What if ... (Politics)

Had this idea for a long time, but...
What if...
...US and Europe are like the Solarian Laegue?
...what if Syria, pre-arabian spring Lybia, Iran, Iraq are like Loomis, Mayers, Seraphin etc??
...what if media are lying and/or are just incompetent (given what they report about things i know of, i REALLY DONT trust them to be competent)

Yeah, I have been reading Rising Thunder and making that comparison. But with the way Weber portrayed Haven's educational system I have thought it was like the United States also.

You gotta wonder what not so subtle portrayals Weber is putting into his stories.

But it seems we are being pushed into a culture war while computers and the Internet should tend to make culture obsolete.

Every different culture is really just about brainwashing kids into being stupid in a different way.

Like what is with all of the incompetent Islamofascist terrorists in the United States? Watch a few World War II movies to see what the French resistance did to German logistics. How many thousands of miles of track are there in the United States? But we have all of this security in airports but no attacks on trains in 11 years. Funny that.

umbrarchist wrote:Yeah, I have been reading Rising Thunder and making that comparison. But with the way Weber portrayed Haven's educational system I have thought it was like the United States also.

You gotta wonder what not so subtle portrayals Weber is putting into his stories.

But it seems we are being pushed into a culture war while computers and the Internet should tend to make culture obsolete.

Every different culture is really just about brainwashing kids into being stupid in a different way.

Like what is with all of the incompetent Islamofascist terrorists in the United States? Watch a few World War II movies to see what the French resistance did to German logistics. How many thousands of miles of track are there in the United States? But we have all of this security in airports but no attacks on trains in 11 years. Funny that.

Well, trains aren't exactly the most viable target when your aim is to SCARE the enemy. They also aren't a terribly viable economic target anymore, since the US doesn't really do very much manufacturing anymore. And the distributed network of the trucking industry is less vulnerable, at least until a very large NUMBER of trucks are taken out of service.

Hmm... maybe that's why gas prices have gone up so much... /snark

FriarBob wrote:

umbrarchist wrote:Yeah, I have been reading Rising Thunder and making that comparison. But with the way Weber portrayed Haven's educational system I have thought it was like the United States also.

You gotta wonder what not so subtle portrayals Weber is putting into his stories.

But it seems we are being pushed into a culture war while computers and the Internet should tend to make culture obsolete.

Every different culture is really just about brainwashing kids into being stupid in a different way.

Like what is with all of the incompetent Islamofascist terrorists in the United States? Watch a few World War II movies to see what the French resistance did to German logistics. How many thousands of miles of track are there in the United States? But we have all of this security in airports but no attacks on trains in 11 years. Funny that.

Well, trains aren't exactly the most viable target when your aim is to SCARE the enemy. They also aren't a terribly viable economic target anymore, since the US doesn't really do very much manufacturing anymore. And the distributed network of the trucking industry is less vulnerable, at least until a very large NUMBER of trucks are taken out of service.

Hmm... maybe that's why gas prices have gone up so much... /snark

Scaring the enemy in this case is easy as hell. Blow up a TSA checkpoint. The liberals will go crazy about how the TSA hasn't been doing anything for years and have in fact introduced a new vulnerability. The conservatives will demand a bigger security budget to set up pre-checkpoint checkpoints. This doesn't even have to be a suicide bomb, though I'll leave the mechanisms required to the reader's imagination.

The fact that this hasn't happened says interesting things about the terrorism threat in the United States.

Attacking the railroads and other infrastructure-related targets has another unique advantage- you can't secure everything. It's not possible to watch every inch of every single track running across the country. You can drop a fairly simple bomb that will derail a train onto an isolated bit of track and walk away. Do that once a week, and you bring the heavy transportation infrastructure of the United States to its knees, keep your name on the front page of the news and in every politician's speeches every day, and do fascinating things to the economy. All for the price of a backpack-sized bomb a week. I don't know about you, but that's rather terrifying to me.

Any more it wouldn't take very much of a bomb to derail a train in the US. There have been three or four derailment within 50 miles of my home town in the last decade. All were due to the age of the system, which in some cases had not been rebuilt in the last 30 or so years. This on a line that carries 10 to 15 full size trains a day, many of which are unitrains carrying coal for the overseas market. The average lenghth of time lost due to a derailment of any cause is about three days. Clean-up may take longer but the repairs are fast. And while the repairs are underwady, it is fairly easy to reroute.

RandomGraysuit wrote:

FriarBob wrote:Well, trains aren't exactly the most viable target when your aim is to SCARE the enemy. They also aren't a terribly viable economic target anymore, since the US doesn't really do very much manufacturing anymore. And the distributed network of the trucking industry is less vulnerable, at least until a very large NUMBER of trucks are taken out of service.

Hmm... maybe that's why gas prices have gone up so much... /snark

Scaring the enemy in this case is easy as hell. Blow up a TSA checkpoint. The liberals will go crazy about how the TSA hasn't been doing anything for years and have in fact introduced a new vulnerability. The conservatives will demand a bigger security budget to set up pre-checkpoint checkpoints. This doesn't even have to be a suicide bomb, though I'll leave the mechanisms required to the reader's imagination.

The fact that this hasn't happened says interesting things about the terrorism threat in the United States.

Attacking the railroads and other infrastructure-related targets has another unique advantage- you can't secure everything. It's not possible to watch every inch of every single track running across the country. You can drop a fairly simple bomb that will derail a train onto an isolated bit of track and walk away. Do that once a week, and you bring the heavy transportation infrastructure of the United States to its knees, keep your name on the front page of the news and in every politician's speeches every day, and do fascinating things to the economy. All for the price of a backpack-sized bomb a week. I don't know about you, but that's rather terrifying to me.

Dont even really need a bomb. just remove the bolts from one section of railing on a bridge on some not regularly checked rail line. train crash may take out the bridge, and even if not, will take far longer to clean upthen a crash on flat land. if visual inspection is a worry, cut the stem off and superglue the head back on, and the quick look visual evidence is gone. first train or two you would want to aim for passenger train to get fast attention, but after that, focus on the lines that predominantly carry goods, like to a steel manufactory. IIRC, forcing one of those to shut down then requires 3 months to restart, so the problems will keep on going long after the clean up finishes. If you did it right, you could even get a crash to occur where multiple rails are side by side, eg near a port or station, and close multiple lines, or even part of a port and cause major disruption above and beyond a normal train crash.

And all this for the cost of some clothing to make you look like a maintenance man, and some tools.





its not paranoia if its justified...

Major electricity transmission towers in isolated spots. Drop a dozen lines at a time leading into major cities, using chainsaw driven cutters.
Relatively small bombs would turn a petroleum storage tank into a fuel air bomb equivalent to a small nuke. Lots more but I'd better stop before I get a knock on the door.

Daryl wrote:Major electricity transmission towers in isolated spots. Drop a dozen lines at a time leading into major cities, using chainsaw driven cutters.
Relatively small bombs would turn a petroleum storage tank into a fuel air bomb equivalent to a small nuke. Lots more but I'd better stop before I get a knock on the door.

the way the world seems to be headed, we may all be getting knocks on our doors soon for being on this forum, where words like megaton, nukes, explosives, and military and civilian deaths are talked about so often, thanks to the themes in DW's books. Add to that the fact that a significant lot of us have probably been to university, own or know how to use weapons, and talk about the justifications behind terrorist attacks (green pines, Clyntahns Rakurai, etc) and we should all have been questioned long ago.


After all, just in my first year at uni, i have learnt how to make napalm, tnt, the basics of building a working nuke, biological warfare and how to go about it, ways of making chemical weapons, been given access to equipment and tools that can help me make bombs and other tools, plus a little reading of various sci fi and mil fi, and hist mil had taught me how to make and use caltrops, cheese wire, booby traps, tips for emergency battlefield first aid, and at least 10 to 20 ther things that could be useful in a war, zombie apocalypse, terrorsist mission or just about anything else. with the invention of google, wikipedia and email, most of the security groups like the fbi, interpol, cia etc must have soiled themselves from all this information now being available to almost everyone instantly.


uh oh. i hear a car engine and a kno
























=D





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its not paranoia if its justified...
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Word recognition spying can be comical. While in Defence I had to produce a quick response for Parliamentary Questions on Notice for the Minister on the current joint Australia/US training operation. Because it was the regular Operation Tandem Thrust our net Nazis froze it and put it into the porn investigation team due to thrust. Almost had to get the Major in charge shot to free it up in time.
You do have a point though about being checked out.
I always laugh when they confiscate nail clippers on flights but allow the business class drinks trolley to have full wine bottles. Which is more frightening, the clippers or a couple of jagged broken bottles?

If you needed to wait until first year at U. to learn some of that stuff, you must live in a very repressed sociaty. I had most of that information by the time I was 16, almost 40 years ago. And I still managed to get a TS clearance while I was active duty. And keep it for a decade.