OT Attack in Paris 120+ dead
 

http://www.cnn.com/

On a night when thousands of Paris residents and tourists were reveling and fans were enjoying a soccer match between France and world champion Germany, horror struck in an unprecedented manner. Terrorists -- some with AK-47s, some reportedly with bombs strapped to them -- attacked sites throughout the French capital and at the stadium where the soccer match was underway.

Scores were killed in the coordinated attacks late Friday, leaving a nation in mourning and the world in shock. CNN will update this story as information comes in:

Interesting.... From Twilight 2013


July 30, 2010 the French suffer theirs. During the Coupe de France in
the Stade de France, a group of “terrorists” release a highly toxic
Novichok agent (a broad classification for a series of Russian next
generation nerve agents) into the crowd. During the panic and
confusion they also detonate a van full of an approximately 1000
kilos of ANFO (Ammonium Nitrate/Fuel Oil high explosive) near
the soccer stadium converted to a triage area. The resulting blast
causes the collapse of the entire southern goals section. Over
10,000 casualties are estimated because of the agent, stadium
collapse and the chaos that follows.
By the end of August, numerous resolutions are hurriedly
signed into law targeting extremist groups of all kinds; Muslims, neoNazis, anti-government, communists, even leftist political parties.
Anyone associated with or believed to be associated with any of the
extremist groups on the government’s list are arrested and sent
to detention centers. Mass deportations begin in earnest, starting
with Ukrainian refugees, then with other groups as the government
begins it unofficial program of “peaceful” ethnic cleansing. Again,
Germany Italy and Austria, along with Spain, Denmark and Great
Britain follow up with similar laws of their own.

yet one more time
 

I pray for those that have had to experience such an event.
and Damn just damn.

Last count I heard is 158 dead and still climbing.
I wonder if this will finally convince Europeans that open borders, while nice in a perfect world where everyone gets on with each other, is actually a BAD THING.

Now 166 dead.
And there's a report of a bomb at Gatwick airport in the UK.

Need another voter
 

Could you maybe move here and vote!

Of course I can not speak for all of the refugees, but ISIS is one of the reasons these people are running.

My $0.02

Mike

Consider this. Several years (i.e. less than five) ago a whine by one of our local far lefty idiot types about the fact that she and her Palestinian companion(s) took five-eight hours to get through security at Tel Aviv Airport when leaving the country was published in (IIRC) the Sydney Morning Herald (the Aussie equivalent of The Times or The New York Times) … she complained that it was racist and anti-muslim.

The SMH sought comment from an Israeli Security expert who made this point – 100% of terrorist attacks in Israel or directed at Israeli interests are carried out by Palestinians or Muslims (or a tiny cohort of crazy deluded westerners who are known to blindly support Palestinian terrorists). Stringent security measures aimed specifically at Palestinians and known pro-Palestinian activists is, therefore, a sensible precaution … and, as a result, there have been no terrorist attacks in Israeli airports since the measures were instituted.

'But, but, but!' the whiny idiot lefty complained, 'It's racial profiling!'

'Yes, but it's effective racial profiling' was the response.

Now, being of a generally left political perspective myself (socialist, not communist … something like Eurosocialist, but not the nonexistent Tranzi nonsense spouted by some people), but also being a long time supporter of Israel and of common sense, I could only shake my head at the outright lunacy of said lefty whiner.

So, consider this – close to 100% of recent terrorist attacks have been carried out by Muslims, often of Arab or other Middle Eastern or North African origin. While one can reasonably assume, based on the evidence, that they do not have widespread active support amongst the Muslim community, though they may have somewhat wider sympathy from same (way less than 1%, I'd guess, for the former, at least in the Western muslim diaspora) – but the fact remains that close to 100% of recent terrorists were muslims.

So, is it racism or racial profiling to direct the vast, overwhelming, majority of your security resources at muslims in general, and at muslim sympathisers amongst the more idiotic non-muslim elements of your society? Or is it common sense?

Likewise, is it racist to exclude muslims fleeing from undoubtedly repressive and violent regimes in the Middle East from non-muslim countries in the west that are many hundred, or even thousands, of klicks from their homelands, after having passed through (or bypassed) safe muslim countries on the basis that muslims are the source of close to 100% of recent terrorists?

Yes, racists will use this as an excuse to demonise many innocent muslims.

That, however, doesn't change the reality that it makes sense to target the root source of the problem – and, since it is seemingly impossible (and certainly is impossible with finite resources) to determine whether a muslim refugee is an actual terrorist plant or will, at some future time, become radicalised and commit terrorist acts, then doesn't it make sense to exclude all muslim would be refugees from non-muslim majority countries?

Isn't that common sense? Unpalatable, indeed, but common sense nonetheless.

Phil McGregor

Issue is that among the refugee's are members of ISIS looking to expand there war into Europe. The hard fact is, Europe and the US cannot afford to allow them entry if this could happen. And I think France will close its borders soon to refugee's and pressure its neighbors to do the same.

But don't forget, ISIS is some of those coming in with the refugees.

British police have cleared Gatwick. French national (probably Muslim) under arrest. Undercover and armed police all over London with British Army SRR Regiment on patrol. London's barracks on high alert, SAS on standby and Para/Gurkha contingent 30 minutes away on helicopters. If ISIS vermin think London is a soft target there in for a very unpleasant surprise.

These attacks are all too easy to perpetrate. We absolutely have to use military responses to individual threats, but if that's the only type of response we use, this shit is going to continue for a long time. The problem is twisted versions of religion, and violent ideologies. Many jihadis have had little to no formal education save what they can get for free in a Saudi-funded madrasa, and what sort of education do you think that would be? Then you've got deluded young westerners who have bought into the increasingly sophisticated jihadist propaganda that's all to easy to spread via social media.

If we don't find a way to drag out of miserable, abject poverty and ignorance the large parts of the Islamic world where all too many people basically have bugger all to live for, if we don't find a way to provide more secular, western-style education to those people, if we don't find better ways to support and de-radicalise disaffected Islamic youth inside our own countries, this "War on Terror" is going to continue for ever.

I'm having enough trouble with the loonie lefties here!

As many have pointed out in the past, security at Airports simply creates a huge bottleneck of people outside security who would be perfect targets for a suicide bomber ... why waste time trying to get on a plane with a bomb when half a dozen terrs can simply roll up to the unsecured public areas of your local regional or international airport ... hell, your local bus or train station ... and set themselves off.

The attack in Paris could be a nasty sign of things to come ... and such attacks are effectively impossible to detect.

Even wiping out ISIS in Syria won't necessarily stop them.

Phil

There's been an attack now in Turkey I hear. Not that it's really anything out of the ordinary there though....

Hey, I am one of those loony lefties! Though I consider myself an enlightened liberal -- I disagree with the right on most things, but not all.

You may be a leftie Paul, but you're certainly no loon! :)

Anyone else see a lot of the timeline in Twilight 2013 coming true?

Back on the 5th of November, German police pulled a guy over and found a grenade, two pistols, four AKs and 200kg of TNT in his car. They looked over his GPS and the route programmed in, and running at the time was to have taken the driver straight into Paris.

Nobody said a word.

Imagine if this fucker had linked up with the rest of his unit.

It's going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better. All Europe can do (which they won't) is deport everyone in the "refugee camps", and keep a very close eye on those who've settled already, and close their borders. But, again, they won't.

PS Islam isn't a race. Saying you hate Islam isn't racist. I'd hate Islam if it was practiced exclusively by blonde-haired, blue-eyed specimens of pure Nordic extraction. Saying "I hate Islam" is as racist against people from the ME as saying "I hate Nazism" is racist against Germans. "Being anti-Islam is racist" is a pernicious lie spread by the perpetual victim PR front for terrorists, known as CAIR.

Hear hear!

All of this is nothing new, there were many leftist terrorist groups active in Europe during the 1960s-1980s and they pulled the same attacks as being seen now.
The scariest part though, is that many of the ISIS/ISIL jihadists are not ignorant peasants from the poorer parts of the Middle East and Asia looking for a way out of poverty, many of them are middle-class and educated and seeking a way to force regime changes to what they think will be better for the middle classes - they typically don't think too much about the poor (unless it's for propaganda).

The terrorists are already in the country. The tighter you make security the angrier you make the home grown extremists. Remember not one of the top non 911 terrorist/massacres were committed by "arab foreigners". Oklahoma City Bombing, Virginia Tech and Sandy Hook comes to mind.

If we are talking recent attacks the Boston Bombing comes to mind. Yes Kyrgyzstan would not generally be considered "arab" but they were certainly foreign born Islamic terrorists.

This is true...

Peterborough Ontario Mosque set ablazed
 

I saw this happening

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toront...fire-1.3320013

Agreed. I tend to be center-right if you add me up. Well, on some things I've very right on, I'm "Mr. NRA" are for example but I would be more of a representation of the libertarian wing of our Tea party over here. Heck, on one forum, after posting for 17 years, I'm been kicked off for being "too liberal" but the guy who runs it now claims to be on a "mission from God." (When people say things like that, I find that scary) To quote Michael Savage, the talkshow host, I'm for "Borders, Language and Culture" and you made a good case out of protecting your nation and people and the methods that need to be done. I'm for profiling if it is for our protection, I don't care if it is on the lookout for Moslems or if the majority of perps were Amish (for sake of argument, I'd be for the same thing.

Sure, I think there will be some things we disagree on, but at least there are liberals who have good principles and not kow-tow to the ogic where it goes too far into national or Western Civ suicide.

You do have good points although if I may add that the only way they know over there is to keep peace, you generally need a strongman with a good army/henchmen force if you will. As bad as Saddam Hussein was, he kept a lid on things of this type but he did play into the Islamic radical side to stick it, or try to, to the Wet as the two Gulf Wars carried on. Assad, the same way and so on. I think you're right, again, the problem is that we need the will, the money and resources. We can't afford it, not we cannot afford it either. I know we have to do the same thing to Germany and Japan after World War II but we were king of the world then, not so much now and we have a lot of problems here. The only way I can see this remotely happening is a coalition as my cousin pointed out yesterday. Even so, the people we need to change will want to change, will they want to do it? That's the $64 billion question.

It's like the snake chasing it's tail, but in the end, we might have to end up fighting anyhoo, we might be past the point of no return, maybe, and it will mean we have to defeat them or they defeat us. Hopefully if that happens, we will get to the point where they will have to "say uncle" at some point. Don't know much about the Twilight: 2013 timeline but it does not sound good. I'm not gung ho, I hate confrontation but I'm just saying that we might have little or no choice but to fight.

I've noticed 5 or so events which seemed to come from the T2013 timeline. And laugh inside at the memory of the critics of the timeline who said it was too fake. Now we can "bump the timeline back a couple of years and still play T2K2.2 or T2013. AS for RL, France will pound ISIS members to dust to my cheering. A Western military that isn't going to issue arrest cards or what ever I found in the duffle at my friend's surplus store.

It was not only fake (of course) it was ridiculous - as I said somewhere else, to believe it you not only had to have no knowledge whatsoever of military tactics and strategy, logistics, economics and geopolitical realities you had to actively reject any semblance of such knowledge.

That didn't, and doesn't, mean that everything in it, especially if considered in isolation, is impossible, but a whole hell of a lot of it, and the whole thing overall, is ... ridiculous.

Is WW3 possible? Sure. Is it likely to go nuclear if it occurs? Yes. We can debate how possible and how likely it is to go nuclear, but wishful thinking won't change my answers.

But not a one of the TW:2000 or TW:2013 backgrounds were believable, certainly not based on what we knew at the time, or even based on what we know how ... especially based on what we know now, in fact. Of course, we also know how close we came on a couple of occasions - mostly in the form of an actual nuclear attack by accident or mistake, rather than a conventional war that escalates.

How could WW3 occur - best guess, at the moment, is a mis-step by Putin somewhere ... he seems dead set on reviving the Cold War singlehanded and is not as smart as he seems to think he is. It is possible that he could push things too far ...

Another possibility, but probably a lower order one, is conflict with the PRC over the South China Sea ... again, it would likely be accidental. And it could well remain limited and regional even if conflict did occur ... but the chance of escalation and opportunistic actions, and resulting accidents, in Europe or elsewhere is, of course, always a possibility.

ISIS/Islamic Terrorists, probably not gonna cause it themselves, as much as they'd like you to believe it ... and I suspect that the less idiotic amongst the leadership know that ... but they could trigger it by being a source of possible conflict between the West and Russia.

Even if they did a Franz Ferdinand, the worst that's likely to happen would be a quick military crushing of them in a limited regional (and entirely conventional) conflict ... though, of course, it wouldn't stop the terrorism.

But if Russia and the West didn't agree on how to carry out such crushing, that could lead to nasty things.

YMMV.

Phil

Need I go on?

If Pakistan either finally collapses into the failed state that it's been teetering on the brink of for some time, or it finally goes full-Islamist like Iran, I will become very, very nervous. Their control over their nukes has to be pretty suspect even now. Imagine the risks if things went either of those two directions I described.

2007

* EU Military Battlegroups. Common EU military. Nope. No hope thereof.
* Centrist shift in US politics. Nope, not even close.
* Tainted food recalls in US linked to China. Nope.
* British and French elections ... what were they smoking?
* Iraq, well ... they had to get something right(ish)
* Afghan government pressures US to assist with law enforcement. Again, what were they smoking?
* Pakistan - well, again, something OK.
* Australia. Fantasy. Every. Single. Australian. PM (Labor and Liberal). Since 1941 has sucked up to the US in every way possible. The supposition here is ludicrous.
* Worldwide drought in 'rich farm countries' ... like China (ROTFL) comparing ot to the US. Hallucinogens? We've never. ever. had a worldwide drought. Anyone with a basic knowledge of history would know that, and anyone with a basic understanding of climate science would understand why.
* Solomon Islands quake puts pressure on worldwide food resources! Do these guys know what the population of the SI actually is?

Given that the book was published in 2008, they could at least have gotten more of the above at least vaguely resembling reality.

2009
* Iraqi politicians 'begin to find ways to make their government work for all Iraqis' ... again, whatever it is they were smoking would have made them more money than the book did.
* Worldwide heatwave destroys crops. Again, not the slightest understanding of science, or even where food crops are grown. As for the economics, very few of the countries likely to be affected are significant exporters and make little or no money from exporting food. Those that are and do don't rely so much on it that it would have an impact unless the ridiculously anti-scientific drought lasted for several years.
* Libya. Yeah. Right. ROTFL.
* Darfur conflict spreads. Again, not the slightest understanding of the local and geopolitical realities.
* EU Battlegroups (the nonexistent ones) in Central Africa roaming around. Logistically this is simply insane - they'd be worse off than Rommel. Their base in N'Djamena ... well, Chad had no paved roads outside of the capital, no railways anywhere, no river that is more than intermittent (and, in any case, goes nowhere relevant) and their airfields are overwhelmingly dirt strips.

Oh, and in 2010 the EU sends in more nonexistent and unsuppliable BGs into Sudan and Central Africa.

I could go on. And on. And on.

Now, granted, not a lot of Americans (Australians would probably have a clew about some of the US and EU stuff, but be no better informed on the rest and UK/EU types would probably have a better handle on the Russian/Ukranian stuff, but also be clewless of most of the rest ... we all have our national blindspots) would probably have a clew as to why many of these things are, frankly, insanely ludicrous ... but if the authors had bothered, oh, I don't know, to check Wikipedia or even the old CIA Country books on some of the places involved, they could, at least, have clewed themselves in.

It gets progressively worse and worse.

Like, oh, the Oakland Flu.
Or the Israelis giving their nuclear arsenal (they have a hell of a lot more bombs than one, probably more than their neighbours have major cities and military targets - and, frankly, even with Tel Aviv hit by Dirty Bombs, I'd back the Israelie military against their neighbours any day of the week) to Egypt for some desert in Libya.

Now, yes, the bits about Pakistan and the Middle East in general are, mostly, not ridiculously unlikely, but so much of the rest is that it makes the whole progression ... ROTFLMAO ridiculous.

YMMV.

Phil

Even the beloved first edition had moments of that. But I'd take your list and try to redo those if/ when the campaign ever went to those regions to a more plausible end(as much as a TEOTWAWKI premise allows). As was mentioned in the "Timelines" thread, one doesn't need a complete timeline. As infrastructure collapses,PC's wouldn't have the complete picture anyway.

Absolutely agree with that and I've mentioned something like it in other threads before.
No need to detail every last thing when PCs will never, EVER even hear so much as a rumour about it. A bit of uncertainty is a great tool a GM should never give up.

Anyway, getting back on topic, it would seem there's more to come with Isis issuing a list of cities they intend to attack shortly. I can't see any way that they don't have the resources in place to do it either.

It must have been your post that stuck in my mind.

And as I've mentioned a few times, most people playing RPGs aren't that interested in reading through a highly detailed history/timeline. If it's going to be ignored by, for example, four out of five players, it's probably not worth going to all the extra effort to develop the timeline much past the most significant events.
And that way you also avoid some of the less-believable moments quoted here.

it comes down to if the timeline is necessary to understand the other information you have presented

I did a highly detailed timeline in the East African sourcebook because many people are unfamiliar with the area - so it helped flesh it out and show how the 2001 situation got to where it was instead of just jumping in at April 2001

Very different in places like Korea or Europe - there have been so many alternate WWIII books and other things written let alone the real news in those areas that you can play without much more than the war started here, some general dates as a timeline and ok now we are at the start of the game

the timelines in the original game were good ones (and by that I mean the ones in the original version 1) - they may have had the US taking it on the chin too much to satisfy the reality that somehow France became the great world power of Twilight 2300 - but in general they made sense (Pakistan and India nuking themselves out of existence and the Soviets and Chinese going to war, based on what was going on in the earlly to mid 80's was pretty plausible to those of us who were adults at the time - even Iran possibly going moderate after what the mullahs were doing was reasonable)

I think that was part of what made the game background so plausible at the time and why that game had a bigger appeal to me than say Gamma World

Exactly.

If they'd only made some comments like 'Hotspots in the Middle East, Afghanistan and Eastern Europe grew in intensity and eventually devolved into local, then regional conflicts that sucked in even the major powers and led to a worldwide war.' they'd have been home and hosed!

They wouldn't have annoyed the few people like me who have enough of a clew to know what was so wrong with their detailed timeline and, as you say, most of the players couldn't have cared less.

To paraphrase J W Campbell, 'Grant the trigger and go ...'

As it was, they picked the worst possible way of doing things. :(

YMMV

Phil