisions as China enters a period of virtual shutdown. As the virus spread, officials in Wuhan and around the country withheld critical information, played down the threat and rebuked doctors who tried to raise the alarm. A reconstruction of the diseases’s spread by The New York Times showed that by not issuing earlier warnings, the Chinese government potentially lost the window to keep the disease from becoming an epidemic.

The outbreak has undermined the myth that the Chinese political elites win assignments and promotion purely on merit. China has sold this system as its own unique innovation. Developing countries have sent thousands of their government officials to China to learn its model of governance, a political system that offers security and growth in return for submission to authoritarian rule.

People in China are now questioning that premise. They are focusing much of their anger on Xi Jinping, China’s top leader and the person many blame for creating a culture of fear and subservience within the Chinese government.

Few people dare to question Mr. Xi openly, for fear of provoking censors or the police. But after Mr. Xi disappeared from public in recent days, some social media users began asking euphemistically, “Where is that person?” They are also posting online and sharing pictures of former leaders at the site of past crises.

Critics say quietly that, under Mr. Xi, the party began promoting loyal political cadres over technocrats — the experts and skilled administrators who were the backbone of China’s bureaucracy in 1990s and 2000s, when the country grew the fastest.

Those officials could often be corrupt, but even the party’s fiercest critics sometimes acknowledged that they got things done. Liu Zhijun, the former railway minister, is serving a lifetime sentence for taking bribes and abusing power. He also oversaw the creation of China’s high-speed rail system, which vastly improved life in the country[note: LOL].

The wok tossing in China stems in part from the tension between the technocrats, who hold a large number of positions with China’s provincial and national disease control centers, and the political cadres — the mayors, governors and the provincial party secretaries. The outbreak and lack of disclosure suggest that the political cadres are winning. In fact, even the technocrats are becoming cadres because none of them had the courage to tell the public what they knew about the virus.

Chinese officials are spending as much as one-third of their time on political studying sessions, a lot of which are about Mr. Xi’s speeches. Political loyalty weighs much more in performance evaluations than before. Now the rule of thumb in Chinese officialdom seems to be demonstrating loyalty as explicitly as possible, keeping everything else vague and evading responsibility at all costs when things go wrong.

The Chinese people may be paying the price. The failures span the system.

Zhou Xianwang, Wuhan’s mayor, said he didn’t disclose the scale and danger of the epidemic earlier because he needed the authorization from higher up. But he could have done something without sharing much information, including telling the residents to wear masks, wash hands frequently and stop big gatherings such as the potluck banquet attended by over 40,000 families just a few days before his city of 11 million was locked down.

When information began to dribble out, it was vague and misleading. In a series of online notices issued between Dec. 31 and Jan. 17, local officials disclosed they were treating pneumonia patients but didn't say when or how many.

The National Health Commission, the ministry with the authority to declare an epidemic emergency, didn’t issue its own notice about the outbreak until Jan. 19. But the notice essentially kicked blame back to the local authorities. The first sentence cited a rule that required the commission to work with local officials on epidemic prevention.

A top government health adviser, Wang Guangfa, who had reassured the public that the disease was controllable only to be sickened himself, said in an interview after he recovered that he had limited information at the time. He also defended his phrasing as a “misunderstanding” by the general public, saying most outbreaks of infectious diseases are controlled in the end.

Local officials don’t seem to have local people at the top of their list of priorities. In an interview with state television, Ma Guoqiang, the Communist Party secretary of Wuhan, acknowledged that Wuhan residents “are a little anxious and a little nervous” and said he would mobilize all party cells to comfort them.

“But the most important comfort,” he added, “came from Party Secretary Xi Jinping.”

Mr. Xu, the novelist, said Mr. Ma’s remarks demonstrated how officials had more concern for pleasing their bosses than taking care of the people they allegedly served.

“If they can rearrange the order in their hearts," Mr. Xu said, “we’ll see a very different governance style.”

As they try to contain the spread, local governments are showing that they are better at looking busy than they are at finding a solution. Many are now finding ways to track down and even expel residents from Hubei Province to keep the coronavirus from spreading. Tracking potential spreaders is sound policy, but punishing or persecuting them risks driving them underground, making it even harder to fight the outbreak.

Even outside the hardest hit areas, local officials are showing they don’t make rules with the well-being of the people in mind. A video that went viral across China showed a couple stuck on a bridge connecting Guizhou Province to the city of Chongqing. The two governments had halted travel between them, and the couple — she from Guizhou, he from Chongqing — had no place to go.

On social media, low-level cadres are complaining that they are receiving so many instructions from the higher-ups that they spend most of their time filling out spreadsheets instead of getting real work done. In a social media post headlined “The Formalism Under the Mask,” the author wrote, “Most people in the system don’t do things to solve problems. They do things to solve responsibilities.”

After the epidemic, the Chinese leadership will have to punish a few officials, even severely, to save face and win back some credibility. But for people who are suffering from the epidemic and the failure of governance, the Communist Party may have a hard time winning them back.

“I know before long this country will go back to being a peaceful, prosperous society. We will hear many people screaming how proud they are of its prosperity and power,” a Wuhan resident wrote on the social media site Weibo. “But after what I have witnessed, I refuse to watch the applause and commendation.”